Behind the door lie lurid plastic crates filled with the oddest shaped parsnips and green vegetables. Last year, Ibarra made a documentary called The Strategy of Crooked Cucumbers about co-operative farms in the southern German city. People join the co-op and pay as much or as little as they can for wholesome produce. Ibarra, Chilean-born but raised in Luxembourg, studied agricultural sciences before getting involved in all manner of projects in Freiburg β co-operative farms, community organising, filmmaking, journalism.
The year-old, passionate about the politics of life, took his cues from similarly aligned alternative, green-leaning worldviews from elsewhere. Vauban, a planned district on the southern outskirts of Freiburg, was formulated in the mids and completed over the last decade. Freiburg itself is also an interesting summation of what we thought that future might look like at various points in the past. Perhaps aptly for a city that is loath to waste anything, it encompasses urban and environmental thinking that has been swirling around for decades.
The other philosophy underpinning Freiburg is the modern green movement, which evolved from German leftist politics in the mids. It embraced students β and in Freiburg there are thousands of those at the year-old Albert Ludwigs University β and the urban anti-state, anti-capitalist communes. Vauban is one of the more far-reaching results: a family-friendly suburb situated on a former French barracks.
Since the French army packed up their Cognac and Camembert and left 22 years ago, having arrived victorious at the end of World War II, a transformation has occurred. I tour Vauban, with Luciano Ibarra as my guide. In every direction there are neatly swept streets, rows of trees, not many cars and buildings whose regular angles are unmistakably Teutonic β well-behaved and crisply designed.
Ibarra points upwards and I notice where red paint bombs have splattered against the hotel. Many locals opposed its building, on a site which used to be a squat called the Rhino. Many locals wanted a park built on the site, not a hotel. It was one of the last squatted parts of Vauban until the eviction in The home-made houses round the corner look like Christiania in Copenhagen, another experiment in communal living on a former military base.
