All Things Urban

Are you looking for a place you can afford but are forced to rent or buy a top marked prices? Are you also angry at the structural shortage of affordable housing, especially in city centres? And are you also tired of working, living, eating and sleeping in the same space all day every day? Let’s come up with alternative strategies for collective affordable housing together, and utilise vacant space for solving the housing scarcity! Act now, and join us for our Summerschool Let's be R€AL! - A new Collective on the Block! taking place from 19-30 July 2021 in Rotterdam. There are still some places left, so don’t hesitate: apply now! For this Summerschool we’ve teamed up with architect Alfredo Brillembourg and experience designer Tessa Steenkamp of Urban-Think Tank Design Partners to explore new strategies for collective affordable housing. Participating in this summerschool will not just be an academic exercise, but we have the ambition to make it as real as possible. That’s why we found a real client: the Rotterdam-based activist association City in the Making. We will combine our collective knowledge with their experience of community-driven redevelopment of vacant properties to develop strategies that move beyond “temporary vacancy management” and to develop affordable housing and working spaces in collective ownership and management for the long run. In doing so we will tap from Alfredo’s worldwide experience of developing affordable housing, his research on the Torre David in Caracas, the ‘Empower Shack’ housing in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, the work of the School’s co-founders Crimson Historians & Urbanists in the WiMBY!-project in Rotterdam Hoogvliet, and Tessa’s experience in building digital tools for citizen empowerment and collective decision making in Amsterdam. These tutors and a range of other experts will take you through lectures, excursions and various exercises. Together we’ll come up with a manifesto, a development model and a bid-book with social and selforganised alternatives for anti-squatting companies, and utilise vacant space to solve the housing scarcity. We’ll look at newly proposed governance models, such as ‘right to challenge’, ‘neighbourhood rights’ and the commons, and work with alternative ownership models such as rent-to-buy and community land trusts. Combining these organisational, legal and social perspectives with design interventions we aim to come up with a pragmatic method to create more affordable housing. That’s why we call for citymakers from all backgrounds to participate and unite for housing! From journalists, data scientists and architects to squatters, anti-squatters and urbanists and from artists, real estate agents and homeowners to renters, developers and geographers. Tutors: Alfredo Brillembourg and Tessa Steenkamp (Urban-Think Tank Design Partners), Wouter Vanstiphout, Michelle Provoost and Mike Emmerik (Independent School for the City / Crimson Historians & Urbanists). More info here: https://www.schoolforthecity.nl/letsbereal Regular tickets available: 500 euro Student tickets: 400 euro

This studio is open for everyone, for designers and architects as well as historians, journalists, anthropologists, artists, and housing developers.

You can register for this studio by sending an email to [email protected]. For practical reasons, a maximum of 15 participants can take part in this course.

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.