Let's Be R€al! A NEW COLLECTIVE ON THE BLOCK
SUMMER SChool 2021
A two-week summer school exploring new strategies for collective affordable housing with architect Alfredo Brillembourg of Urban-Think Tank Design Partners, experience designer Tessa Steenkamp and Crimson Historians & Urbanists, taking place from 19 - 30 July 2021 in Rotterdam.
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE
Regular tickets are available for 500 euro. Student tickets are available for 400 euro. For practical reasons, a maximum of 15 participants can take part in this course. For questions, or to qualify for the student discount, please send an email to: Info@Schoolforthecity.nl
While city centres all over the world are increasingly popular for living, working and tourism, housing has become scarce and real estate prices have skyrocketed. In Rotterdam, like in many other cities, it has become extremely difficult to find an affordable place to live. Although coming from a long tradition of rent controlled social housing in the Netherlands, the neo-liberal policy of recent years has left housing corporations paralyzed and has curtailed their possibilities to invest. This has led to a structural shortage of affordable housing, especially in city centres.
People who are seeking to build a life in the city and who are looking for long term housing solutions, are often forced to rent or buy for top marked prices, which is only within reach for the lucky few. Others find their houses on the city’s fringes or in neighbouring towns. These processes of so-called gentrification and segregation are often described as a law of nature, but in reality, they are the result of deliberate policy-changes that turned the act of buying a home into an investment opportunity. At the same time, the differences between insiders and outsiders (often the younger generation) on both the private housing market as well as in the social housing system, is growing. Rapidly increasing prices have made it more and more difficult for first-time buyers to find a house, while the waiting list for social housing is getting longer every year. Most extremely this becomes clear by the number of young people that became homeless for economic reasons, which has tripled between 2009 and 2019.
Meanwhile, buildings owned by investors or public entities are sometimes kept vacant awaiting their value to increase. While the Netherlands used to have a rich culture of squatting as a means to fight value speculation and taking back vacant space for housing, the act of squatting has become illegal as of 2010. An array of ‘anti-squatting’ companies now rent these empty buildings to small groups of users, to prevent potential squatting. This does not only lead to a very inefficient use of the available space in times of scarcity, but is also the opposite of what creates a vibrant city; anti-squat renters are not invited to invest in a building or their neighbourhood, their rental agreements can be ended anytime, and they are often not allowed to organise social activities in the building.
During the summer school LET’S BE R€AL! we will explore alternatives for creating actionable living spaces for affordable rents. We will do so by means of a collective effort, and with a special focus on existing, vacant property. The Rotterdam collective City in the making (Stad in de Maak) will function as our external client for the studio. Together we’ll support them in finding a new location for housing, new models of ownership and new methods of collective city making – using the requirements for their initiative as a real-life case study.
Can we come up with an alternative for anti-squatting, and utilise vacant space for solving the housing scarcity? Can we use newly proposed governance models, such as ‘right to challenge’, ‘neighbourhood rights’ and the commons? Or 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.
Course Structure
For this summer school, the Independent School for the City collaborates with architect Alfredo Brillembourg of Urban Think Tank Design Partners and experience designer Tessa Steenkamp of Bits of Space. We will build upon Alfredo’s worldwide experience of developing affordable housing, hir research on the Torre David in Caracas, Venezuela, the ‘Empower Shack’ housing in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and Tessa’s experience in building digital tools for citizen empowerment and collective decision making in Amsterdam, as well as the work of the School’s co-founders Crimson Historians & Urbanists in the WiMBY!-project in Hoogvliet, the Netherlands.
This studio aims to set an example for major cities worldwide, and proposes an array of solutions from different perspectives. The focus will not be on the aesthetics of a building, but is aimed at the development of new strategies and organisation models for housing, including new ownership models, data visualisations, proposed policies, social design interventions, financial strategies and methods for the act of reclaiming space itself.
During the first days of the studio, participants will be introduced to the Rotterdam housing market and its contemporary challenges. The tutors and guest lecturers will set out different perspectives on affordable housing, and highlight relevant case studies. After immersing into the topic, and having researched it from all possible perspectives, City in the Making will present their brief and specific requirements. In the second week, solutions will be explored and -if possible- prototyped and executed. The studio will result in a plan for taking back housing. Our research will be summarised into a manifesto on the need to use vacant space for (collective, affordable) housing, and our proposed solutions and experiments will be presented on site as a call to action. The design of the manifesto and its public presentation will be part of the studio and will act as a public declaration calling for alternative models.
The studio is open for everyone, and we invite citymakers from all backgrounds and scales to participate: journalists, data scientists, architects, squatters, anti-squatters, urbanists, artists, real estate agents, home-owners, renters, developers, geographers – unite for housing!
Tutors
Alfredo Brillembourg
Alfredo Brillembourg was born in New York, where he studied architecture at Columbia University. He undertook his master’s degree at the Central University of Venezuela after which he co-founded the Urban Think Tank - an interdisciplinary design practice dedicated to high-level research and design on a variety of subjects concerned with contemporary architecture and urbanism in complex environments. Notable projects include the Caracas Metrocable, the Vertical Gym typology, and more recently the documentary and publication on Torre David – a 45-storey unfinished office tower in Caracas that has become a node for the study of informal vertical communities. Brillembourg has taught at Columbia University, where he co-founded the Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory (S.L.U.M. Lab), and held the chair for Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zurich.
Mike Emmerik
Mike Emmerik is School Coordinator of the Independent School for the City and partner at Crimson Historians & Urbanists. He was trained as an urban designer at the Delft University of Technology and subsequently worked in the Faculty of Architecture as a teacher and researcher within the Chair of Design as Politics. Mike took part in various research and design projects at the intersection of urban development and policymaking and is affiliated with the Dutch Board of Government advisors from which he advises the national government and local authorities about issues related to urbanisation and mobility.
Michelle Provoost
Michelle Provoost is part of the Dean Team of the Independent School for the City, co-founder of Crimson Historians and Urbanist, and director of the International New Town Institute. As an architectural historian she is specialised in urban planning history, postwar architecture and contemporary urban development. Michelle has taught at various universities in the Netherlands and abroad and continues to be in great demand as a public speaker. She lectures regularly throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States, and has been involved in many municipal, national and private committees and juries.
Tessa Steenkamp
Tessa Steenkamp is an urban interaction designer, designing interactions within cities rather than with screens. She trained as an industrial designer in Eindhoven’s University of Technology, and later specialised in Emergent Technologies and Design at the AA School of Architecture in London. With her design practice ‘Bits of Space’, Tessa gives shape to the relations and interactions between people, technology and the built environment. Previously, she was experience designer at UNSense – tech startup of architecture firm UNStudio, and at the city of Amsterdam, where she set up ‘OpenStad’: a government innovation programme developing new, digital tools for collective decision making, giving residents more insight in and power over their direct living environments.
Wouter Vanstiphout
Wouter Vanstiphout is an architectural historian and researcher who has written extensively on urbanism and spatial politics. He is part of the Dean Team of Independent School for the City and co-founder of Crimson Historians & Urbanists. From 2008 to 2020 he held the Design & Politics chair at the Technical University in Delft, with which he explored, researched and defined the boundaries, commonalities and tensions between the fields of politics and design. As a practitioner he has directed the renewal of the Dutch industrial satellite town of Rotterdam: Hoogvliet and advises municipalities, the national government, housing corporations and project developers on matters relating to urban renewal, cultural heritage and spatial and urban politics. From 2012 to 2016, he was a member of the national advisory council on the environment and infrastructure (RLI).
About City in the Making
City in the Making (Stad in de Maak) is a common and commoned association set up in 2013 to take on the redevelopment of vacant properties in Rotterdam. The start of this initiative has been triggered by three conditions: the dramatic vacancy that has occurred among the Rotterdam based housing corporations following the start of the 2008 financial crisis, the diminishing of the subsidised housing stock, and finally the desire to reintroduce a place for urban production and economy in neighbourhoods. They find inspiration in the spirit of the historic housing cooperatives, but equally, draw on the recent emergence of open-source maker communities and local circular (micro-)economies. The next step for City in the Making is eventually to go beyond the temporary exploitation of the vacant properties, using principles such as: no speculation with living and working spaces, low-threshold affordability, living space as part of a wider “infrastructure”, partial independence from large economical systems, collective ways of organising with enough freedom for individual needs. And finally, they aim at communities that not only collectively manage building(s), but equally generate their income in these buildings and among their inhabitants. more info here
Course Schedule
Monday 19 July
10:00 – 10:45 Welcome and general introduction by the Independent School for the City
10:45 – 11:45 Lecture by Alfredo Brillembourg and Tessa Steenkamp
12:00 – 13:00 Lecture on the history and present of affordable housing in Rotterdam by Crimson
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 17:00 Excursion: Icons of affordable housing
Tuesday 20 July
10:00 – 12.00 Lecture on different financial development models
12.00 – 13.00 Group discussion on finances
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 16:30 Teamwork: discussion on finances and programme of requirements
16:30 – 18:00 Lecture (to be confirmed)
Wednesday 21 July
10:00 –13:00 Teamwork on programme of requirements and sketch design
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Teamwork on programme of requirements and sketch design
18:00 – 19:00 Dinner break (on own occasion)
19:00 – 20:00 Lecture by Alfredo Brillembourg
Thursday 22 July
10:30 – 12:00 Presentation of programme and sketch design
13:00 – 18:00 Field trip to various architectural projects in Rotterdam South.
Friday 23 July
10:00 – 11:00 Conversation on development strategies
11:00 – 13:00 Teamwork on development strategy
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Teamwork on development strategy
Monday 26 July
10:00 – 13:00 Teamwork on development strategy
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Teamwork on development strategy
Tuesday 27 July
10:00 – 13:00 Teamwork on development strategy
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Progress presentations on development strategy
Wednesday 28 July
10:00 – 13:00 Teamwork on development strategy
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Progress presentations on development strategy
Thursday 29 July
10:00 – 13:00 Collective discussion 'Letter to the Mayor'
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 18:00 Finalize development strategy and update sketch design
Friday 30 July
10:00 – 13:00 Prepare for presentation
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break (on own occasion)
14:00 – 15:00 Prepare for presentation
15:00 – 16:00 Presentation of final results
16.00 – 18.00 Public discussion on affordability of housing