City Link Festival in Hamburg

With the cultural festival City Link in Hamburg GivRum formed new relationships, communities and cultural cooperation between Copenhagen and the German harbour city. It gave new perspectives on the participants’ own practices and created an understanding of cultural and creative practices in other cities and in other countries.

The challenge
The overall idea was to form a cultural exchange as part of a development of the Fehmarnbelt region. This was the vision that the Municipality of Copenhagen invited GivRum to help realize, and hence the idea of the City Link Festival was born.

For a few years GivRum had already been working to establish and develop a cultural network between Copenhagen and Hamburg, so when the opportunity to create a festival that could help to expand this network, presented itself, we acted.

The challenge was to develop a festival that could unite activists, innovators, grassroots, architects, urban entrepreneurs, landscape designers and many others with the aim of encouraging contact between people in an interdisciplinary perspective and creating international cultural communities. The focus of the City Link Festival in Hamburg was to:

• Develop sustainable platforms for cultural exchange.
• Create cultural relations and cooperation across borders and cities.
• Develop a strong concept, which in the future might also involve Europe’s other large cities.

The task consisted of establishing a cultural platform in Hamburg, which could track down and arrange contacts with and between local players. Likewise, a format was to be developed to display the cultural diversity of the two cities and in this way provide an opportunity to share knowledge and establish cooperation.

The solution
The City Link Festival connects cities culturally, professionally and socially. With these three points of impact GivRum created ties between Copenhagen and Hamburg through the festival and the platform city-link.org.

With a diverse festival programme and cultural events as a catalyst for new meetings and communities, relationships and collaborations were created across the two cities. The 11-day City Link Festival in Hamburg included, among other things:

• Exhibitions with artists from Hamburg and Copenhagen.
• A Conference with focus on culturally sustainable cities with international speakers, best-practise examples from both Hamburg and Copenhagen and a panel debate.
• A workshop about City Link’s future development with more than 50 Danish and German participants.

City Link 2014 was the beginning of an increasingly growing network of cities and a user-driven community with everything from event-organisers, innovators, musicians, cultural entrepreneurs, to architects, journalists and researchers. The platform city-link.org and the yearly City Link Festival have made it easier to form contact between creative actors across countries.