The urban structure of Dresden Gorbitz evolved from a rather one-dimensional base, its sole purpose being to provide housing. There are relatively few integrative elements and only minimal urban diversity in Gorbitz. Apart from the housing blocks themselves, there is only a school, a public pool, a shopping mall, and a small church at the edge of the neighborhood.

Gorbitz’s social structure is a good example of segregation – it mostly provides affordable housing for a specific social clientele. Thus the neighborhood apparently reproduces its own image, or rather its own stigma: „Today not only the residential housing companies are battling the momentum of this development. The GDR pre-fabricated concrete housing developments have long been ill-reputed as a social trouble hot spot.“ (Uta Hergert/ Marcel Raabe: Platte mit Aussicht, documentary film, 2006)

What artistic intervention could spark incentives, as the federal capital of Dresden has put it, to “publicly, long-lasting, subtly, socially, lively, culturally, communicatively, supportingly, intergratingly and participatorilys“ enhance “urban restructuring“?

My entry to the competition wants to stage a social experiment with a completely open ending. Social processes are not predictable and hard to trace. The project I suggest is going to unfold only in the realm of social interaction – no sculpture, no permanent “artistic setting“ in the neighborhood. I hope it will provide an impulse to let the Gorbitz people know that no fairy-tale will come to them. They can only create their own. A “real“ fairy-tale of our days. This also means to ultimately overcome the idea that fairy-tales are always set in faraway countries beyond our day and time, by turning this special tale into a participatory story.