The collaborative contribution to the exhibition was called ‘Shrink Big’ and promoted the project idea ‘MetroSachs’. The project pushes the fact that Eastern Germany is shrinking to extremes: the area is to shrink even more in the rural areas while creating three dense centers. One of them being ‘MetroSachs’, resulting from the fusion of Leipzig, Halle and Weimar, the other two being Berlin and the Baltic coast. The goal would be to reduce tax load for cities and provide more infrastructure in dense urban areas. At the same time the Autobahn and hospitals would be dismantled in the rural areas.
This extreme utopia was sketched in order to activate a radical discourse and to break the existing deadlock of the political discussion. To emphasize the utopian, metaphorical character of the proposal it was decided to draw an abstract map. The map is constituted of arrows reflecting current statistics of migration and is based on a honeycomb grid. Dissolution is displayed by incomplete honeycombs and functioning networks are displayed by complete honeycombs.
