The Future Planner

China is booming. So much so that entirely new cities are springing up across the country. One of them is Anting New Town, on the outskirts of Shanghai. Planned and designed by German architects, among them Christian Wittig from Weimar. He was commissioned to design parks, streets, recreational facilities, and the urban infrastructure—modeled on the prototype of a small German town: Weimar, which serves as Germany’s showcase city for the Chinese. The Wittig and Rietig architectural firm now builds more projects in China than in Germany. What began as an exciting job for Wittig has since become a passion. He has brought three more Weimar-based architectural firms on board, drafting at the drawing board what is meant to become reality in China. Wittig gets things moving and gets involved: he initiated a town partnership between Weimar and Shanghai-Jiading, and is working on a German-Chinese meeting center in Weimar as well as a Bauhaus institute in Shanghai. His visions are contagious.

The film travels from Weimar to China and back. It portrays a man with extraordinary energy and bold visions for Weimar and Germany—visions he could never have had without his experience in China.