In September 2024, the heimaten project launched with a simple question: Who Does Germany Belong To? At this podium discussion a year later, participants will turn to concrete, local experiences and ask: Who Does the City Belong To?

Urban planning is not neutral. It is politically and historically charged and defined by relationships of property and power. In times of growing spatial marginalization and intensifying competition over increasingly scarce resources, questions of participation and visibility are becoming more urgent than ever: What interests define our cities, and what voices are systematically ignored or even silenced? How are urban spaces designed, whom does this design serve, and who makes decisions about it? And whom does the city really belong to—those who shape policy, those who own buildings, or those who live in them?

heimaten: Who Does the City Belong To? doesn’t only illuminate the connection between spatial order and power, but also discusses what’s necessary to make marginalized groups heard and visible in the long term—and what their large-scaleparticipation might look like.

The evening will kick off with excerpts from the documentary film Schrott oder Chance (2019), an insightful record of the debates surrounding the demolition of the Institut für Lehrerbildung Rosa Luxemburg in Potsdam (Rosa Luxemburg Institute for Educational Training), constructed in 1977, and the reconstruction of Potsdam’s Prussian inner city. Afterwards, panelists will use concrete examples to discuss memorial culture, participation, and how a society ought to design its cities and the way people live together within them.