User:Fugawi/sandbox

= space and place =

Intro
space and place is a Vienna-based political cultural collective, known for public space projects which aim to make new connections between groups. The non-profit group often uses humour to make political points, working in the space between community-building and city-branding.

Name
The name space and place comes from two sociological terms. Space is mental, and place is physical. They describe a person’s reference points to their wider surroundings. They refer to the difference between, for example, a home and a house. A house is a series of objects, but we build an emotional bond with a home, and a sense of belonging.

History
Founded in Vienna in 2012 by two couples: Brigitte Vettori (cultural anthropologist) and Leo Wagner (social worker), Monika Kalcsics (journalist) and Eugene Quinn (journalist/urbanist).

Walks
The group is well-known for a series of city tours in Vienna, which are primarily aimed at local residents.

The first tour, Vienna Ugly, was launched in 2015, during the week the Eurovision Song Contest came to Vienna, following Conchita Wurst’s victory in Copenhagen the previous May. Vienna Ugly tours some controversial architecture in the city. Participants vote to decide if each building is ugly or not. The walk has attracted international media attention, prizes and legal action from the owners of some buildings.

Smells like Wien Spirit explores 16 smells which can be found in West Vienna.

The group also organizes midnight tours, aimed at a younger audience and including spontaneous interviews with people the group comes across during the night.

The Invisible Smart City tour looks at contemporary Vienna and the ways the city is adapting to future needs.

Walk the Line follows the route of the U1 underground line, above ground, looking at the impact becoming connected to the underground network has on a district.

Alles gute, Otto!, in cooperation with Wien Museum, visited almost all of architect Otto Wagner’s work, on a 12-hour tour.

International Cooperations
In partnership with Green City, Eugene Quinn has led three Munich Ugly tours, in Germany.

Working with MARKK Museum in Hamburg, Germany, space and place organizes social-dining events linked to different exhibitions in the Museum; a walking tour visiting three restaurants serving food from three continents (exploring how authentic food needed to be amended to appeal to Germans), and the German Citizenship Test offered to Germans, on German Reunification Day.

Quinn led a tour of every district in Oslo for the Urban Future conference in 2019 and also made a presentation urging people to walk more in urban places, instead of green spaces.

Social Dining
space and place helps build dialogue between diverse groups, using food and a question menu to open up new conversations and networks, and start some debates. Strangers sit together, one-to-one, for a meal and a range of unusual questions to ask each other, based on Oxford University historian Theodore Zeldin Conversation Meals. Examples of Austrian adaptations of the format include:

magdas Social Dinners (refugees dine with long-term Vienna residents and hotel guests)


 * 1) VIC40 in Cafe Rathaus (UN diplomats meet Viennese)

European Forum Alpbach Innsbruck (business leaders meet teenagers)

Vienna Coffeehouse Conversations (international community meets Viennese). Eugene Quinn also curates the question menu to create more contact between internationals visiting Vienna, and engaged residents.

These evenings are generally in English, and sometimes also in German.

Silly Walks
The group turned walking into an event by building a catwalk, and then inviting the Viennese to perform their most ridiculous walking styles, in front of a jury, and the public. Participants were given points and prizes for their creativity, or silliness. This event has featured at both the opening of the Mariahilferstrasse as a shared space in August 2015, and at the annual Streetlife Festival.

#HowtobeAustrian
This 2016 media campaign, in cooperation with Ö1 radio in Austria, asked immigrants to describe small details of Austrian life for newer arrivals. It won several prizes including a Leopold Ungar Prize for socially-engaged journalism and Österreichische Radiopreis for innovation. In context of the arrival of 100,000 refugees and migrants in autumn of 2015 this series of short films was judged to be a useful contribution to integration and diversity.

Urbanism in Vienna
space and place engages with Vienna in various ways, using different tools to research and represent the city. Many of these tools are free, no-carbon and available to people in any city. Brigitte Vettori is a trained anthropologist and Eugene Quinn is a regular guest lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology’s Spatial-planning department. The group lecture internationally on issues of contemporary urban life, and how people can better live together, embracing transformation and diversity.

Komm Raus

Street Capital

Wien Lebt - Wohnstrasse.

REGEN.WALD

Controversies

 * Eugene Quinn was twice fined by the city of Vienna for making illegal tours, because he is not a qualified tour guide.
 * The group has attracted interest from the financial authorities because some of their projects are not traditionally associated with the non-profit sector (for example, social dining)
 * Eugene Quinn stated that his four Brexit Tours of 2019 were a protest against the UK leaving the EU, in chaotic circumstances.
 * In 2018, space and place organized the Austrian Citizenship Test for Austrian citizens, as a quiz format, to measure how they would score at their ‘own’ examination. The highest scores came from citizens of South Korea and the USA. The project was later repeated in Germany, on German Reunification Day. The stated aim was to question why so few migrants choose to become citizens of their adopted country.