2 Avenue de l'Universite
L-4365 Esch-sur-Alzette
Luxembourg
The Cultures of Assembly platform (CoA) has launched its podcast programme, featuring its first three conversations with guests Clémentine Deliss, Rahel Süß, and Dennis Pohl. The conversations are now live on the CoA website, as well as platforms Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, and Amazon Podcasts.
Cultures of Assembly is a long-term research initiative and podcast series run by the Chair of the City of Esch at the University of Luxembourg. CoA is a project for discussing and speculating on spaces of agonism and democracies in the making. We operate as a platform for productive friction, conflict, and negotiation, while building discourse on spatial politics and the public sphere.
CoA runs in parallel with a new, carefully situated neighbourhood agency and discursive venue in the city centre of Esch-sur-Alzette (24 Rue du Brill). Our physical space and its virtual communication tool aim to generate productive dialogues between urban pasts, presents, and futures –– and the various publics and individuals who claim and produce them.
As part of a larger initiative aiming at the reworking of the normative categories and tools of urban regeneration, our projects promote public negotiation through unconventional formats and research, aiming to generate spaces of encounter that enable differentiated Cultures of Assembly and a more nuanced understanding and rendering of democratic publics in the age of the socio-ecological transition.
The city of Esch-sur-Alzette is subjected to changing physical and social phenomena, within a particular cross-border geography at southern Luxembourg, a region where a once thriving steel industry was born. In the transformation from heavy to the service industry, its renewal has been accompanied by the rapid growth of the tertiary sector and knowledge economy. This process, taking place under premises of neoliberal political and economical agendas, has been characterized by an increased social and spatial inequality, as well as a weakening of a public sphere and loss of political agency.
As urban researchers, we are interested in critically discussing and mobilising collective imaginaries to inform urban regeneration of Esch-sur-Alzette, in its shifting from an European center for steel production towards a more politically, environmentally, socially, and economically just space. In this process, we work and collaborate with an extensive and diverse group of local and international artists, architects, researchers, and practitioners.
Team
Markus Miessen is Professor of Urban Regeneration at the University of Luxembourg, where he holds the Chair of the City of Esch. His work revolves around questions of critical spatial practice, institution building, and spatial politics.
Marija Maric is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Luxembourg. Her work focuses on the production of the built environment through the questions of property, real estate and media.
César Reyes Nájera is a postdoctoral researcher in Urban Regeneration at the University of Luxembourg. His work explores urban social dynamics and degrowth strategies to critically update the notion of sustainable development.
Francelle Cane is a doctoral researcher. Her work focuses on the question of the ruin through the perspective of late capitalism, spatial policies, and the man-altered landscape.
Cultures of Assembly
Chair of the City of Esch
Prof. Dr. Markus Miessen
24 Rue du Brill
L—4041 Esch-sur-Alzette
Associated with the Master in Architecture Programme , University of Luxembourg .
Design
: Matthias Görlich, Marcel Strauß
Web development: Another Code Project
. Karen Czock, Fabian Wohlfart
Soundtrack
: ugne&maria.
Ugnė Vyliaudaitė, Marija Rasa Kudabaitė
