Move You(r) City

Move You(r) City is responding to an increasing lack of physical activity and an overall social transition to a digital and motorised lifestyle. According to the WHO, more than 70% of all adults move less than a recommended minimum of 2.5 hours weekly. Consequences like declining quality of life, vulnerability to disease and potential social exclusion must be addressed. There is an urgent need for cities and municipalities to implement strategies to promote physical activity. This also means that low-threshold, interdisciplinary and participatory forms of communication must be developed.

Nine thought books of Move You(r) City work on situational potentials and modularly expandable structures, multicoding concepts and creative mobilisations of public spaces as everyday opportunities. Hanover as a testing ground is characterised by relics of car-oriented and functionally separated urban planning of the post-war period. There are many monofunctional and geometrically difficult leftover spaces in the accessible inner city that separate urban life. The project reinterprets these underused locations and speculates on strategies with global transferability. Small-scale interventions as well as bold structures and additions to existing buildings are designed. Design tools, like scaffolding structures, which provide temporary uses and allow self-builds are valued as potential community empowerment. The diverse concepts are developed in short stories as part of a new overall narrative for urban movement promotion. The project understands the media of architecture, like drawings, graphic visualisations of socio-critical narratives and installations in space as a potential. A unifying momentum of the alternation between observing, analysing and speculating modes of work is seeked by translating the various researched contents into a large handwritten storyboard. It brings together blocks of writing, pictographic symbols and spatial drawings of various projection methods and constructs an expansive, open-ended spatial picture telling the story about a city that is supposed to move us. For the first time it used the four metre high wall surface of a lift in Hanovers architecture faculty. The usage of this often overlooked but central place became a metaphor for the bigger idea of also systematically activating underused spaces of the inner cities.