Recovery Through Remediation: Landscape and Economic Transformation of the GDR’S “Energy District”

 

Recovery and Remediation carries forward research begun in the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative (HMUI) Urban Intermedia Project  and takes the investigation into the dynamics of urban transformation and intermedia practices in new directions.

The focus is the coal-mining region of Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz) which powered Berlin’s early 20th century industrialization, and after World War II enabled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to become energy self-sufficient. Today, Lower Lusatia is the site of a major remediation project, the plans for which were drawn up and partially realized by the GDR in the 1960s. That project is transforming the opencast lignite mining district into a lake district, and the larger region into a center of renewable energy production. As post-socialist Germany’s answer to the West’s Emscher Park – a cultural landscape celebrating the Ruhr Valley’s industrial history – the objectives of the Lusatian remediation project (which was also an IBA site in 2000-2010), go far beyond those of Emscher Park. They include both an economic recovery program built around renewable energy production and research-based industries, and a far-reaching ecological remediation program that includes (in addition to the new chain of lakes), an extensive public health and social welfare infrastructure.

Continuing the methods developed in the Urban Intermedia* project, the research examines Lusatia’s remediation and economic development historically (tracing it back to late 19th century Prussian decrees that mandated mine restoration by land owners) and carries forward on-site fieldwork and multimedia archival research begun in the context of the HMUI Berlin research portal.

This project is being developed by HMUI Co-Director, Eve Blau and Igor Ekštajn.