The Productive City – A Laboratory between Vienna, Kyiv, and Kharkiv

Visions of the Future In many European cities today, there is a spatial and social mismatch between living and working conditions. The city offers many job opportunities to highly skilled professionals, while a large proportion of low-skilled workers live in urban areas with few or no job opportunities. This discrepancy gives rise to many problems in terms of economy, mobility, and sociality. Some can be mitigated by transfer payments and social welfare systems. However, the challenge for cities of the future lies in reinventing proactive neighborhoods, closed-loop economies, and new alternatives for co-production and eco-sharing, as well as in building participation across the entire population to ensure a productive city. The "Reallabor" concept between Vienna, Kyiv, and Kharkiv Vienna, Kyiv and Kharkiv, three cities that at first glance have little in common, will collaborate in a pan-European setting on the theme of the productive city under the aegis of the Kyiv Biennial. While the move away from sectoral, hermetic production structures and towards the holistic "productive city" is being rehearsed in Vienna, the situation in Kyiv and Kharkiv is different; the people of Ukraine, despite war conditions, keep urban life active and productive. In view of the ongoing Russian war of aggression, it is impossible to ignore that nothing is as it was before and that changes continue to unfold. This kind of catastrophe, which undoubtedly affects cities, public space, and coexistence, has altered many aspects in urban life and for city dwellers. Even if it may be too early to think about reconstruction, it is quite appropriate to consider a tight, common, and European transformation of the city as a living space. How can the cities of the future function? We are trying out an experimental arrangement to reimagine the city together. An experimental arrangement that incorporates mixed use, in which living and working move closer together again, ensuring that neighborhood and participation can be combined with productive forces and transformed to create a city based on short distances. Within the framework of the Kyiv Biennial, a laboratory will Curated by tranzit.hu (Dóra Hegyi) be set up by IG Architektur, inter alia, in which planners from Ukraine will cooperate with colleagues from Austria and from cities across Europe in a shared hybrid workspace. Architects and artists will have a chance to work at a digitally shared table as part of the Biennale exhibition. The process will be structured to ensure that work is done simultaneously in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Vienna, which will be digitally connected, and discussed at this table. To make that possible, an exhibition installation is being developed that forms a shared creative workspace at two locations, over 1,800 km apart, each consisting of a real-world desk and its digital mirror image in the form of a large screen. As participants in the work process, exhibition visitors will be encouraged to join in discussions and to contribute ideas to the work. The following topics will be explored: What does it mean to produce in a post-industrial society in search of a balanced way of life within the density of complex cities? How can experiences of collective threats and organized solidarity-based resistance in Ukraine’s cities contribute in future to changing our cities, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, so that a good life becomes possible again? Dates of the events: 20.10., 15:00 Vision in Vienna and Kharkiv 27.10., 15:00 Mobility 10.11., 15:00 Public space 1.12., 15:00 Productive city 8.12., 15:00 Rebuilding restructuring, and re-use 15.12., 15:00 Summary and outlook