On Friday October 14th leaders of the IBA Wien, Stuttgart and Parkstad Limburg met at the Quirini Stampalia – part of the Biennale di Architectura – in Venice during the event of ‘100 hours in Venice’ as to share their IBA common good as well as the future of the IBA as methodology.
Wirschaftförderung Region Stuttgart kicked off by presenting the framework of their Internationale Baustellung 2027, as a result of 6 months interactive platform process just concluded on October 12th. The Stuttgart ambition stands out since as while most IBA’s addressed specific challenges or problems from a past, IBA Stuttgart anticipates the industrial change yet to come in the decade ahead e.g. Industry 4.0. In effect the Region Stuttgart ambition to host an IBA can be seen as a kind of ‘revisit’, since Stuttgart hosted already hosted an IBA in 1927 with it’s very famous ‘Weisenhoffsiedlung’ as a heritage.
Vienna City IBA’s ambitions anticipates mainly in the domain of new social housing (‘affordable housing’) due to challenges like a vast economic and demographic growth in the dynamic cross border setting towards Bratislawa and the change of it’s population both in age and by origin, participation, social configuration, putting it’s demands on architecture and keeping in mind climate change / mitigation and sustainability in energy. For this Vienna set up a framework referred to 3 – 3 addressing the topics of quarters, quality and responsibility . Vienna is quite renown for it’s firm and exemplary housing policy since the early 20th century. The Vienna ambitions reflects the need for affordable housing which is part of one of the first to be elaborated themes of the just concluded Amsterdam Pact for an EU urban agenda.
IBA Parkstad put on stage it’s participatory approach so far, addressing the ‘next’ phase in it’s transitory process after the painful deindustrialisation in the 70’ies, over it’s ‘from black to green’ transition to now become a resilient and future proof region, reconciling with it’s past. The IBA Parkstad accentuated it’s cross border approach in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine reflected in the composition of it’s quality board but also in the ‘IBA academic’ programme with cross border & EU-wide collaboration. Within this a series of international collaboration activities amongst diverse universities have taken place, but also visibility created in Brussels during the Days of the Regions & Cities by the Committee of European Regions & Cities in Europe.
In an interactive discussion on the 3 IBA’s lead to the conclusion that currently they are working within the framework of what one could consider ‘the third’ generation of IBA, since they not only are looking at the build environment as such, but also anticipative in ‘being ahead of chance yet to come’. Mental, social, economic and cultural chance have become more at the core in an evolving methodology the IBA nowadays is, taking e.g. actors form the quadruple helix on board.
The 3 IBA’s concluded investigating a more structural format of collaboration could well be an option.