Stadtstaat. A Scenario for Merging Cities by Metahaven

26 September–15 November 2009

Casco, Utrecht

‘Stadtstaat. A Scenario for Merging Cities’ is a project by Metahaven in two episodes, co-produced
and presented by Casco and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Following episode 1 on view until 12
September at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the opening of episode 2 takes place on 25 September at Casco
where the story of ‘Stadtstaat’ evolves.

Critical design
Metahaven is a design studio that explores the ruptures in the fields of design, research and
geopolitics. They operate with strategies of fiction and allegory to revise and mobilize the role of
corporate identity and aesthetics in projections of political and economic power. They stage their
speculative inquiries in highly visual and conceptually dense assemblages, which can take shape on the printed page, as a client brief, in ephemera like stamps, brochures and posters or take on the form of exhibitions, lectures and debates. Metahaven consists of Daniel van der Velden, Vinca Kruk, and Gon Zifroni. Much of their work, since their founding in 2006, is gathered in the forthcoming book ‘Uncorporate Identity’, which also features a host of contextual and allusive
texts by architects, novelists and political scientists.

‘Stadtstaat. A Scenario for Merging Cities’ projects a mise-en-scene of an urban experiment, not
city twinning but city merging. Going beyond the conjectural scenarios of place-branding that have inflected their recent work, Metahaven invents models for a regional 'city-state'. With a
programmatic reflection on the homogeneity that might befall European 'unification', we are invited to imagine a policy decision by two mid-level Northern European cities that bid to weather the economic downturn and enhance their networking capacities by becoming one – Utrecht and Stuttgart. With a nod to the EU’s primary purpose as a trading bloc, these two enterprising cities try to become more competitive by joining forces, and pursuing the dream of unlimited network power. Departing from Metahaven’s forays into encryption and the space-structuring effects of new
information technologies, ‘Stadtstaat’ is managed via an information architecture called ‘Trust’,
a social networking platform that governs through participation.

‘Stadtstaat. A Scenario for Merging Cities’ generates forms that render the role of design in a
managed and technocratic European reality more tangible and debatable. The graphic surface
becomes a platform that turns communication into political interaction. This is done through the
production and distribution of ephemera like letterheads, models, tapes and posters as well as
'tag clouds' and 'chats', which embody the emerging communal netspace of the formerly distinct
cities.