Weaving Stories-Bridging Cultures: Promoting Diversity and Inclusion through Cinematic Storytelling
Through a series of site-specific, experiential workshops, art and architecture students from different national/cultural backgrounds collaborate on the production of short movies that creatively interpret the quotidian life in historic urban landscapes as a dynamic field of cross-cultural intersections in time and space. Their space-driven narratives contemplate aspects of social awareness and inclusion, promote cultural dialogue and explore the prospect of belonging as meaningful dwelling.
Cross-border/international
Greece
Germany
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Other
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): School of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Styliani Last name of representative: Lefaki Gender: Female Nationality: Greece Function: Associate Professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: School of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus Town: Thessaloniki Postal code: 54124 Country: Greece Direct Tel:+30 697 731 2153 E-mail:styl.lefaki@gmail.com Website:https://architecture.web.auth.gr/en/lefaki-styliani/
Name of the organisation(s): Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, Germany Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Karsten Last name of representative: Weigel Gender: Male Nationality: Germany Function: Professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Schellingstraße 24 Town: Stuttgart Postal code: 70174 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+49 711 89262631 E-mail:karsten.weigel@hft-stuttgart.de Website:https://www.hft-stuttgart.de/p/karsten-weigel
Our initiative for a series of recurring, intensive educational workshops is the result of an international collaboration between 3 academic institutions from Greece, Germany and Turkey. The main scope is to heighten awareness among students of art and architecture about the city as a historical and cultural palimpsest through cross-cultural teamwork. To date, it has instigated three site-specific, hands-on workshops (Stuttgart, Akçaabat, Thessaloniki), each focusing on a different manifestation of tangible/intangible heritage that reflects the cultural multiplicity of their respective urban contexts. The methodology discussed below distils our learning experiences, as instantiated in the implementation of the Thessaloniki workshop. This was conceived as an experiment with the art of cinematic storytelling: a stratagem for revisiting the city’s multicultural past and exploring its reverberations in modern quotidian life. Here, historical accounts of the city, its evolution and its architectural imprint inspire narratives about urban life as a socio-cultural continuum that reaffirm our sense of belonging. By scripting, storyboarding, shooting and editing short movies in mixed teams, students actively and creatively reinterpret the city’s historical past, by critically addressing its present challenges and imagining potential futures for sustainable urban habitation. Working in situ for the duration of the workshop (for Thessaloniki, our case-study was Ladadika, a historic neighbourhood/market in transition) enables students to gain an amplified sense of the place and its people, by observing daily life around the clock and subsequently by contemplating aspects of social cohesion and inclusiveness that forge community ties and sustain living urban heritage. Local stakeholders, their memories and their habitats thus become sources of inspiration for unofficial narrations about contemporary urban living, especially for cities with latent, contested or difficult pasts.
art and creativity as agents of urban change
cross-cultural history of architecture and the city
social inclusion and resilience
collective memory and urban identity
testimonies of the city
Nowadays, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas and planned or unplanned suburbanisation expanding at an ever-increasing rate at the expense of the rural environment, investigating the living conditions of brownfield or inner-city sites presents a major challenge for modern societies. Our initiative draws upon literature on urban reclamation, rejuvenation and adaptive reuse to introduce site-specific learning experiences in the form of international workshops addressed to students of art and architecture that examine how neighbourhoods and communities respond to the exigencies of homeostatic, sustainable urban living. We focus on historical city-centres and in particular areas that undergo significant land-use transformations due to economic shifts (e.g., the displacement of traditional commerce) and study the potential for thriving local communities with a strong sense of belonging by foregrounding their relationship to built space and its multi-layered history. Placing academic innovation at the core of our approach, we utilise the communicative impact of cinematic storytelling so as to narrate meaningful stories about contemporary urban living. Cinema, architecture and the city have been following intertwining paths since the dawn of modernity. Today, representations of architecture and the city in film constitute valuable resources for contemporary historiography. Conversely, exploiting the expressive means and rhetorical power of cinematic narration in order to put forward compelling arguments about the future of the city and its architecture represents a niche area of creative experimentation. Within this framework, weaving stories about fragile urban habitats becomes a medium for promoting a heightened awareness among young people of the need for cultural inclusion and social resilience. Developing expertise, tools and methodologies to embrace digital change in the social sciences and humanities lie at the heart of our project.
By monitoring the quality of life within inner-city neighbourhoods with a view to revisit their multi-layered/cultural past through cinematic narration, our workshops offer students a chance to study the diverse human geography of their site and its particular urban ethos: the practices and rituals of everyday life, local networks of connectivity, social organization and dynamics and possible conflicts (e.g. racism) that have risen as a result of socio-political and economic processes (e.g. migration). In short, an analysis that oscillates between individual experience and collective expression along the lines of urban anthropology and foregrounds the spirit of the place and the essence of belonging. The resulting overview, depicted in graphically expressive mental maps as part of the brainstorming process, provides the raw material for developing stories that reflect both the porousness & fragility and the resilience & dynamics of these urban ecosystems. Turning our stories into short movies by exploiting the conventions of narrative or experimental cinema adds an extra, artistic layer to the project, one that involves the imaginative transcription of our site analysis to telling moving images and soundscapes. Cinema, the lingua franca of our times, provides a malleable tool for communicating novel ideas about socio-spatial inclusion and urban regeneration to both local stakeholders (in situ screening) and a wider audience (YouTube channel), thus aspiring to a European dissemination network of cultural exchanges. The Thessaloniki workshop (October 2022), where this methodology was exemplified, succeeded in yielding high-quality results, with 36 students from Greece, Germany and Turkey working in mixed teams of 5-6 to produce 7 short movies of consequence, dealing in different topical aspects of sustainable urban living, from the fading traditional professions to ageism and accessibility. The movies were screened locally and at the STRAND (Belgrade, December 2022).
Our research and educational methodology involves a rigorous investigation of the area under consideration for potential cracks in the socio-spatial continuum of the city, looking in particular for tangible or intangible barriers for people with different ethnic, racial, cultural, social or economic backgrounds or with disabilities and foregrounding, through the use of creative scripting and cinematography, the daily practices that render our cities less inviting and inclusive for the marginalised and vulnerable ‘silent minorities’. These practices often intersect with the side effects of intensified gentrification, whether tourism or real estate driven, and become manifest in various real-life scenarios. Utilising cinematic techniques to isolate such occurrences from the hustle and bustle of our daily routine, as our workshops do, and examine them closely under the magnifying glass of cinematic storytelling presents an invaluable opportunity for active reflection among students, workshop tutors, invited guests, local stakeholders and the authorities, a key aspect of the screening that takes place at the closing event of the workshop. Hence, instances of spatial exclusion feed into micro-historical urban narratives that turn into well-structured cinematic arguments and easily perceivable visualisations of the issue at hand. More importantly, short movies produced by our students during the workshop move past a firm diagnosis of the phenomenon, to seek the potential for overcoming these obstacles in ways that only the rhetorical format of cinema can attain within the tight temporal constraints of the workshop. In effect, our initiative promotes the heuristic toolset of inclusive design as a coherent planning methodology for a fair and equitable city that accommodates equal participation, acknowledges the diversity of its citizens and eliminates spatial segregation, thus setting the foundation for a healthy civic society and ensuring sustainable urban living for all.
At the very heart of this initiative lies an anthropocentric approach to the urban environment and its history, which fosters cross-disciplinarity by combining potent heuristic methodologies from social anthropology and history. Oral testimonies, in particular, are pivotal to our aim of reconstructing the memory of the place via the moving image. Personal and subjective histories in the form of ‘life stories’ are collected, either on or off camera, to form a dynamic pool of source material that informs our stories and drives their plots forward. These are provided by locals who live and/or work in the area and are willing to share their life experiences with us. This, in effect, triggers a stochastic process of retrospective appraisal and increased awareness on various aspects of urban communal life, mutually beneficial for both our students and the interviewees, who are invited to attend the final screening at the end of the workshop and engage in a fruitful discussion with other community members, our guests and our team. Our premises become, for the duration of the screening, the tangible spatial manifestation of the public sphere. With this in mind, our students canvass the area during the preliminary phase of site analysis for potential protagonists, whose valuable input will afford them a better understanding of the place and its special character, its history and the potential for sustainable future habitation. Actively listening to life stories thus becomes integral to the social and cultural practices of storytelling, a real-life exercise in communication, reflection and social empathy that aspires to give rise to a different type of scholar and/or practitioner; a younger generation of artists, architects and city planners who will be better equipped to cope with the latter-day challenges of social justice and inclusion in the European city. This higher ambition provides the main pedagogical drive of our initiative and the recurring theme of our workshops.
Drawing on recent experience with the Thessaloniki workshop, we are confident that we have devised a participatory schema that actively involves various stakeholders in different stages of the organization; before, during and after the end of the actual event. The essential research that precedes our workshops involves several months of preparations that include, among other tasks, formal and informal discussions with the local authorities (e.g. the municipality) and local stake holders (e.g. shop, café and restaurant owners) about the site under scrutiny, in the vein of a typical SWOT analysis (locating a suitable venue in the vicinity to house our workshop is also part of this process). On a national level, we liaise with central governments to secure greater visibility, agility and dissemination of our efforts. On a European level, we seek the moral and material support of relevant diplomatic missions and NGOs to further our agendas for cross-national collaboration, mutual understanding and cultural fusion. In the case of the Thessaloniki workshop, the different stakeholders included representatives of the local community, the Municipality of Thessaloniki, the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Consulate of Turkey in Thessaloniki, the Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Thessaloniki and the World Cultural Community of Hellenism, based in Germany. Collaborating on different levels with them contributed to the shaping of a set of ‘good practices’ for the design, implementation and knowledge sharing, which are expected to guide our future ventures, while being constantly refined and upgraded. Moreover, they furnished the social and cultural programme of our workshop with different extracurricular activities, such as a guided tour of the Atatürk Museum in Thessaloniki followed by a reception, a reception at the Maritime Museum, offered by the World Cultural Community of Hellenism and a guided tour of Vergina, courtesy of the German Consulate.
The educational context of our initiative aims at designing and implementing creative knowledge environments and learning experiences through a rigorous interdisciplinary perspective that binds together a wide range of neighbouring academic fields and expertise from our profoundly interconnected world. At the very core of our approach there exists a contemporary take on architectural history and historiography that emphasizes the adaptive reuse of disused or rundown spaces through the lens of cultural heritage studies and environmental sustainability. This is coupled by an active interest in the history and theory of cinema and in particular the eclectic relations between architecture and its filmic representations. Filmmaking as a creative practice and a set of communication skills also forms integral part of our interdisciplinary teaching approach. Our methodology draws on the heuristic tools of general historical research, more precisely the practices of oral history and micro-history that involve on the one hand interviews with the protagonists of our stories and on the other hand a special focus on the relationship between place and memory, from the individual to the collective. Moreover, the use of nuanced observational tools and techniques for qualitative research (e.g. diary) as instantiated in social anthropology describes a crucial part of the site analysis process. Finally, the above-mentioned fields interconnect with the theory and practice of architectural and urban design since student movies are conceived and treated as designed spaces, although submitting a design proposal is not a requirement. Workshop tutors who practice interdisciplinarity in their respective academic environments -sourced from 4 institutions: School of Architecture (Thessaloniki), Hochschule für Technik (Stuttgart), Jade Hochschule (Oldenburg) and Karadeniz Technical University (Trabzon)- collaborate remotely, over the network, and in situ, before, during and after the workshops.
Our methodology reintroduces moving images as potent rhetorical arguments about the urban space and, in effect, as designed (celluloid) spaces. This in itself marks a rather original approach that understands cinematic storytelling as a congruous expressive medium that complements the time-honoured representational and communication skills of the artist and the architect. Another innovative aspect of our initiative resides in the use of the moving image as a medium for sharpening existing or developing new cognitive skills for artists and architects with the explicit objective to generate a more nuanced and better crafted understanding of the complex and fluid realities of our world. Filmmaking situated within the realm of architectural studies steadily becomes a coherent field of scholarly endeavour that extends the traditional architectural curriculum to incorporate the development of skills in digital research and visualization techniques commonly associated with the digital humanities. The Thessaloniki workshop, capitalizing on earlier experiences with the Stuttgart & Akçaabat workshops, signposts the way for creative experimentation with the vocabulary, the grammar and the syntax of film language with a view to further consolidate the mutual interaction between cinema and architecture for our future ventures. This involves the design of educational settings for the investigation of the urban landscape and its architecture through engaging spatial narratives and expressive cinematic spaces: i.e. the creation of a dynamic archive that records the tangible and intangible legacy of the city via an intercultural interpretation. This forward-thinking approach to the current challenges facing the European city aspires to contribute to the cultivation of a culture of engagement and integration, which owes to permeate both the ways experts understand and design the urban landscape and the ways citizens lead their lives within its boundaries.
Our workshops employ a fairly low-tech strategy in order to achieve the highest possible mobility and flexibility: our students are prompted to use their mobile phones for shooting their films & recording sound and their laptops for processing the results of the site analysis & editing their movies, all with freely accessible software. Working on location or at a close proximity to the area under consideration (in the case of the Thessaloniki workshop, we were based in Ypsilon, a late 19th century, disused khan, that was transformed in a multipurpose cultural space in 2017) resonates with our determination to keep the need for technological infrastructure as basic as possible. Instead, we have shifted the focus of our initiative to the design of a coherent methodology that can be easily replicated in other places (both within and in different cities) and other educational contexts (secondary schools or different academic disciplines). To this end, we have devised a straightforward modus operandi that involves the creative use of cinematic storytelling for the construction of filmic arguments about the city and its current challenges that can be further refined and enriched with successive implementations. This is mainly due to our open-ended and not ends-oriented approach, whose heuristic capacity becomes more acute and sensitive with each new application. This, in effect, constitutes a paradigmatic case for bilateral knowledge flow, where the learning framework of the workshop is transferred, mutatis mutandis, to a different spatial or academic context, while, at the same time, each relocation provides a valuable opportunity for retrospective reflection on the means and processes of knowledge acquisition. This répétition different makes a case for academic excellence through knowledge-transfer and cross-cultural collaboration by fine-tuning our analytical tool in ways that acknowledge the individuality of each socio-urban habitat while seeking the common ground.
Our initiative entails week-long, intensive, hands-on, experiential workshops for students from different countries/universities, rotating between locations and cities, with a view to discuss aspects of inner-city sustainable living through the use of cinematic storytelling. They kick-off with a team-building activity, followed by a series of induction seminars, mainly on the socio-cultural heritage of the site under investigation and on aspects of cinematic and visual discourse, offered by workshop tutors & guest lecturers. This leads to a detailed site analysis and the ensuing processing of the accumulated qualitative & quantitative data via mental mapping. Data visualization of this kind informs the development of stories and plots on different aspects of urban life that turn into storyboards and shooting scripts for short movies, whose protagonists are the locals, their life-stories and the spaces they inhabit. On-location shooting and sound recording take place under natural conditions with lightweight, unobtrusive equipment. The footage is subsequently previewed, discussed and edited in non-linear freeware, with the design of an appropriate soundscape. The final results, 5-minute-long cinematic arguments about the city, are screened at a public event towards the end of the workshop, where students, tutors, guest lecturers, local stakeholders and representatives of state agencies engage in a broad discussion. Various group activities are spread throughout and at the end of the workshop to provide background on the place and its people and opportunity for reflection. Starting with the movies produced in Thessaloniki, our initiative aspires to create an online database of student projects that take on various aspects of communal living in different cities, under the umbrella notions of urban sustainability and integration. These will hopefully contribute to the discussion about tangible & intangible inclusive heritage and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.
The return to inner-city residential or commercial districts and the ensuing processes of urban reclamation and rejuvenation -that foster the academic debate and affect the reality of many North-American and European cities over the past several decades- have triggered socio-spatial transformations that, despite the well-intended efforts, occasionally result in more or less conspicuous segregations and exclusions. Their spatial, tangible or intangible imprints have become the foci of current discussions on a ‘barrier-free city for all’, a city that acknowledges and celebrates the diversity of its citizens and invites them to actively participate in the shaping of the special character and atmosphere its neighbourhoods, thus cultivating a strong sense of belonging for all. This formed the theoretical framework within which our students approached the recently revitalized commercial and leisure district of Ladadika in Thessaloniki with a view to comprehend & analyze the status quo and contemplate possible futures for sustainable living in the area, through the rhetorical expressiveness of the moving image. In doing so, our students engaged in a fruitful discussion with the local community, actively listening to their concerns & aspirations and raising vital questions about meaningful habitation in the city, both of which informed their projects. In this respect, their short movies became mediums for and agents of a wide-ranging retrospective reflection that led to a heightened awareness about what constitutes the essence of a place with respect to its multi-cultural context. As our database of relevant works grows, this discussion is expected to move from the physical space of the workshop to the digital sphere, through a comparative assessment of telling examples from different localities.
As the final deliverables of our last venture begin to receive attention across European borders as part of our comprehensive dissemination strategy (‘OA2022’, Belgrade, ‘Mercati storici e rigenerazione urbana in Europa’, Venice), we are already embarking on the design of our next academic undertaking, which focuses on the replication of the prototypical learning experience of our workshops in a different urban context. This will most likely be an altogether new urban location, pending the successful conclusion of ongoing discussions with additional institutional partners. Furthermore, our team is currently exploring the possibility of hosting the event on a regular, yearly basis, an earlier commitment that was interrupted by the pandemic, beginning in October 2023. This is expected to build momentum, sharpen the heuristic and expressive capacity of our methodology and enrich our dynamic database of online student movies with additional projects. The latter, i.e. building a crucial mass of relevant cinematic works that can uphold an informed discussion on a local, national and cross-national level about urban sustainability and integration within a range of different localities, constitutes a crucial, long-term ambition and a performance objective. To this end, we are holding knowledge and experience-transfer discussions with colleagues from various schools of architecture -e.g. from the universities of Cambridge (DIGIS, UK), Padua (UniPD, Italy), Thessaly (LECAD, Greece)- and The Cyprus Institute, where cinematic techniques and locative media have been applied to serve different purposes. This, in the long run, aims at establishing an academic and research network between diverging partners and cities with a view to direct our combined efforts toward unearthing the underpinning assumptions and reasoning that hinder inclusive, participatory urbanism in the European city.
The main educational goal of our initiative is directly linked to the aims of the European sustainability competence framework and in particular the direction of teaching and learning sustainability competences through the umbrella term of ‘sustainability education’. Embodying sustainability values through the design of learning experiences that apply skills and practices for a homeostatic living rests at the very core of our pedagogical philosophy. These take the form of analytical and design priorities that foreground on the one hand the adaptive reuse of the built environment and on the other hand collective participation and individual agency.
