Stadt und (gelingende) Integration

City for Everyone and Tell Me about Here, I’ll Tell You about Somewhere Else are two book projects that explore the different levels of community living in the 21st century.

City for Everyone provides amazing facts and interesting explanations about the concept of the city for all the family. In connection with a small exhibition in the Klangraum Krems Minoritenkirche, Osamu Okamura  reports on the development process and shows the results in a video. What is the reality of a city in which a growing population is supposed to find space? How must our cities develop for us to live in a shared space in future?

For Austria’s Guest of Honour spot at the Leipzig Book Fair 2023, six young authors met for the project Tell Me about Here, I’ll Tell You about Somewhere Else. Their aim was to develop a sharper insight from their different perspectives and – entirely incidentally – to share a positive experience of integration. They wanted to trust their vision, thoughts and wishes, their dream of living in a world of mutual consideration and understanding. What does successful integration look like? A video explains facts about the project, followed by Fariza Bisaeva and Berndatte Sarmann, two authors of the book, reading from their texts.

What are the similarities between both book projects? How is a city for everyone also to be conceptualized as a city where integration is successfully achieved for people from different social and cultural backgrounds?

***BIOGRAPHS***

Osamu Okamura
b. 1973, is an architect and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec and, among others, curator of the project Shared Cites: Creative Momentum. He has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize of the Czech Republic..

Fariza Bisaeva
b. 2000, studies Islamic religious pedagogy in Vienna. In the eljub eBook 2022, she wrote Longing for Peace.

Bernadette Sarman
b. 2001, after spending her childhood in Lower Austria, she studies German philology at the University of Vienna. In the eljub eBook 2016, she wrote Living Together and is currently also a contributing author for Bühne magazine.