GOODALL

Publication
Aude Bertrand / Sebastian Fritzsch / Tanja Goethe / Christian Odzuck / Gabi Schillig / Arne Schmitt / Denise Winter

Before the plans for the ParkStadtSüd district are implemented, with the aim of building out the downtown greenbelt in the city of Cologne, GOODALL proposes to integrate the perspective of the visual arts and its closest disciplines into the urban discourse.

We are very pleased to announce the start of this effort, signaled by a brochure containing six letters that document the results of individual and collective research into the Raderberger Brache and its surroundings. A continuing series of annual publications will accompany, examine, and interpret the forthcoming spatial and social changes, while also communicating them in new images.

The area of research:
After more than a century of development, the Raderberger Brache will be more glaringly exposed; a new city neighborhood with twenty thousand more residents will require development. At this point in time the seven-hectare area as a whole is excluded from the process of development; currently, it is included as an undefined area in the plans.

Legitimate claims upon living spaces close to the city center are coming from various directions, and so it seems paradoxical to put a wild biotope shaped by vegetative processes into the balance. From this perspective, developing and reconceptualizing the Raderberger Brache as a protected space where nature can be experienced seems to be the poorer choice.
 
Cologne’s Volksgarten was laid out a good hundred years ago very close to the Raderberger Brache. To do this, many individual pieces of property in the area bounded by the city’s historical border, the freight railway, and its historical defenses had to be united. The director of the garden at the time, Fritz Encke, was headquartered here. Other buildings for the city’s nurseries were also erected in the section of the Volksgarten only a few hundred meters from the Raderberger Brache.

A garden where botany was taught was also laid out close to where the street running through the Raderberger Brache is today, and it remained there until the upheaval of World War II. Community gardens were established on this land. Plans for a new ring in the 1970s, a so-called second ring for Cologne, included the area as a link to the south. Although community gardens and small businesses were cleared away to make room, the plans for the second ring were later abandoned.

The Raderberger Brache was left to develop successively on its own. It became a highly diverse green space, where both grasslands and forests grew. With the construction of a connecting road ten years ago along the Grossmarkt area, new conditions were created for the Raderberger Brache. Today the area is already under increasing pressure, because many residents prefer to use these different, non-standardized, and natural paths.

Dates
November 20, 2017
Publication launched
publication [​at​] goodall-view.com

November 26, 2017
Tour of the Raderberger Brache and discussion of the publication
Bischofsweg/ Vorgebirgstrasse

December 31, 2017
Deadline
Call for proposals 
opencall [​at​] goodall-view.com

Open call
A grant for site-specific research will be given for the first time in 2018.

Between April 16 and May 14, 2018 the city of Cologne will provide a live-work space near the Raderberger Brache. Grant recipients will be able to do research for their projects in the Raderberger Brache and Cologne. In November 2018 another issue of GOODALL will be published, and visits—such as a trip to the oldest art fair in the world, Art Cologne—will offer opportunities to get to know Cologne’s art and cultural scene. 
 

With thanks to all participating artists, as well as to our sponsors and partners.