THIS IS TOMORROW

Independent School for the City

Location
Language
Type
Rotterdam
English
Short-term programme
Dates
Price
Deadline
01.04.2024 - 28.06.2024
Various (Scholarships available)
11.02.2024
Location
Language
Type
Dates
Price
Deadline
Rotterdam
English
Short-term programme
01.04.2024 - 28.06.2024
Various (Scholarships available)
11.02.2024

About the Programme

The Independent School for the City is thrilled to announce the centrepiece of our yearly education programme, This is Tomorrow! 🔍 **Course Details and Structure**: This is Tomorrow is a unique 12-week course on contemporary urbanism, dealing with the Anthropocene, Superdiversity and Right to the City, taking place from April 1 - June 28, 2024. Throughout the course, Rotterdam is a laboratory for researching problems that are relevant to cities worldwide. Participants and teachers will bring in unique expertise from different disciplinary viewpoints, that will fuel the course and create an exciting community of learning! The first two weeks will be dedicated to an introduction of Rotterdam itself, its lively urban culture, the morphology of its urban structure, its strategies and challenges for housing, for alternative energy sources, and its place in the global economy. Through field trips, lectures and exercises, you will explore the physical but also the invisible realities of the urban landscape while meeting professionals from within the network of the School, whose diverse backgrounds, work, experience and opinions will sharpen your own thinking. The weeks after, participants will unravel the city using different lenses and focuses. In the first block “Right to the City” we will cooperate with research and activist collective Loom, who are also the driving forces behind Failed Architecture. During these three weeks, you will explore strategies for people to reclaim their right to the city, and how professionals can contribute to creating the conditions for this. For the second block “Anthropocene” we invited landscape architect Dirk Sijmons (founder of H+N+S Landschapsarchitecten) and exhibition designer Herman Kossmann (founder of Kossmanndejong). Under their guidance, you will learn about the impacts and new realities of the Anthropocene and examine the effects on daily life in the near future, when global temperature has increased by 2,5 degrees. The third block is focused on “Superdiversity”, working together with sociologist Linda Zuijderwijk, Crimson, photographer Florian Braakman and others. You will learn and develop methods for interviewing people, to record locations and conversations, to interpret what we see and to retell it in pictures, maps and stories, with the aim to get a deeper understanding of the Superdiverse makeup of the population. 🎨 **Creative Output**: Every block will be wrapped up by making a concrete individual product, either a textual column, graphic novel, design or another type of visualisation. In the last week, we will collectively synthesise our production. 📝 **APPLICATION PROCESS** The densely packed 12-week programme fits within the 90 days period of a tourist visa to the Netherlands. It is based on a five-day work week filled with workshops, lectures and field trips. The regular participation fee for This is Tomorrow is 1200 Euro (no VAT payable). In addition, we offer a **Droom & Daad Scholarship** (for participation and part of the expenses) to two motivated applicants from and living in one of the low- and middle-income countries on the DAC list. You can apply by sending a motivation (1 A4), your CV (max 2 mb) and examples of previous work (max 8 mb/5 pages) to [email protected] before February 11, 2024. The programme needs a minimum number of 8 participants and has a maximum of 20 participants. Applicants will be informed before March 1, 2024 whether they have been accepted, after which a down-payment should be made of 150 Euro. For questions please contact [email protected] You can also apply for each of the thematic workshops Right to the City, Anthropocene, Superdiversity that are part of This is Tomorrow as stand-alone courses for 400 Euro. **Please specify in your application that you found this opportunity through All Things Urban**

Who's Coming

- **Urban Professionals and Students**: Ideal for those in urban studies, planning, design, social sciences, economy, and related fields. - **Global Perspective Seekers**: Suitable for individuals interested in understanding global urban issues, particularly the challenges and opportunities in cities worldwide. - **Activists and Researchers**: Beneficial for those engaged in urban activism, research, or policy-making, looking to deepen their understanding and impact. - **International Participants**: With the program being in English and located in Rotterdam, it's accessible to a global audience.

About Us

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, urban professionals can discuss and develop ideas to tackle 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 affecting real change through architectural and planning projects. It is founded on a strong belief in an incremental instead of a tabula rasa approach to city planning which blurs the line.
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