11:00-12:00Uhr

For the Hackathon in Residence as part of the Biennale, 20 participants from all over Europe, including the Netherlands, Great Britain, Slovenia and France, will come to Gelsenkirchen. From 12-16 September, they will be working, designing, programming and creating concrete solutions for the digital and sustainable city in mixed teams of architects, landscape architects, programmers and artists.

The challenges the interdisciplinary teams are working on are concrete tasks on the festival grounds. How can underground infrastructure be made visible, for example? What are solutions to avoid large-scale land sealing in the future? How can urban spaces be used better and more efficiently and what influence do grey and green actually have on our health?

The results of the working week can be discovered and tested during guided tours in the festival area on 16 & 17.9. In a walk of just under 20 minutes from the Science Park along Bochumer Straße, the prototypes developed by the teams during the week can be experienced and presented in the direct context of the neighbourhood. Those who cannot or do not want to take part in a guided tour can also explore the Hackathon spots on their own.

The tours start at the info point in the Arakde of the Science Park.

Tip: Parallel to the exhibition of the hackathon results, the virtual excursions take place in the mxr lab, which is located exactly halfway along the tour next to the Holy Cross Church.

Treffpunkt: Wissenschaftspark (Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen), Infostand am Haupteingang

11:00-18:30Uhr

On 16 & 17 September we offer virtual excursions for which you don’t have to leave the festival area. In the mxr lab on Bochumer Straße, virtual reality beginners can take their first steps and advanced users can gain new insights into VR. The programme includes excursions into the metaverse and getting to know planning and simulation tools.

Location: mxr lab, Bochumer Straße 109, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

11:00-11:30Uhr

Talk by Steffen Budweg

From participation to co-creation – examples and experiences of the use of digital tools in a European city network for more citizen participation.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

11:30-12:00Uhr

Talk by Danko Nikolić

Currently, the use of artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of energy to train the best models. In contrast, the human brain requires comparatively tiny amounts of energy. Yet humans are smarter than AI in most tasks. The goal for the future of our technology is to develop an AI that is as energy efficient as the human brain. In his talk, Dr Danko Nikolić will explain some of the “tricks” that the human brain uses to work efficiently. One of these “tricks” is, for example, that it is able to learn from small amounts of data. In addition, our brain has the ability to switch off large parts and only use a small part of the network – only the part that is needed at any given moment. In the future, AI will also have to adopt these biological strategies in order to achieve sustainability.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

12:00-12:30Uhr

Talk by Robin Römer

The last heat has just passed, the asphalt has become firm again and the rush to the bathing lake or the cooling forest outside the city has subsided. But the breathers before the next long summer are getting shorter and shorter and hot spells longer and longer. This makes it all the more important to transform our city into a cool oasis.

The transformation to a cool and green street is not new, but climate change adaptation is still not consistently considered in planning processes. That is why the E.ON Foundation has launched the “Streetplaner” project, in which microclimate analyses are brought to life through augmented reality in square and street designs in Essen.

Robin from cityscaper explains how this works and why it is a way to get more people involved in reallocating urban space.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

12:30-13:00Uhr

Talk by Imanuel Schipper

Participation, collaboration, involvement – are these both solutions to all problems and a nightmare? How can (and are) VR/AR/XR used in urban design so that multiple stakeholders have their say? Is the technology a help or rather a hurdle? Who is allowed (and able) to play along? And what do we want to achieve? What kind of world of coexistence are we building (or imagining)?
The lecture shows perspectives of collaborative digital tools and concepts for future urban design and planning on the basis of projects of the City Science Lab of the HCU Hamburg.)

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

13:00-14:00Uhr

For the Hackathon in Residence as part of the Biennale, 20 participants from all over Europe, including the Netherlands, Great Britain, Slovenia and France, will come to Gelsenkirchen. From 12-16 September, they will be working, designing, programming and creating concrete solutions for the digital and sustainable city in mixed teams of architects, landscape architects, programmers and artists.

The challenges the interdisciplinary teams are working on are concrete tasks on the festival grounds. How can underground infrastructure be made visible, for example? What are solutions to avoid large-scale land sealing in the future? How can urban spaces be used better and more efficiently and what influence do grey and green actually have on our health?

The results of the working week can be discovered and tested during guided tours in the festival area on 16 & 17.9. In a walk of just under 20 minutes from the Science Park along Bochumer Straße, the prototypes developed by the teams during the week can be experienced and presented in the direct context of the neighbourhood. Those who cannot or do not want to take part in a guided tour can also explore the Hackathon spots on their own.

The tours start at the info point in the Arakde of the Science Park.

Tip: Parallel to the exhibition of the hackathon results, the virtual excursions take place in the mxr lab, which is located exactly halfway along the tour next to the Holy Cross Church.

Treffpunkt: Wissenschaftspark (Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen), Infostand am Haupteingang

13:00-15:00Uhr

Deep Dive with Leo Stuckardt, Jaka Korla and Janka Lengyel

EN/NL / Published in 2002, the speculative design project “The Regionmaker” by MVRDV and Daniel Dekkers anticipated a shift towards data-driven urban and regional planning processes. Being equally a vision for the RheinRuhr region and a manual for the RegionMaker software, the project recognised the profound entanglements of design and the tools that enable design.
20 years later, the data-modelling and simulation techniques of the RegionMaker have become common practice around the world. Beyond that the exponential evolution of computing power, (remote) sensing and machine learning techniques offer new opportunities for the collection and interpretation of spatial data.
The workshop will explore what kind of tools we can imagine to respond to a growing inventory of urban, regional and planetary urgencies.

Total duration: 2 hours

5 min: Introduction
15 min: Input lecture MVRDV
15 min: Input lecture Janka Lengyel
15 min: Assignment and collective conversation
60 min: Group work
10 min: Presentations

Registration required; bring your own laptop if possible

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

15:00-15:30Uhr

Talk by Jan Kamensky

Jan Kamensky gives insights into the project and talks about his motivation. What is it about the use of the term utopia? Why does the language of images help us to change our consciousness and develop mindfulness? There will also be an opportunity for exchange.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

15:00-16:00Uhr

For the Hackathon in Residence as part of the Biennale, 20 participants from all over Europe, including the Netherlands, Great Britain, Slovenia and France, will come to Gelsenkirchen. From 12-16 September, they will be working, designing, programming and creating concrete solutions for the digital and sustainable city in mixed teams of architects, landscape architects, programmers and artists.

The challenges the interdisciplinary teams are working on are concrete tasks on the festival grounds. How can underground infrastructure be made visible, for example? What are solutions to avoid large-scale land sealing in the future? How can urban spaces be used better and more efficiently and what influence do grey and green actually have on our health?

The results of the working week can be discovered and tested during guided tours in the festival area on 16 & 17.9. In a walk of just under 20 minutes from the Science Park along Bochumer Straße, the prototypes developed by the teams during the week can be experienced and presented in the direct context of the neighbourhood. Those who cannot or do not want to take part in a guided tour can also explore the Hackathon spots on their own.

The tours start at the info point in the Arakde of the Science Park.

Tip: Parallel to the exhibition of the hackathon results, the virtual excursions take place in the mxr lab, which is located exactly halfway along the tour next to the Holy Cross Church.

Treffpunkt: Wissenschaftspark (Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen), Infostand am Haupteingang

15:30-16:00Uhr

Talk by Matthias Heskamp

Images of the future are powerful tools because they expand people’s imaginations and thus influence them. We are all familiar, for example, with the visually stunning car advertisements that promise us a better future if we would only choose the latest car model… With the “Manifesto of the Free Street”, the Berlin think tank paper planes e.V., in cooperation with scientists from WZB and TU Berlin, has now tried to create images of an urban future that is actually desirable: The architect and image scenographer of “Straßen befreien” (Free Streets) talks about the learning process that led to the images exhibited from 10 September to 24 September 2022 in the Arkade (Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen), the difficulty of emotionalising with images of the future and his love of streets.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

16:00-16:30Uhr

Talk by Tim Mittelstaedt

It is common knowledge that bees are industrious – but Tim Mittelstaedt shows in his lecture that they are also digital pre-flyers. Equipped with LoRaWAN, bee hives can be monitored remotely. But LoRaWAN is not only something for beekeepers. With the help of this technology, it is also possible to check the humidity of green spaces, the risk of forest fires in moorland, the CO2 content in a conference room or the parking situation at a park-and-ride. You can hear what the technology can do and how it is already being used in this lecture.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen

17:00-18:30Uhr

Deep Dive with Matthias Krentzek, Linda Breitlauch and Hubertus Schäfer

je 5 Minuten Impulse von Linda Breitlauch, Matthias Krentzek und Hubertus Schäfer. Followed by 60-minute deep dives (three groups of your choice depending on your interests).

Digital urban planning: what does the city of the future look like in the metaverse?
Matthias Krentzek invites you to a thought experiment: What would it be like if you could build the city you live in all over again, avoiding all the mistakes of the past? What would it be like if you oriented your city much less towards the needs of car traffic? Unfortunately, it is only theoretically possible to create an urban space completely on the drawing board. But it is possible for a different kind of space – and it is happening right now. The biggest tech companies in the world are currently working feverishly on a new living space. This space is digital, and it will shape our everyday lives in the future. What is meant is the “metaverse” – and this is the most important trend word of the digital scene. The term describes a digital space that is created by overlapping virtual and physical reality and that exists permanently and consistently.

Technology and competence transfer with games for sustainability and innovation
Living, learning and working in the digitalised world – how to make complexity understandable with serious games. The potential of digitalisation lies above all in the design of interactive applications that enable participation and change in a social context. Among other things, AI-supported simulations can help to implement urgently needed infrastructure measures at all levels of the development of cities and municipalities in the areas of mobility, healthcare, education, participation and sustainability in an effective and cost-efficient manner. In addition to technology, this also requires creativity that can use existing data as well as the participation of all people to find solutions for a sustainable and equitable society.

A digital-analogue experience landscape of the future
The office GREENBOX Landschaftsarchitekten develops innovative digital-analogue living spaces in city centres and parks. Using project references, the company’s founder Hubertus Schäfer will report on the possibilities of integrating a digital experience level in landscape architectural planning. In the workshop, he will discuss the diverse opportunities and challenges of “hybrid” urban and open spaces with the participants.

Location: Konferenzsaal, Munscheidstraße 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen