Let’s Be R$al!

Let’s Be R$al! Is a a 2-week studio at the Independent School for the City with Urban-Think Tank and Crimson taking place from 19 – 29 October 2020. In this studio we will explore new development strategies for collective affordable housing in Rotterdam together with architect Alfredo Brillembourg and experience designer Tessa Steenkamp of Urban Think Tank. After an introduction to Rotterdam’s housing market, its contemporary challenges and its affordable housing legacy, and conversations with various stakeholders involved, we will collectively develop a speculative housing proposal for a mixed-use community of about 80 households and additional facilities on a given location in the city. Each person will bring in his own requirements and (financial) capacities and contribute to the collective sum of wishes and limitations. The course will result in a project proposal: a prototype for a collective building including a spatial sketch, a financial model and ideas for the social life and interaction of the collective. The presentation will include an illustrated ‘letter to the mayor’ as a collective manifesto to explain what is needed to truly realize affordable housing in Rotterdam.

Event and registration information

The Independent School for the City is a post-graduate educational platform based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The school is an initiative of Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles) 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.