Gstettn

General Remarks and Considerations

The term "gstettn" is part of the specific vocabulary of Austrian language – and for several reasons not translated into English here. Indeed there would be only rough translations, so we might better try to explain what "gstetten" means and why they are listed in the TBC encyclopedia…

The word "gstettn" has its origins in "Gestade" (German for "shore"), and was used in Austria for river shores. However, its nowadays use leads us more or less directly into urban space, fro the centers to peripheries. Yet it should be mentioned that gstettn can be found on countryside as well, for the general meaning of the term is "unused land" – more precisely: land that may have been used before, but now is not used anymore. Or at least seems to be unused.

Last but not least "gtettn" can also refer to the plants growing on unused land – usually a mixture of what might have been planted and cultivated by those who had used the land before and plants grown from seeds that have been carried there by the wind, by animals or whatever kind of way.

In urban space, gstettn are indeed often associated with or called "urban wilderness" (a rather romanticist and therefore misleading term) or "no man's land" (even more misleading, for as a matter of fact gstettn are usually owned by somebody).

Nevertheless, gstettn are obviously not only related to the concept of Open Greens (see ibid.), but also to the concept of EcoTimeZones (see ibid.).

For this very reason, the have become one of the focus areas of research within the Time Inventors' Kabinet – and especially within the work of the TIK collective based in Graz, Austria.

In the context of TBC research, it is of course their special relation to aspects of time (and time bending) that led us into research on gestettn.

A.o., we found that gstettn are not only in a hybrid state between being places and non-places, but – quite accordingly to the time dimension in places and non-places – in a hybrid time-state. As a matter of fact, they might be considered as "time capsules in (dis-)continuous transformation".

…

Related Entries:
[Connected Open Greens]
Discontinuous Temporality (work in progress)
[EcoTimeZones]
[Open Greens]
Time Capsules (work in progress)
[Time Inventors' Kabinet]

tags: botany, clocks, ecology, green, plants, time, urban cultures