By Heike Hanada and Adam Caruso

The first symposium of the series Dortmunder Positionen (Dortmund Positions) broaches the issue of the 'monumental' as a characteristic that is increasingly losing its self-evident nature. It seems that with the advent of the 21st century, the concept of the monumental in general - and in urban planning in particular - has turned into something dubious. Thus, despite a sense of growing digital restlessness, museum construction remains perhaps the only remaining discipline in which the monument and monumentality may still form a single entity, albeit unspoken.