Ton Matton – författare

Ton Matton is a city planner, indie urbanist, self-confessed fan of performative urbanism, doubter, and epistolarian. At the start of his career as a city planner, Matton began writing letters on the subject of sustainable urban planning, which at the time was still a very new field in the discipline. He wrote one to a government minister, explaining that housing estates are a compromise, not a replacement for life in the city or the countryside. He wrote another one to a Chancellor of Germany, reminding her that the energy generated by solar and wind power still needs to be stored in electric toothbrushes and cell phone batteries. Since then, he has written many more letters—to politicians, project developers, and people of greater and lesser renown. All Matton’s letters express his passionate enjoyment of doubt. With a lot of humor and his usual provocativeness, he challenges the recipients of his letters to look at things in a new light, and in doing so encourages readers to seize the initiative themselves.

Although public spaces in the former East Germany were elaborately refurbished after reunification, many small towns and villages continue to suffer from population exodus and high vacancy rates. One of those towns is Tribsees in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where 70 of the 240 houses in the downtown area are currently unoccupied. In 2020, a team of artists and students led by Ton Matton engaged with a number of these buildings, sounding out possibilities and concepts for the future of the town in collaboration with residents. This resulted in new narratives of co-existence—involving large amounts of improvisation and not always in adherence to the letter of the law—based on individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, and local production. Slow Urban Planning does more than document this project and its artistic interventions, some of which were implemented in the context of the Tribsees Centenniale. It also illuminates how urban planning processes tend to proceed in general, and how regulatory structures can be adapted in order to better integrate performative processes.