> Eliminate Loneliness.exe

> Germany

>FINALIST

Team Members:

​
​Caroline Purps,

Tom Brennecke

Urban Space shrinks and expands according to our capability and willigness to interact and engage with it. The state of loneliness renders this invalid. Loneliness, other than being alone, disconnects us from our surroundings. We are ill; and so is the city.

The lonely urban traveller is simply functioning, relying on familiar patterns and movements, being locked into a seemingly monofunctional space. There is no personal identification and no common language.

Text is the mediator between built structure and personal well-being (according to Wittgenstein: ,,The borders of my language are the borders of my world.“) We display how language becomes a guideline for enacting with space, being the substructure to everyday life.

As our case study, we have used Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Alexanderplatz is Berlin‘s urban center. It is a major square with satellite squares around. It is the main transport hub and increasingly crime incubator. It has become contested space – nothing for the lonely.

Script: When we are lonely, we are lonely everywhere. Alexanderplatz is planned using a code, a lonely person hardly finds pleasures in. It‘s the masterplanned urban area, offering indoors for consumption and empty outdoors. The code represents us getting lost, finding only functions and formulas instead of feelings and spots of existence.

Backlog: Backlog describes a list of things yet to be done. Amidst the masterplanned surrounding, our desires and emotions breaking through. Our language serves as a placeholder for imagination. We overwork the parameters that made the code fail. We are overwriting urban space with what we need.

Exe: Exe stands for execution and many little things make a big change. That‘s the cover of the book that holds our lonely desires. No space shall have the right, to deny us a hug when we are lonely. We want communicate, connect, change perspective, walk different ways – or at least have the ability to live our loneliness out.