Lebrecht Migge
At the end of the 1970s, the initiators of the Kassel School of Landscape and Open Space Planning, Karl-Heinrich and Inge Meta Hülbusch and Helmut Böse, took up Lebrecht Migge's concept of self-sufficiency as a guiding principle of urban planning and developed it further into the idea of an "autonomy of use". At the same time, a historical reappraisal of Lebrecht Migge's work and influence took place with the exhibition and publication "Leberecht Migge, Gartenkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts", which was realized by Jürgen von Reuß with the collaboration of Lucius Burckhardt, Heidrun Hubenthal, Inge Meta Hülbusch and Mike Wilkens, among others, as part of the Federal Garden Show in Kassel in 1981. Heidrun Hubenthal set up the "Leberecht Migge Archive", on the basis of which she published a first bibliography on Migge in 2004. Further publications appeared from the open space and vegetation working group at the end of the 1980s.
Building on his research on the Anthropocene kitchen as part of the Cluster of Excellence Image-Knowledge-Design, Philipp Oswalt is preparing an annotated re-edition of Leberecht Migge's virtually unknown work "Leberecht Migge: Berlin kolonisiert. Berlin supplies itself! One million Berliners emigrate!" from 1932.
Against the backdrop of the effects of the global economic crisis, Migge formulated a radical vision of a social, modern, technically based settlement ecology for a metropolis of millions as a summary of his 20-year preoccupation with green settlements and self-sufficiency. He was way ahead of his time and formulated concepts that have become topical in today's debates on the Anthropocene, landscape urbanism and urban agriculture. As an innovative lateral thinker, Migge thought through the open spaces of the city in terms of their ecological, social and economic function and developed a concept for the scale of a modern city that combined modern technologies and sciences with self-sufficiency and self-organization. At the same time, he tested his ideas experimentally on himself, in what we would today call a real laboratory.
The aim of the project is to make this forgotten pioneering study publicly accessible in order to provide impulses for today's discussion on material and energy cycles, urban nutrition and open, actor-based planning of a do-it-yourself city.
Researcher: Philipp Oswalt