BELT catalogue 2
Studio Stubbekøbing

An essential component of the BELT initiative are the BELT Studios, in which students from the RUC and TH Lübeck work at different locations in the BELT region as part of their respective Bachelor's and Master's degree programmes. Each studio is dedicated to identifying recommendations and developing spatially anchored action plans that focus on specific issues within the programme region. Each studio is conducted in close cooperation with local actors at both citizen and municipality level. The BELT Studios are designed to be as realistic as possible and include actionable recommendations for the future development of the city or community. The results and ideas of the individual studios will be integrated into an overall strategy (BELT Vision) at the end of the project.

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The 2nd studio was held in Winter 2023. Focusing the town Stubbekøbing on Northern Falster as a special planning case students at Roskilde University and TH Lübeck researched overall themes relevant for development generally in the Belt region: Reversing negative population trends, cultural revitalization of former industrial harbor spaces, tourism and business development and identifying new uses and structures for public space.

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A central aim of the studio was to understand the role of local community in transformation processes and address local values and needs of citizens through bottom-up participatory methods. Thus, local citizens took part in a workshop with the students during the studio to share their hopes for the future development of the town.

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In addition to the academic institutions, Projekt 4850 was a research partner for some of the student projects. The initiative consists of transforming a silo and surrounding buildings in the harbour area of Stubbekøbing into an art and community centre. Some of the topics mentioned above were contextualised with the case of the silo transformation, as well as discussions around new prospects for a declining town centre and creative-washing, artists being used as mere instruments for development projects.

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The overall outcomes of the studio were:

• First, development of a general understanding of planning challenges, and potentials facing Stubbekøbing as a small town in the emerging Belt region.

• Second, spatial analyses of urban structure and characteristics of place were carried out and comparisons were made to the city of Neustadt.

• Third, analyses of citizens perspectives to development outlined a number of approaches to organize bottom-up planning processes.

 

The town center and harbor space have been focal points for analyses as they represent significant places for intervention in urban revitalization. The analyses were all based on a combination of theoretical knowledge and extensive fieldwork in the town.

35 students from urban planning programmes at Roskilde University and TH Lübeck were involved in the studio - that also included several months of preparatory work of students researching and conceptualizing the planning challenges theoretically, probing methods and doing field studies.

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The semester and studio work were organized by Majken Toftager Larsen, Lasse Koefoed, Astrid Laura Dam Jensen, Thomas Theis Nielsen and Thomas Skou Grindsted at Roskilde University and Anika Slawski at TH Lübeck