Bavarity – what is it about?

In order to communicate what my book "Bavarity – Coping with Crisis in the Space of Building Culture", in the German original, "Bavarität – Krisenbewältigung im baukulturellen Raum" is about, I formulated seven talking points that outline the central ideas of the book:

Bavarity describes how people influence the built environment – and vice versa. The German federal state of Bavaria serves as an example of a regional form of building culture, against the background of current and future crises.

The book is structured into five chapters that aim to understand or "decode" the built environment of Bavaria according to the categories of text, crisis, building culture, housing, and visions.

The built environment in cities and on the countryside possesses characteristics that make it similar to a text. Laypeople capture the meaning of this text in a subliminal way, perhaps unconsciously, by "feeling" it, which provides a manner of orientation. For professionals in the realm of planning and design, this text has a deeper meaning. It "explains" the character of the culture that surrounds them. 

For architects, urban designers and urban planners, this text indicates differences between aspects of tradition and modernity, of craftsmanship and industrial production.

The relationship between these aspects can differ according to specific cultures, resulting in the creation of different ways of building and different ways of life. We can interpret each of them as rural or urban. Combined, they become "urbanity" or "rurality". This is why the book proposes the term "Bavarity" for the specific combination of ways of building and ways of life in Bavaria.

Given current crises and their impacts, if Bavarity is supposed to be sustainable and resilient, knowledge of building culture and participative action are both required.

This leads to the main thesis proposed in the book: The better we understand the text of the built environment, the more effectively and productively we will be able to participate in processes of planning and design, the more sustainable and resilient our built environment can become.

"Bavarität: Krisenbewältigung im baukulturellen Raum" is available from Springer Spektrum and all booksellers.