Students:Day Five - politics, participation and urban development

The day started off with a presentation at Leuphana University by a representative of the German Green Party who sits on the local Lueneburg town council, Sebastian Heilmann. Sebastian talked about the current situation of the Green Party in Germany and the impact that it's had on the German political landscape. He also discussed the beginnings of the Green Party from more than 30 years ago and the fundamental principles upon which it was built, i.e. anti-nuclearism, the women's movement, environmental justice, and peace.

The following presentation was delivered by academics Annegret Kuhne and Stephan Seegar who talked about experiences in the process of public participation for creating a good and sustainable urban life in Lueneburg through DialogueS, which brings together groups of local citizens to discuss in a number of innovative ways how to foster a more sustainable approach to living in the city. This was rounded off by an interactive exercise with the students asking them to peg their own thoughts of the topic "What does a good and sustainable life mean to you" onto a clothesline set up in the classroom. The most notable outcome of the exercise was that most people made notes at a rather high and broad level about sustainability concepts rather than discussing what sustainability and a good life meant to them at a more personal level.

The afternoon session was dedicated to a return to the city of Hamburg where we visited the IBA International Building Exhibition contained mostly on Wilhelmsburg island on the Elbe River. We first stopped off at the Georgsverder visitor centre and then carried on to the centre of the island to new innovative residential buildings that had only very recently been completed, including the first example of a building clad in algae panels. The final stop was made at the "energy bunker", which was originally a WWII flak tower but which has been converted into use as an energy generation and storage facility and which is also clad on one side with solar panels.