All Things Urban

The Independent School for the City is very happy to announce Alison Killing as our next School’s Out! speaker on January 29. Alison is an architect, urban designer and geospatial analyst based in Rotterdam, working to engage people with the built environment, via the design of buildings and urban strategies, film making, exhibitions and events. In 2010 she started her office Killing Architects. In 2021, Alison was the first architect to win the prestigious Pulitzer journalism prize. She won the prize in International Reporting together with reporter Megha Rajagopalan and programmer Christo Buschek because of their work on the exposure of secret Chinese state camps in the Xinjiang region to imprison Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities. She identified the prison sites -simply put- by comparing areas on China's map tool Baidu Maps with images from external satellite data providers and by checking which areas were blanked out on Baidu Maps. On the 29th of January, Alison will talk about her interdisciplinary work as an architect and researcher and about how her skills in architecture helped her make a valuable contribution to the investigation of social issues. Keep an eye on our socials to see if the event will be online or on location.

Everyone who is interested in the city

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.