Vol. 7 Presenter: Daniel Schwab
Presenting
Profit and Placemaking
Lesson from Urban Development in Capitalist and Communist postwar Germany
Summary
This presentation looks at the idea of profit, or the good, in urban placemaking.
The best urban spaces came into being in pre-capitalist societies. I will show a couple of examples of how these are keyed to the social good, the human organism and the natural world. A brief examination two cities—Heide in Capitalist West Germany and Greifswald in former communist East Germany—will show how those economic models affected their development and their relationship to the notions of the good mentioned above. Capitalist growth and the generation of profit in West Germany furthered the destruction of the traditional built environment, while the Communist abandonment of the inner city ultimately led to its preservation.
Bio
Daniel Schwab is a historic preservation planner at the City of Santa Fe. He has performed as classical clarinetist in Germany and the US, been a Zen monk in San Francisco and managed the educational program at Schumacher College, in Totnes, UK. He studied planning at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany and worked for the city of Heide, Germany before moving to Santa Fe. He has experience in bicycle-oriented traffic planning, urban regeneration, and historic preservation. His scholarly work focuses on the epistemological and structural implications of the human-nature relationship for urban planning.