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Anthology documents "Free Space in the Crisis".
Image: Dr. Daniel Münderlein.The predecessor of the book is the blog (www.freiraum-krise.de), which the editors started at the beginning of the pandemic at the Department of Open Space Planning at the University of Kassel. In 48 contributions, 14 authors bring together their own observations, media coverage and scientific discussions. Due to the unpredictable course of the pandemic and the staggered reaction of regulatory measures, individual snapshots and atmospheric images of various open space situations were created. They portrayed emptied open spaces, hygiene distances, blocked equipment elements but also rule violations or new uses of space in a scientific-descriptive but also in an essayistic way.
"We documented a heterogeneous mixture of official rule-setting, appropriation practices, changed mobility behavior, coping strategies, so-called coping, glimmers of hope as well as spatial bizarreness and paradoxes," Stefanie Hennecke, professor of open space planning at the University of Kassel and author and editor of the anthology, describes the project. In the first part of the book, readers will find the only minimally revised blog posts on Open Space in Crisis?! in chronological order and thus a tracing of the temporal development of spatial measures against the pandemic.
"After it became clear over the course of 2020 that Freiraum in der Krise?! would not remain a snapshot, but that a kind of new normality in the crisis was emerging, we made the plan to turn the blog's contributions into a book and supplement them with an additional 10 reflective chapters," reports author Daniel Münderlein on the genesis of the anthology. The second part of the book therefore contains ten more contributions that were written outside the blog starting in fall 2020. Various authors reflect on the changing meaning of certain places, such as the balcony, the forest, virtual space, or even changing spatial practices and human-animal relationships based on empirical data collection or systematic literature research.
The book is published in 2021 as a print edition and e-book in open access by Kassel University Press: doi:10.17170/cobra-202108064500
Click here to order a print copy: https://www.uni-kassel.de/ub/publizieren/kassel-university-press/verlagsprogramm
Contact person:
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Hennecke
Department of Open Space Planning
E-mail: hennecke[at]uni-kassel[dot]de