German documentary Nicht-Mehr Noch-Nicht (Not Here Not Yet) explores Europe’s urban voids and the artists and citizens looking to fill them in.

I just finished watching the 2006 documentary Nicht-Mehr Noch-Nicht by filmmakers Daniel Kunle and Holger Lauinger.  A "Dokumentarfilmessay in 82 Min" shot on video, the movie examines unused urban spaces primarily in Germany, but also in the Netherlands and England.  Giving equal weight to bespectacled architectural theorists and scruffy, theatrical squatters, the movie attempts to provide an intellectual framework for the abandoned apartment blocks and factories—lingering over the broken windows, weed-benighted lots and empty streets—while also showing groups of artists and locals angling to make the most of their landscapes.

A theater group in Amsterdam led by Eva de Klerk moves into empty warehouses to create sets, and a group in Hamburg polls residents for their “collective desires” before working to turn a dockside plot into a thriving community green space called Park Fiction.  In Berlin a group of designers called Urban Catalyst organize a classical music concert in the abandoned Palace of the Republic.  That the first half of Nicht-Mehr Noch-Nicht is dominated by doom saying academics and architects had me fearing that this would be another exercise in European self-loathing, but the community-minded, and at times downright joyful, planners, designers and activists who worked to make gardens, theater, and vibrant gathering spots—call it “artistic infill”—save the film from becoming a Foucault-quoting gloomfest.  Not that I didn’t like college.