Please look to attend the City Seminar "Open Creative Labs: Critical Reflections on Creativity and Work in Berlin” on March 4th, 2016, Room 626 in the Kaneff Tower York University between the hours of 12:30 - 2:00pm.

Abstract: In recent years we have been observing the establishment of new places such as maker spaces, fab labs, coworking spaces, hacker spaces or living labs. In Germany, most of these places cluster in large metropolitan agglomerations. In a recent research project we subsume these places under the term “Open Creative Labs”. First tentative interpretations seem to link these spatial phenomena at the nexus between urban and economic geography as many labs curate urban centrality for serendipity and creative encounters at a spatial micro scale. Cases from Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and other German metropolitan regions will illustrate the variety of lab formats and function as a mirror to discuss some consequences of the lab development for urban policies.

Suntje Schmidt is a research fellow at the IRS. She studied geography, American Studies, and business studies in Berlin and New York. Her doctoral thesis focused on the channels and effects of knowledge spillovers in the knowledge economy. Her research interests lie on the time-spatial aspects of generating and sharing knowledge and innovation, resilience practices of actors in knowledge and creativity intensive labor markets and on the conditions for the inter-regional transfer of practices and experiences. She is interested in the role of places as nodes in transnational networks and communities. Her resent research focuses on participatory innovation processes in Open Creative Labs (e.g. Coworking Spaces, Fab Labs, Maker / Hacker Spaces etc.)