All Things Urban

The Independent School for the City is proud to have two of Hollands most original thinkers and makers as teachers of a unique two week studio from 9 - 20 March 2020. The exhibition designer Herman Kossmann and the ecologist and landscape architect Dirk Sijmons have joined forces with the School and mapped out an expedition to discover the ultimate consequences of our attitude to the Anthropocene – the geological era marking the dominant human impact on the Earth systems. A matrix of four basic attitudes towards the Anthropocene and in confronting the causes and effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, land use change et cetera will help us bring the effects of our actions close to home, literally and painfully. As always, the Independent School for the City will take the dirty old fossil fueled port town of Rotterdam as its point of departure, but only to travel to the far-flung corners of the globe brought to Rotterdam by the participants in the studio. Rotterdam will be mirrored with your home town or region and vice versa. From the abstract levels of dealing with the climate in terms of policy, economy or science, we will dive right down to the level of everyday life in the city, in your own neighborhood, in your own street. If you are a denialist, expecting that the current upheavals are part of a geological cycle unaffected by humans, then how will you work, live and travel in the future, relieved of all restrictions and feelings of guilt or responsibility? What will your street look like? If your attitude is one of Deep Ecology and you feel that man should take steps back and realize he’s only a small cog in a living web of a myriad of species then how would you spend your days and your life. But what if you are a techno-optimist, expecting solutions from technology that would allow us to keep on developing, growing and innovating, without endangering our future, how would daily life be redesigned? And what if you would accept that our only way to survive and come to terms with the damage we have already done, is a radical deprogramming after a millennium of a fundamentalist belief in growth? How would we live then?

The Independent School for the City is a playground for all urban thinkers, do-ers and designers – based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It brings together critical and experimental ideas in the field of urban research, design, strategy and activism. Through a range of diverse activities, it offers a platform where urban professionals can meet to informally discuss the challenges facing the modern city. The school is an initiative of Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS and is rooted in their practices of combining a critical and activist approach to the city with effecting real change through architectural and planning projects. The independent school for the City is founded on a strong belief in an incremental instead of a tabula rasa approach to city planning which blurs the lines between critique and practice on the one hand, and research and policy on the other.