lala.ruhr - the landscape laboratory of ruhr metropolis
Climate change is here and we can't continue as we are. The problem is obvious, but where to start? As alone you will fail in frustration. Our call therefore goes out to all urban gardeners, politicians, planners, activists, artists and technology enthusiasts - to students and just as much to experienced doers and professors, whether you are involved in your neighborhood or at the United Nations: "Motivated people of all disciplines unite - the future is a collaborative project!
Regional
Germany
lala.ruhr and the biennale is located in the ruhr region and took place in Gelsenkrichen. The event is integrating actors from different places and cities of the region, from local initatives, Universitys and adminstrational organisations. We cooperate further with international Partners as ICLEI and the UN COnvernion on Biodiversity.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): lala.ruhr Type of organisation: private collaborative initative First name of representative: Sebastian Last name of representative: Schlecht Gender: Male Nationality: Germany Function: Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Bochumer Straße 140-142 Town: Gelsenkirchen Postal code: 45886 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+49 1523 4596113 E-mail:sebastian@lala.ruhr Website:https://www.lala.ruhr
lala.ruhr is the laboratory for the landscape of the Ruhr Metropolis and a private and personal driven initiative. We are a network of enthusiasts and experts for landscape and architecture, urban development and spaces, joint work and participation, communication and collaboration, locally, regionally and internationally. We want to shape the future together and develop this region as a diverse and inclusive landscape. As a green network that connects people, on their doorstep, in their minds and with global contexts.
In workshops, expeditions, international and regional cooperations and living labs, future topics are discussed, developed, tested and made tangible. Until the year of the International Garden Exhibition Metropole Ruhr 2027 and beyond, the excellence of the people, the projects existing in the region and their competences will be brought together and further developed in an international and local discourse.
In 2022, lala.ruhr has organized the first international Biennale of urban landscape in the middle of the Ruhr region as a unique format for the current future topics of urbanization, as a festival for the city of the future.
The Biennale of lala.ruhr is based on the commitment of private individuals with the intention to strengthen community motivation and mutual understanding, to shape the present and the future, and to network local actors in the Ruhr region regionally and internationally in the context of global challenges.
Landscape Laboratory
Collaboration
Nature Based Solution
urban futures
climate change
Achieving sustainability requires integrated and coordinated action across multiple sectors and levels of society. Objectives are interrelated and do often overlap. lala.ruhr aims at supporting the task of transforming cities in the sense of a future-oriented, livable and just landscape and to generate motivation and concrete solutions with participants from different professions and backgrounds. lala.ruhr addresses the important challenges of climate change, climate adaptation, social community and the connection with the ecosystem and the biodiversity crisis as a collaborative design task.
As an outstanding and exemplary element, a biennial festival is offered as a stage and catalyst for many existing initiatives and actors, who experience their own value creation as part of the event and at the same time are strengthened and promoted in their own development through professional, regional and international networking. In particular, the aim is to promote cooperation across silos and borders and to enable mutual awareness and support. Planners, engineers, nature conservationists, urban activists, climate protectionists, citizens, politicians, together in their roles, but especially as people, should exchange ideas and motivation on important topics and, above all, create shared interests.
The important core of lala.ruhr is that the basis of our coexistence is a well-designed environment, and that a future suitable for living can only be created through a collectively developed and reoriented understanding of good design and ecology. The effects and findings of climate change and biodiversity loss show that we need to reorient our actions. A previous (and current) understanding of aesthetics and sustainable design has become a major contributor to resource consumption and CO2 emissions and ecosystem degradation. Our position here is that we need to renegotiate and realign experiences and knowledge and understanding in new interdisciplinary formats and together in regional and international exchange to move from negative impacts to a positive outcome of our cultural practice.
With the first formats, the online Festival of Landscape 2021 and especially with the first on site event, the Biennale of Urban Landscape 2022, we have succeeded in developing these interdisciplinary and integrative formats that engage a variety of different participants and bring them into an active exchange.
The Biennale sees itself as a very active format in the form of a 14-day festival that essentially actively engages participants rather than addresses them as consumers. At the last event, over 200 people from Europe and also many local initiatives were actively involved in the implementation of the Biennale with their own contributions. Such an interdisciplinary and internationally networked format contributes in an exemplary way to developing urgently needed solutions for the future in a global community and with local and regional specific linkages.
Under the motto "The future is only possible together", we set out to develop a collaborative, learning, inclusive format. We were able to secure funding for the event from actively self-acquired grants from the state, region, and foundations. With this we were able to ensure free participation for all. In order to be able to specifically address a target group in a very open framework, we invited active participation and submission of ideas and contributions with the slogan "Motivated people of all disciplines, unite", which resulted in a large and diverse response.
The access to an active participation was deliberately simplified by consulting all contributors with one's ideas and supporting them already during the elaboration of their program item and, if necessary, on site with technical support or even a moderation. We were already able to test this concept successfully with our first online format "Festival of the Landscape 2021" and have now successfully implemented it in "real" in 2022.
In this way, we were also able to realize almost all contributions in 2022 in concrete terms. We see the Bienniale Festival as an exemplary format because of the need for spaces and opportunities for participatory, collaborative, inclusive, but also cross-professional discussions to foster the collaborative aspect of transformation, which requires not more technological solutions , but even broader mutual understanding and collective motivation.
With various "open call" formats and with concrete thematically curated program sections, more than 130 program contributions to the Biennale have been given by more than 200 active participants. As diverse as the contributors have evolved, so are the offerings that invite further participation.
All program sections are designed in such a way that, on the one hand, experts can share their topics (e.g. XR professionals meet geospatial engineers), but on the other hand, every visitor can experience the results.
For example, the in the program points that dealt with the "city for all" and "age-friendly spaces", the surrounding neighborhoods were explored in city walks, XR technologies were developed into an inclusive design tool in a hackathon week and presented in the public space of the district, initiatives from the district were involved as well as the Federal Ministry and the UN Secretariat and ICLEI, street furniture was built from scrap wood, raised beds were planted, ideas for the regional green infrastructure strategy were collected or concepts for the urban future were developed with international students under the motto "Design for urban uncertainties".
Looking back, we are very proud of the number and quality of contributions and the positive feedback from many participants with diverse backgrounds, including international professionals, neighbors, local activists, universities, families, and more.
At the core, we also believe that each participant has a personal motivation and intrinsic interest in a great future, in addition to their professional, organizational or political commitment, helping to build strong and emotional networks across bubbles, borders and silos, as part of civil society.
Designing a city that we like to live in and that works really well for everyone is anything but easy. That's why no one can do it alone. The network of lala.ruhr consists of local, regional, national and international actors, who, in the context of the first Biennale of Urban Landscape initiated by lala.ruhr, acted as sponsors and partners or helped to shape the program of the Biennale.
Baukultur NRW, the Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Regionalverband Ruhr as well as the E.ON Foundation made this great and innovative festival possible with their support. The Science Park Gelsenkirchen was both partner and event center. In addition, many other people, companies and institutions were involved, including the Chamber of Architects of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Federal Foundation for Building Culture, the IGA Metropole Ruhr 2027, the Association of German Landscape Architects, City Decks, the Urbanists, Architects for Future, ICLEI Europa, Impact Factory, Jugend Architektur-Stadt, kultur.west, the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the Royal Danish Embassy Berlin, Places _ VR Festival, the Ruhr Conference, RWTH Aachen University, Salon5, the Mercator Foundation, the Technical University of East Westphalia-Lippe and TU Dortmund, the Urban League (Urbane Liga) and many more...
As described before, our initiative has a very interdisciplinary approach, but refers to a common design task that makes concrete reference to the current challenges of climate change, the biodiversity crisis and social justice.
Already in the process of designing the event, we worked closely with local initiatives from the region, such as "Places Festival Gelsenkirchen" "Die Urbanisten e.V. Dortmund”, "Gemeinsam für Stadtwandel Essen", the "Urban League" but also the BDLA (Association of Landscape Architects), the Chamber of Architects NRW, various universities, Baukultur NRW e.V., ICLEI, the UN Secretariat and many others and developed program modules.
At the center of our perspective is urban design from the perspective of the "urban landscape" as an inclusive ecosystem with people, houses and infrastructures and all living creatures.
To highlight only some exemplary events, we were able to discuss in a workshop with the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biodiversity and with the Regional Process of the Ruhr Biodiversity Strategy, the State Ministry, students of regional planning and other interested parties together on the contribution of local processes to the international conventions, or the initiative of the regional food councils "Schlaraffenband Ruhr" together with the Association of Landscape Architects to develop a concretization of your concept, which is now undergoing a continuation. The Regional Association Ruhr has developed with participants in a 2-day open offer more than 70 concrete suggestions for the Regional Strategy Green Infrastructure, and in a hackathon week 20 young and international experts from very different fields (XR, game design, art, architecture, landscape planning, GIS data...) have developed solutions for participatory and future-oriented urban design, and presented them for 2 days to the citizens of Gelsenkirchen Ückendorf on the street.
lala.ruhr brings together different interest groups and actors and facilitates encounters, discussions and actions. These include makers of neighborhood projects as well as experts from urban planning, landscape architecture, art and new technologies such as virtual reality, young international students as well as state secretaries and scientists. Many of these committed people have little contact with each other in everyday life. This is unfortunate, because they are all united by their commitment to the future of the urban landscape in the Metropole Ruhr and beyond.
It is important for our process to be a learning format itself. We want to move on, with the results and together with the partners of the Biennale, to the next stage, another event in 2024 and beyond. Also, it is an example of good cooperation across different institutions that such a format can emerge from a private initiative, and hopefully live on. Our main concern, the collaborative motivating learning on concrete tasks, on the basis of concrete initiatives, the opportunity to participate and to network in the long term for demanding future tasks, is transferable and can also be applied in other places and also in other professional contexts.
Individual components of the Biennale also invite imitation, such as the Diversity Weekend with over 40 contributions from an open call, the Hackathon Residence Program with participants from different countries and continents, The Ruhrbane League initiative with the goal of building a local network of young city makers, or the Campus Week with the subsequent international closing convnetion with 35 students from three universities and with global roots, which allows the students' ideas to become part of the professional discussion.
In addition, the Biennale is also an invitation to all interested from the circle of the NEB to participate with ideas and projects at the next edition in 2024 (which, however, has no concrete funding yet), to follow curiously, or even just to visit. The Ruhr region as a transformation region is an important place to discuss and sustainably shape the urban future.
A collaborative approach is pursued at lala.ruhr. Networking, joint action, initiating and thinking across borders and disciplines are in the foreground. With the motto "thinklandscape" we place the urban landscape as a metaphor in a connecting context. A sustainable networking of the participants on a personal level via the initial experience of the event is an important part of the idea to gather "motivated people of all disciplines". Here we see an important missing node to the complex tasks of the future. A mutual understanding of other disciplines, perspectives and arguments, acting locally in global contexts, pursuing a common goal. Our concept also refers to the past of the Ruhr area as a region of post-industrial transformation, which, however, also faces unsolved problems in many issues. Concrete solutions should thus be strengthened, supported and further developed, so that the event sees itself as a catalyst for change. "The Ruhr has a lot to offer but also a lot to learn" is therefore the position for further development with a local strength and in international exchange. The future can only be achieved together! #thinklandscape #imagineurbanfutures
The initiative addresses the need to transform, to shape urban areas in the face of climate change. As highlighted once again at the last COP, the need for climate action is bigger than ever, and at the same time, adaptation to climate change is becoming an increasingly urgent task that needs to be solved at the local level.
lala.ruhr has chosen the perspective of "landscape" as a common ground for urbanity and ecology. Under this guiding theme, the locally and globally linked issues of biodiversity, quality of life, health, mobility, local community, social cohesion, circular economy and resilience are addressed in a holistic and interconnected format. By bringing all this into the theme "thinklandscape", we underline the need to see cities as a functional part of an ecosystem for all and not to be developed further as a localized cause of resource consumption and associated emissions.
The Ruhr, one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe, has gone through a green and successful transformation from its industrial past and yet is a place of social exclusion, high unemployment and lack of clean air and sustainable transport. In our eyes, there could be no better place to learn from the past, to demonstrate the destruction of ecosystems and the success of transformation programs such as the Emscher Reconstruction or the European Green Capital 2017, while pointing out that there is still so much to learn in order to take a step forward to become a just and climate positive region.
In order to address these local contexts as motivating yet challenging for new bold action, networking with international partners and global action approaches are important. This creates mutual recognition, inspiration and motivation for local action as part of a response to a global crisis in a European and global context.
The idea of lala.ruhr - the laboratory for the landscape of the Ruhr metropolis- emerged in 2019, and through an exchange with regional initiatives and international experts with the concept of the "Biennale” set out to develop a format for the region and for international exchange on the necessary integrated action. After the initial collaborations with the regional association, the first Festival of Landscape was created in 2021 as a two-day online format.
Lala.ruhr subsequently successfully implemented several smaller projects of varying scope and funding, but then wanted to focus on the idea of realizing the biennial format. As a private initiative, a concept was then formulated that was discussed and further developed with potential partners. As a result, the "first Biennale of Urban Landscape" could be carried out in September 2022 as a great success.
2019: Manifest: https://www.lala.ruhr/en/concept/
2021: Festival of Landscape: https://www.lala.ruhr/festival/
2021: Recommendations for Action: (https://www.lala.ruhr/en/2021/07/05/green-infrastructure-offensive-handover-of-recommendations-for-action-to-the-rvr/)
2021: Polis Award: https://www.lala.ruhr/en/2021/09/25/polis-award-2021-3rd-place-for-lala-ruhr/
2021: Imagine Green Urban Futures: https://www.lala.ruhr/en/2021/09/27/review-imagine-green-urban-futures/
2022: first Biennial of urban Landscape: https://www.lala.ruhr/en/2023/01/24/the-1st-biennale-of-urban-landscape-sets-new-standards/
However, no further funding has been secured, so we now have to launch again and find a new shape. We still believe in the urgency and power of collaboration and togetherness. Together with our partners, we are working on a retrospective and outlook for a new concept for a biennial as a place of shared and networked learning for a global future. And we will be happy to find further support, recommendations and partners for the way to go. The future is beautiful - sustainable - together #thinklandscape
People rank climate change among the most serious problems facing the world today. The environment we live in has a significant impact on our lives, our well-being, and our future. lala.ruhr has dedicated itself to the task of fostering shared learning and a deep understanding of how we as humans, in harmony with the needs of our fellow human beings and the ecosystem, can influence the design and transformation of our urban landscape. The future is a collective effort.
