Thomas Schlechte

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Bio

"Born in Dresden, Germany (1987), Thomas Schlechte studied Business Administration (B.A.) and International Economics (M.A.) in Berlin. Currently, he is applying for a doctorate position with his exposé titled: Processes of discovering, formulating, learning and exchanging pattern languages by civil society as a new paradigm of sustainable development (working title). The project refers to Christopher Alexander's architectural pattern languages and seeks to analyze its potentials for a sustainable development paradigm by discussing a horizontalization of expert-science and local knowledge in order to expand allocation competencies of resources and knowledge from exclusive institutions to civil society."


Longer Bio

"Born in Dresden, Germany (1987), Thomas Schlechte studied Business Administration (B.A.) and International Economics (M.A.) in Berlin. After becoming largely unsatisfied with business practices during experiences in his bachelor studies, he decided to attach a master´s degree in International Economics for exploring theoretical mechanisms of economic systems. After experiencing disputes between post-keynesian and neo-classical economists, his skepticism for rigid and reductionist models for solving complexly interwoven problems rose significantly. Simultaneously, his attention shifted to the cleavages between promises of theoretical models and negative real-life effects, such as ongoing efforts of protecting the environment by fostering global liberalization, deregulation and privatization in concurrence with intensifying resource exploitation. As a result he focused on the contemporary paradigm of sustainable development in which he criticized its large market-bias. After completing the studies with his Master Thesis (Reconsidering Sustainable Development: Shifting weight from global economic imperatives toward locally determined ecological and social values) diverse interests such as Philosophy, Epistemology, History, Biology, Art, Architecture and many more thrived him to conduct research free from borders of scientific disciplines. Currently, he is applying for a doctorate position with his exposé titled: Processes of discovering, formulating, learning and exchanging pattern languages by civil society as a new paradigm of sustainable development (working title).

The project refers to Christopher Alexander's architectural pattern languages and seeks to analyze its potentials for a sustainable development paradigm by discussing a horizontalization of expert-science and local knowledge in order to expand allocation competencies of resources and knowledge from exclusive institutions to civil society.


The vision

In a system in which powerful institutions

(1) artificially limit the potential and distribution of knowledge by making it subject to a competitive distribution system and

(2) artificially inflate material production by making this knowledge a matter of “willingess-to-pay” in form of patented products,


the project envisions the opposite:

(1) unhindered potentials and distributions of knowledge as well as

(2) a sensible degree of material production by context-depended collaborations of civil individuals and groups. The pattern language, as a practical tool and holistic perspective, might play a decisive role in creating a loose network of cooperation for heterogeneous individuals and groups, and helping in coordinating a tendency that has already begun: the establishment of a collaborating civil society beyond state and markets, whose actions becomes increasingly elusive to power-seeking institutions."