Slow Urban Planning: The Future of Tribsees documents a live experiment in post-reunification Germany, where artists and students worked alongside residents of a shrinking town to reimagine vacancy, self-sufficiency, and the limits of regulatory planning.
About This Book
With 70 of 240 downtown houses sitting empty, Tribsees in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a pointed case study in the failure of top-down urban renewal. In 2020, a team led by Tom Matton moved into this vacancy — literally — collaborating with residents to test new models of co-existence grounded in improvisation, local production, and individual responsibility. Slow Urban Planning is part documentation, part manifesto: it records the artistic interventions staged as part of the Tribsees Centenniale while arguing that performative, participatory processes deserve a place within formal urban planning frameworks. Essential reading for practitioners working at the intersection of spatial practice, community engagement, and shrinking-city urbanism.
Key Features
- 160 pages of project documentation, critical essays, and artistic interventions from the Tribsees Centenniale
- Led by Tom Matton in collaboration with artists, students, and Tribsees residents
- Published by Jovis, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How a town with a 29% downtown vacancy rate became a testing ground for alternative models of urban co-existence
- The tension between regulatory planning structures and the improvisational, sometimes extralegal, processes that actually animate shrinking communities
- How artistic intervention can function as a planning tool — not merely as commentary, but as a mechanism for generating new spatial narratives with residents
- A framework for understanding how performative and participatory processes might be formally integrated into urban planning methodology
About the Author
Tom Matton is an artist and urban practitioner whose work engages directly with communities in transition. In 2020, he led the collaborative project in Tribsees that forms the core of this publication, working alongside artists and students to develop proposals for the town's future in dialogue with its residents.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 160
- Dimensions: 230 x 165 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783868597691
- Publisher: Jovis
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Urban planners, spatial practitioners, and researchers interested in shrinking cities, participatory design, and the intersection of artistic practice with planning policy — particularly in post-reunification Eastern European contexts.