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Berlin

Seymour Gris: Wowi’s pop-port

Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, announces a pop-up airport in time for Fashion Week. And it looks like it may have all the perfect ingredients.

The concept sounds awesome. At a press conference on Monday, our “governing” mayor Klaus Wowereit sketched out his revolutionary idea, both a creative response to the €4 billion airport fiasco and one hell of a poor-but-sexy Fashion Week event: a DIY temporary airport in a secret location tapping into the creativity of the Berlin independent scene.

As free tote bags were handed out to bloggers and journalists, Wowi continued: “It’s gonna be a lab for innovative urban planning, melding user generated content, cross-disciplinary programming and some amazing temporary architecture!”

To help launch the pop-up airport, the mayor has recruited his “friends from Bar25”, that mixture of circus-for-grownups, restaurant and wellness spa that once graced the banks of the Spree, to provide the temporary shantytown-style terminal building. Wowereit’s cronies at Bread & Butter will be in charge of event organisation. “We’re sure they’ll be putting the glamour and fun back into air travel,” Wowereit added. “We’ve been brainstorming with key players in the scene who feel as I do: that Berlin is unlike any other city and can do an airport with on-a-shoestring-budget flair.”

Hence, the pop-up airport will contain a guerilla store of locally-designed products, a vegan supper club, organic bakery, and a lab component, in which creatives get to collaborate and contribute to the sustainable development of the project.

The soft launch of the “pop-port” with be by invitation only, announced on a select number of blogs and newsletters. When asked by a journalist about the fire safety concept for the pop-up airport, Wowereit said, “We’re crowdsourcing that from Berlin’s creatives. This time, that won’t be a problem.”