Call for applications: This Is Tomorrow

The Independent School for the City is thrilled to announce the centrepiece of our yearly education programme, This is Tomorrow!

This is Tomorrow is a unique 12-week course on contemporary urbanism, dealing with the Anthropocene, Superdiversity and Right to the City, taking place from April 1–June 28, 2024. Throughout the course, Rotterdam is a laboratory for researching problems that are relevant to cities worldwide. Participants and teachers will bring in unique expertise from different disciplinary viewpoints, that will fuel the course and create an exciting community of learning!

The first two weeks will be dedicated to an introduction of Rotterdam itself, its lively urban culture, the morphology of its urban structure, its strategies and challenges for housing, for alternative energy sources, and its place in the global economy. Through field trips, lectures and exercises, you will explore the physical but also the invisible realities of the urban landscape.

The weeks after, participants will unravel the city using different lenses and focuses.

In the first block “Right to the City” we will cooperate with research and activist collective Loom, who are also the driving forces behind Failed Architecture. During these three weeks, you will explore strategies for people to reclaim their right to the city, and how professionals can contribute to creating the conditions for this.

For the second block “Anthropocene” we invited landscape architect Dirk Sijmons (founder of H+N+S Landschapsarchitecten) and exhibition designer Herman Kossmann (founder of Kossmanndejong). Under their guidance, you will learn about the impacts and new realities of the Anthropocene and examine the effects on daily life in the near future, when global temperature has increased by 2.5 degrees.

The third block is focused on “Superdiversity”, working together with sociologist Linda Zuijderwijk, Crimson, photographer Florian Braakman and others. You will learn and develop methods for interviewing people, to record locations and conversations, to interpret what we see and to retell it in pictures, maps and stories, with the aim to get a deeper understanding of the Superdiverse makeup of the population.

Every block will be wrapped up by making a concrete individual product, either a textual column, graphic novel, design or another type of visualisation. In the last week, we will collectively synthesise our production.

Course programme
Week 1–2: April 1–12, 2024 
Introduction to Rotterdam and the methods of the Independent School

Week 3–5: April 15–May 3, 2024
Thematic block: Right to the City 
With Loom: practice for cultural transformation

Week 6–8: May 6–24, 2024
Thematic block: Anthropocene
With Dirk Sijmons and Herman Kossmann 

Week 9–11: May 27–June 14, 2024
Thematic block: Superdiversity
With Linda Zuijderwijk, Crimson, Florian Braakman and others

Week 12: June 17–21, 2024
Reflect on your findings and present your thoughts

How to apply
The densely packed 12-week programme fits within the 90 days period of a tourist visa to the Netherlands. It is based on a five-day work week filled with workshops, lectures and field trips. The participation fee for This is Tomorrow is 1200 Euro. In addition, we offer a Droom & Daad Scholarship (for participation and part of the expenses) to two motivated applicants from and living in one of the low- and middle-income countries on the DAC list.

You can apply by sending a motivation (one A4), your CV (max two mb) and examples of previous work (max eight mb/five pages) to info@schoolforthecity.nl before February 11, 2024. The programme needs a minimum number of eight participants and has a maximum of 20 participants. Applicants will be informed before March 1, 2024 whether they have been accepted, after which a down-payment should be made of 150 Euro. For questions please contact info@schoolforthecity.nl.

You can also apply for each of the thematic block as stand-alone courses for 400 Euro.