Perspective through paradoxes: a visit to Zwickau

by Ruiying Liu, ESR at the Technical University of Dortmund

Cities are collages of places, with not one but many places and genii loci (spirits of place) — a general rule for big cities, but especially essential to the East German city Zwickau, the destination of my fieldtrip. Although strictly it is no longer a big city (Großstadt) with the population long fallen under 100,000, it is still managed and developed with this self-perception. It boasts of a historic city centre, various large sport venues, large shopping venues, large culture venues, etc. But aside from the growing number of isolated facilities, I struggled to find a coherent urban environment where different layers cohere and create synergy among the many inconsistencies and paradoxes, contrasts and colliding visions packed into one city.

Zwickau is the Robert-Schumann city, and the historic centre is full of amazing classic buildings within easy reach of public transport (Pic 1). But there are no street musicians in public space. Maybe the city once shaped Schumann, but Schumann has not shaped the city, not how it is experienced and used in modern days. Zwickau is also a city of cars (Automobilstadt): birthplace of August Horch, home to the headquarters of Audi and currently the seat of Volkswagen Saxony. However, the famous car museum seems as little connected to the urban spaces as classic music. It is not related to the city centre, and around it, there are no lively public spaces or commercial environments. Furthermore, it is the car traffic that undermines the living quality in the inner city, where housing vacancy goes hand in hand with car traffic in the street (Pic 2).

Unlike professional facilities, sport opportunities in green space is part of the urban space where daily life is lived.

In terms of leisure facilities, one can almost call Zwickau a sport city. In recent years a streak of professional sport facilities like the new football stadium (above, top right) were built, because old ones have fallen out of date. But instead of professional facilities, which might become financially challenging to maintain just like before, sport opportunities in green space is less demanding to create and work in synergy with its surroundings (above, left). In terms of green space, the Schwanenteich Park is a proud symbol of the urbanity of the city, because it is a landscape park with a large lake (above, bottom right). But this appreciation for water is not expressed in public space anywhere else in the city. On the MuldeParadies, the riverfront, you cannot see the river, and the many streams in the city are all hidden behind thick bushes like ditches. The local assumption is that people fear natural water, because of the many flood disasters in the last few decades.

So what, if the apartments are on the cheaper side, as long as it fulfills the promise of the city — a social, high-quality environment with modern facilities — in ways suburban homes cannot?

Zwickau boasts of having a Soziale Stadt (Social City) programme.  Indeed, the social vitality in the densely populated areas is inspiring to see: the green spaces created from demolition of vacant housing become playgrounds and landscape parks, supporting neighbourhood experience, family life, and social facilities (slideshow above). This shows that mass housing areas can evolve into a model of quality living. But in the city centre, this form of development is a thorn in the eyes, where several massive high-rises sit fast in the way to the riverside, blocking the old centre skyline. Once a symbol of egalitarian ideology and much-envied homes, now they are considered taunting figures overshadowing the beautiful historic buildings. Zwickau’s local initiative for a vision in 2050 presents a future where these blocks are finally gone or replaced by chic apartments and offices. But isn’t there beauty in how occupied and full of life they are? Here, the low and medium income households can live next to the best city centre facilities, pensioners can afford daily lunch at a restaurant and children can play together in beautiful green space in sight of their homes.

The city is moving forward economically, and young people moving up the income ladder and seeking to procure stability want better perspectives. But the reality is that the options for good housing and home ownership exist largely for whole-house-buyers. What if people do not want to live in the classical suburban houses with gardens and two cars? The challenge for local planners and developers is to enrich the options in between these two ends to attract younger generations.

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Ironically, the car-dependent lifestyle is killing the inner city of the Automobilstadt. But reinventing the spirit of mobility is not as simple as a few charging stations.

Another future challenge is reinventing the image of Zwickau— “the city of cars” — to be something more environment-friendly and widely acceptable (Pic 3). Maybe “the city of mobility” as some citizens suggested? Indeed the spirit of cars is individual mobility, not the air pollution, the noise of trucks driving through the centre, the nuisance of drivers honking impatiently behind you. In big cities, car driving is technically impossible to be realised for everyone, so the collective vision might better be replaced with something where mobility can be achieved for everyone. Thus it has come to pass that the state funded model project (ZED), materialises, in respect of mobility, in a renting station for e-scooters for the elderly in a fast-ageing neighbourhood (Pic 4). But given the conditions of pedestrian infrastructure all over the city (not to mention the virtual absence of bike lanes), how do you ensure the safety for the elderly who will actually use these scooters for inner city trips?

It is often easy to forget that urban transformation depends on connecting things, stimulating synergy, creating coherent urban environments and reshaping the urban experience — especially in a city with so many parallels and contradictions.

Given its stock of cultural, sport, and shopping facilities, one could say Zwickau is a great city, with no reason of losing population at all… it has small inconveniences, inconsistencies, contradictions, here and there, nothing drastic. But therein lies the dangers for planning: they are easy to ignore because of their sheer pervasiveness, but in the long term they will constrain a city’s potential, and no matter how many patch-ups you make, they will not “incrementally” go away, because they are like problems with bones and vascular systems. These are the problems for long-term strategic public investments. But Zwickau’s record is investing in isolated facilities and projects — professional sports venues, residential projects, large cultural facilities — and afterwards, there is little energy left to connect things, to stimulate synergy, to create coherent urban environments and to reshape the urban experience according to changing social visions. This is inseparable from the fact that the city is handed state subsidies for isolated projects, but also related to the lack of collective consensus and design for the future, in order to strategically invest in larger-scale and long-term issues. Moving forward requires confronting past trajectories, especially appreciating the socioeconomic layers and their often contradicting spatial expressions. In a city with little population pressure, there is a good chance that development does not have to mean one form of living has to be sacrificed for other forms and thus political conflicts. It is the planners’ task to shape the urban environment in which they are related to each other and stimulate unity in diversity.