IN-BETWEEN ZONES
publication

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Introduction

Katarina Sevic
Budapest, December 2007

Dear reader,

This publication is a collection of documents put together in order to archive discussions, comments and ideas raised on numerous occasions over a period of collaborations of its editors.

Gathered around IMPEX - Contemporary Art Provider, our individual and group activities finally got united within one framework. Challenged by the ongoing rapid and substantial transformation in the urban environment of Budapest, we decided to initiate a platform for the critical discussion and analysis of various aspects of urban development and cultural practices.

With a local issue as a starting point, and at the same time encompassing a wider general discourse on the role of cultural potentials in urban development, we wished to initiate a long -term interdisciplinary research project. Built on a fl exible structure, the project was supposed to include workshops, exhibitions, public interventions, publications and other alternative methods of collecting, generating and organizing ideas and knowledge.

The fi rst instance was the workshop entitled ‘In-between Zones’, which took place from 16 to 23 June 2007. The workshop gathered 35 international and Hungarian participants, artists , architects, sociologists, cultural workers, activists, landscape architects and writers.

The site of the workshop was a continuous zone, reaching over the outer 7 th, 8 th , and 9 th districts of Budapest, in-between areas with a rich cultural potential, that were and still are undergoing development projects of different scales but a similar impact as regards urban restructuring. During the seven-day workshop several topics were discussed in small groups with the guidance of tutors. Methods and approaches were developed collectively within the group. The three main topics of the workshop were taken as titles of the chapters for this publication.

You may fi nd the chapter titles too wide and too general for a publication of this size. We are not trying to (re)defi ne any of them or make a comprehensive reference source. The publication in front of you is a kind of scrapbook, an ‘intimate’ reader and a collection of personal observations. We believe that, although not academic in its structure, it is valuable as a testimony and an indicator of the time and place it was created in.

The fi rst chapter, Where is the place of grassroots in the city? includes several interviews with actual ‘initiators’. They are examples of Budapest- and Berlin-based grassroots activities , and are presented here in order to compare two parallel ‘realities’, models and histories , roles, aims, successes and weaknesses of grassroots initiatives in the urban life.

The topic of the second chapter, Public space; Public issues; Urban planning and public art , is concerned with the question of the role of public art and art institutions in the process of city development and planning. The article ‘Defi nitions and arguments concerning socially engaged art’ cites some of the basic literature on the topic in order to bring closer to the Hungarian public the contradictions in the discourse on public art.

The third chapter, entitled Techniques of collective and individual interventions in public space is a collage of ‘instructions’ for better understanding how the city we are inhabiting can be related to our everyday pace.

The city as a subject has become one of the central topics in Western culture today. What does it mean and how is this subject manifested in Hungary? Budapest, a city in search for a redefi nition of its identity, is at the moment passing through a period in which tendencies of the revival of historical facts and fi ctional past go hand in hand with growing commercial interests . The reason why we fi nd it important to produce this publication is because we believe that it can help raise awareness and concern about the processes that shape our city.

With this publication we wish to re-examine our own acts as cultural entrepreneurs and at the same time give new buoyancy to the manifestations of creativity in the city.

These activities can be understood in different ways, as corrections, temporary usages , grassroots , incubators, community work … They are ‘in-betweens’, set at the crossing of alternative and institutional networks. The question is how, and to which level can public authorities recognize and allow these independent, nonprofi t initiatives to become part of their decision making? What are the present dynamics of urban development in Budapest suggestive of? How soon can decentralized production and small fl exible units become elements of present-day urbanism? Are grassroots initiatives sustainable forms for the future? What happens with the projects that, although originally intended to be of limited duration, ‘take root’ in one location, grow, develop and become established? Are temporary uses and users potentially permanent ones? As a result of these questions, apart from refl ecting on several local, Budapest issues, we included a small contribution connected in some way to the present situation in Berlin – a city which is a ‘ laboratory’ of the topics we are addressing here and where cultural hyper-production has become one of the main symbols of the city’s identity. Is it a sustainable model? Is the advocacy of creativity compatible with critical assumptions? In which ways does this model contribute to the city’s wealth in the long run?

The texts in this publication are mainly in Hungarian, with summaries in English. It is primarily meant for the Hungarian audiences. This book is intended as some kind of a manual , offering guidelines and examples, based on our experience. All concerned, who want to make a change, who deal with planning, city development, or those who are not familiar with the issues will fi nd this publication as a document of the ‘ in between zones’ potential.