INSTRUMENTS OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT

The development of the town is a process that has to reinvent itself constantly: the requirements for life worlds, green space, traffic, residential areas, urbanity and for a healthy climate are subject to constant change, which responsible urban development must face in an adequate way. It must draw up new solutions for complex problems again and again. For around 100 years, international building exhibitions have claimed to trigger impulses for innovative development processes.

Since the early years of the 20th century, international building exhibitions (IBAs) have generated quintessential architecture and pioneering town planning in Germany. At the same time, an IBA is less an institution than a principle and self-commitment to drive forward future-oriented and quintessential urban and landscape development.

New forms of living were drafted by IBAs, new urban quarters were created or existing ones renewed, environments for living and working were brought in to a new relationship, the town as a living environment was redefined. The state of the art of research was always included as well. International building exhibitions are therefore more than just everyday business, they have a trigger effect on development work. The search for answers to questions on the town as living environment stood and stands in the centre.

How have international building exhibitions (IBA) as instruments of urban development changed over the last 100 years? Where have continuities been created? How did international building exhibitions (IBA) function and which results are assessed as lasting today?

In the last two years the M:AI has devoted itself to the topic of international building exhibitions with many national and international partners. The mobile exhibition "IBA meets IBA" tells the story of building exhibitions and explains the structural programmes currently active in Hamburg, Saxony Anhalt or Lower Lusatia. Their history has already been confronted with current planning and development questions at two venues in Hamburg and Basel.

Parallel to this, "IBA Laboratory IBA" provided an impulse for a new network of IBA movers and shakers, specialists and attendants. Questions on international building exhibitions as a future-oriented set of instruments on urban transformation are in the focus of meetings that have since become part of the programme of the national urban development policy of the German ministry of transport, building and urban affairs.

The exhibition "Projection Ruhr. Un laboratoire urbain", which was shown in autumn 2009 in the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, had as its theme the IBA Emscher Park and presented the structural transformation of the Ruhr region, development strategies and planning culture, projects and transformations. The artistic staging by the Düsseldorf concept artist Mischa Kuball surprised visitors with a mobile carpet of images, which told the story of the region's transformation very suggestively.