Making decisions and then sticking with them: that's what Frankfurt lacks, says Peter Cachola Schmal. The examples that the director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum finds are striking: social housing, densification, greening, shade, cultural campus, new city districts – there is a lot to do. The fact that agreements and obligations are not adhered to or postponed by politicians, that particular interests inhibit joint progress, he counts just as much as the failure of urban politics and urban society as the fact that in the past ten years, after Mayor Petra Roth (CDU), projects have no longer been declared a "top priority".
Frankfurt does not decide
Eva-Maria Magel
Senior cultural editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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Under the title "Cities of the Future", Schmal gave this year's speech on the traditional Ash Wednesday of the artists in the Haus am Dom. The Great Hall was, for the first time again, fully occupied with invited guests, Bishop Georg Bätzing among them. And little different from Bätzing later in his sermon in the Pontifical Mass in the cathedral, the expert for architecture and urban planning on the first day of Lent was also concerned with conversion.
Shade, greenery and the "sponge city" that stores water and prevents damage, basically the manageable Frankfurt in a global future, was the goal of his entertaining and concise lecture, which began in the big picture: population growth, megacities in the southern hemisphere, the influence of the most populous countries on world politics, a Europe of which it is no longer safe, "whether it can really still have a say", climate change as a cause of flight and Europe as a sealing off continent that must quickly decide whether it wants to be the museum of the world or the avant-garde, for example of urban and transport planning.
From the world to Frankfurt
With this, Schmal landed very elegantly back in the middle of Frankfurt, where he observes the attitude of "not in my backyard" as well as in the world – where the effects affect the everyday life of his listeners, in the hall and online. This was also proven by the lively Q&A session afterwards, led by Joachim Valentin, host of the Haus am Dom, who wondered why Frankfurt was finding it so difficult to act.
In his homily, Bishop Bätzing explained that Lent could give new impetus to this coming into action, before he drew the ash cross on the foreheads of the faithful, among them also several artists and cultural organizers: Lent offers the opportunity to bring the interior and exterior back into harmony. This has the effect of credibility, the loss of which the Church, as Bätzing explained, has also lost. He noted a "crack" in basic trust. Repentance in the sense of a new agreement between inside and outside, a cultural change, could be a task of the next seven weeks. They would, Bätzing promised, fly by.