Park Fiction a new park for Hamburg, St. Pauli

"The wishes will leave the apartment and go to the street and put an end to the realm of boredom, administration, misery."

Under this leitmotif, a group of artists, residents and the office arbos Freiraumplanung prevented the development of St. Pauli's last open space and pushed through a collectively designed park. The campaign and the subsequent planning process allied and enriched art, subculture and politics in a unique way. In 2002, the project was one of the few German art projects to be represented at Documenta 11 in Kassel.

AppreciationGerman Landscape Architecture Award 2005

Jury verdict: A group of artists, planners and residents formed in 1994 with the aim of saving the last open space in St. Pauli from development. Together, they designed a park that meets a variety of usage requirements through its spatial division into sub-areas and elements. The concept of the authors is convincing both in the organization and implementation of the collective planning process and the bundling of the wishes of the residents made therein, as well as in the reflection of the concrete living environment.

It is precisely the complexity, provisionality and partly artificiality of the urban quarter, which represents both Hamburg's poorest residential quarter and the city's amusement quarter, that was taken up by the design. In an area where a conventional park with large contiguous lawns and wooded areas could not be maintained, a design through a variety of individual objects lent itself.