5 September 2016

“Public Space: Fights and Fictions” – digital magazine now available

The “Public Space: Fights and Fictions. 36-hour Factory of Thought” conference is now going online with a digital magazine. In May this year, the conference at the Akademie der Künste brought together around 40 international urban planners, activists, architects and artists and clearly illustrated the broad spectrum of perspectives, ideas and experiences associated with public space. On behalf of the Akademie der Künste and the Goethe-Institut, an editorial team from The Funambulist and the New South group of French architects have prepared a digital magazine with a selection of previously unpublished works on the conference. The magazine, issued in English, is available to read or download free of charge at www.adk.de/fights-and-fictions or http://thefunambulist.net.

This publication summarises the key issues at the conference and, at the same time, offers food for thought on how to continue the debate. In this digital magazine, editors Léopold Lambert (The Funambulist) as well as Meriem Chabani and John Edom (New South) focus particularly on perspectives from the global South as well as observations on the militarisation of public space. The essays by Anna Minton, Mona Fawaz and Ahmad Gharbieh, Elpida Karaba, Tentative Collective, Wilfried Wang and Kathrin Röggla trace and explore the conference’s topics and issues. The magazine also includes six interviews with Eyal Weizman, Cooking Sections, Nana Adusei-Poku, Pedro Gadanho, Ana Dana Beroš and Omar Nagati conducted during the conference, as well as photo galleries featuring images of the highway in São Paulo as a park by Renato Cymbalista and Marvi Mazhar’s documentation of Karachi’s militarised cityscape.

Public Space: Fights and Fictions
Digital Magazine
Free download as a PDF file at www.adk.de/fights-and-fictions or http://thefunambulist.net

The “Public Space: Fights and Fictions. 36-hour Factory of Thought” Conference was held from 19 – 21 May 2016 as part of the “DEMO:POLIS – The Right to Public Space” exhibition at the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, and was organised jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the Akademie der Künste.