A three-month postmaster education programme on contemporary urbanism that takes an uncensored look at our cities
February 1–April 23, 2021
Rotterdam 3013 AE
Netherlands
Dirty Old Town - Apply before November 1, 2020
The Independent School for the City offers an intensive three-month education programme on contemporary urbanism, taking the modern city as its subject and Rotterdam as its testing ground. In this course, we’ll not dream of an ideal future city. Instead we will take into account all that is often avoided and looked away from: the crime, the dirty economy of fossil fuel and exploitation of cheap labour, the rough edges and shadowy zones of the urban territory and the grave inequalities and tensions between the city’s diverse communities. Taking Rotterdam as a pars-pro-toto, we want to go beyond the wishful thinking and the marketing that so often disguises what a city is really about.
Participants in the programme get the chance to completely immerse themselves in the critical and activist approach of the Independent School for the City and its partners, while developing their personal position towards the inescapable complexity and contradictions of the contemporary city. We will offer you a series of lectures, excursions and workshops focusing on specific research methods and pressing social issues in relation to our urban surroundings. Dirty Old Town gives you the opportunity to meet a diverse team of urban specialists, designers and researchers. You’ll work together in a community of learning where you’ll get the opportunity to deepen your knowledge and to further develop your own ideas about the city.
Programme
WK 1-2 General Introduction (February 1-12, 2021)
WK 3-4 Thematic Research - Inequality in a super diverse city* (February 16-26, 2021)
WK 5-6 Thematic Research - Crime as part of a global network* (March 3-10, 2021)
WK 7-8 Thematic Research - Citizens of the anthropocene* (March 15-26, 2021)
WK9 Take position (March 29-April 2, 2021)
WK 10-11 Strategize (April 5-16, 2021)
WK 12 Present (April 19-23, 2021)
*The thematic workshops that are part of the Dirty Old Town programme are also offered as stand alone courses.
About the Independent School for the City
The Independent School for the City is a post-graduate educational institute based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was founded by Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles) in 2018 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 aims to be a sanctuary, a learning community, open to everyone who is involved with the city. The school is independent and autonomous and from that position can be more critical, experiment more, and reach a different audience than the established institutions and accredited schools. It will not be constrained by the formalities of academia or disciplinary boundaries. Participants and teachers form one team in which the advanced and less experienced will inform each other and contribute to the research. Research that is not necessarily solution-oriented or focused on final designs, and may not come to design as such, but will lead to a text, a film, an exhibition or an action.
Borrowing from various disciplines, such as sociology, economics, history, anthropology, as well as urban planning and architecture, the school brings together different skills and thoughts that help to understand and improve the city. Being based in Rotterdam, the school sees this city as the perfect place to explore the spatial challenges of the contemporary city. To analyse them, to learn to understand them and to subsequently formulate ideas to make them better. To think about the spatial, cultural and social aspects of migration, the necessary adaptation to climate change, the reinvention of democracy, and the consequences of economic growth and/or recession.
