Pop-up Campus

The JUPITER CAMPUS is a prototype for the practical implementation of the vision described above. When the Team Co-Creation & Engagement received the sustainability award from the Hamburg 2030 Masterplan "Education for Sustainable Development", the idea was born to turn the 3rd floor of the JUPITER (former Karstadt Sport at Hamburg Central Station) into a temporary, cross-university campus. The pop-up campus was to become a platform for meetings and dialogue between Hamburg's universities and urban society on the topic of ‘Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)’, right in the heart of the city!

The special thing about this location: with its interim use of art, culture, design and gastronomy and its central location on Mönckebergstraße, the JUPITER was frequented by interested and random passers-by. Different uses, activities and events take place on the open spaces on each floor, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes stimulating each other and sometimes disrupting each other. There are always unplanned challenges and surprises to overcome. Improvisation is required. And it is precisely this contrast to traditional seminar rooms, lecture theatres or laboratories that characterises a pop-up campus.

Here, students, teachers, creative professionals and other civil society experts explored, experimented and designed questions on locally relevant sustainability issues. For and with 80 cooperation partners from all departments and academic career levels at UHH and other Hamburg universities, we created a kind of (social) infrastructure for encounters, controversies, surprises and transformative learning well beyond conventional university spaces, open to the public, flexibly equipped and centrally located in Hamburg's urban space.

The carefully curated programme comprising exhibitions, workshops, events and other interactions was tailored around various challenges of sustainable development, with a conscious focus on local relevance and the inclusion of and exchange with non-university protagonists. Random walk-ins mingled with invited participants, excellent research results were made accessible in a multimodal and interactive way and knowledge was exchanged around the seven main topics.

New contacts, impulses for taking action or ideas for future collaborations, more courage for non-traditional (teaching) formats, resilience in dealing with complexity, diversity and uncertainty or greater awareness in urban society: the three-month period offered just enough time for expected and unexpected impacts to unfold, but was short enough to keep commitment and enthusiasm high among all participants.