Explain your city to us!
Explain Luckenwalde to us!

In cooperation with the regional university bureau Luckenwalde , we invite the people of the city of Luckenwalde to explain their city to us.

The project “Explain your city to us!“ (in German: “Erklär uns deine Stadt“) represents an open invitation to all residents of Luckenwalde to share their stories, perspectives and ideas with us and with an interested community.

The basis for this exchange is a survey. In the latter, we kindly ask the people of Luckenwalde to respond to eleven questions, the time scale needed is approximately 30 minutes. Through their answers to those questions, the people of Luckenwalde enable outside parties to share detailed insights about daily life in Luckenwalde, about current and future local and regional issues – and also about their individual relationship to the place where they live or come from.

On the hand, the survey addresses classical local topics, for instance: what spots in Luckenwalde are worth visiting? Or what popular stories about the city are worth sharing? On the other hand, quite unusual questions such as “What animal could Luckenwalde be?” (in biological terms) or “How does the city sound?” (in musical terms) encourage the people of Luckenwalde to reflect differently on traditional local patterns. Furthermore, we ask the residents of Luckenwalde to submit/attach images, photographs, films, drawings or audio tracks to vividly and better visualise their perception, experience and perspectives on the city of Luckenwalde.

Through its people-oriented approach, the project “Explain your city to us! Explain Luckenwalde to us!” places in particular citizens’ perspectives centre stage. In doing so, it sets a distinct counterpoint to statistical data or other, quite impersonal, publications on the development of rather rural areas. On the one hand, these documents provide information on the development of housing costs, the number of companies located in the very region or the existing infrastructure. On the other hand, these numbers shed light on the status quo, but they do not take into account maybe decisive future issues with regard to Luckenwalde. In concrete terms: how will, for example, rising housing costs have an impact on daily life in Luckenwalde? Or how will a potential future technology park in Luckenwalde affect local infrastructure, mobility development, the housing market and public life in Luckenwalde and of its citizens?

“Explain your city to us! Explain Luckenwalde to us!” provides the opportunity to address and critically reflect on the idea of a participatory city since the project particularly and exclusively focuses on citizens’ topics and perspectives. It thus also an interesting project for us in the area of “Citizen Science”.