Call for applications: Dirty Old Town

After a successful first edition, the Independent School for the City is again organizing its unique 12-week professional education programme in contemporary urbanism, taking the modern city as its subject and Rotterdam as its testing ground. The programme starts on January 31 and will explore modern urban dynamics by bringing together different disciplines from historical research to artistic expression. In this course, we won’t dream of an ideal future city. Instead, we will consider 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, researchers, and critical thinkers. 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 and position towards the pressing urban issues of our time.

Curious about last year’s edition of the course? This video gives you an impression of what to expect. Also, take a look at our website to see what the previous participants produced.

You can apply for this densely packed 12-week programme by sending a motivation (1A4), your CV (max 2mb) and examples of previous work (max 8mb/5 pages) to info [​at​] schoolforthecity.nl before November 1, 2021.

Programme
Week 1–2: General Introduction (January 31–February 11, 2022)
Week 3–4: Thematic Workshop – Living in the Superdiverse City* (February 14–25, 2022)
Week 5–6: Thematic Workshop – Accessibility & Crime* (March 2–9, 2022)
Week 7–8: Thematic Workshop – Citizens of the Anthropocene* (March 14–25, 2022)
Week 9: Take Position (March 28–April 1, 2022)
Week 10–11: Strategize (April 4–15, 2022)
Week 12: Present (April 18–22, 2022)

*The thematic workshops that are part of the Dirty Old Town programme are also offered as stand-alone courses. Limited places are available.

About the Independent School for the City
The Independent School for the City is an interdisciplinary and proudly independent post-graduate educational institute for urban research, development, and activism, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The School offers unique programmes for ambitious professionals from all over the world to delve into issues at the very forefront of contemporary Urban(ism) theory and practice through an educational programme following the methodological quartet of Research, Stories, Strategies, Action!

Borrowing from various disciplines, such as sociology, economics, history, anthropology, as well as urban planning and architecture, the Independent School for the City aims to be a sanctuary, bringing together different skills and thoughts that help to understand and improve the city. The School is independent and autonomous and from that position can be more critical, experiment more, and is not constrained by the formalities of academia or disciplinary boundaries. 

The School is open to all personalities that deal with the City—not only those with a background in Architecture and Planning—but also History, Sociology, Art, Psychology, Film, and other Urban Studies—the more diverse the backgrounds of the participants, the more interesting things will get!