Placemaking Week Europe 2024 - Rotterdam

Join us for a walk taking us in unexpected directions and ending in a picnic where we'll sit together, share food and ideas, and create a temporary space where we imagine the city as the future library. This is an exploration of how we harvest and share the city's creativity, knowledge, imagination, and stories.

What if you didn’t see the library as a building, but as a function, with the city as its biotope, where citizens are active curators of local knowledge?

Picture yourself as a future librarian, using all your senses to gather knowledge during our walk, deciding what makes it into your unique library collection. What do you see, smell, hear, taste, and feel that fits in your library? And what is the sixth sense of the library?

As permanent knowledge hubs, libraries can ensure continuity in placemaking processes, contributing to collective intelligence. With this walkshop, we aim to gain valuable experience to use with the Ministry of Imagination and in the future central library of Reykjavik.

The picnic setup creates the informal context that enables respectful dialogue and leads to meaningful interactions. Put your blanket down, take your shoes off, have a drink, and share your ideas!

Colour Portal is an active, explorative, sensorial and creative colour encounter to tune into the chromatics of place. Utilising colour mapping, sensory poetics and lucid documentation. We will tune into the full spectrum of place connection and imagination that colour is a portal into.

Inside the Colour Portal we will:
❥ Invite a series of chromatic encounters to sense and experience colour in new ways.
❥ Work with lucid multimedia documentation.
❥ Consider colour as creativity, culture, care, art, design, materiality, ecology, activation and more.
❥ Spotlight the power and potential of colour as a multi-faceted element of placemaking.

Expect a gently paced and contemplative walk with time to explore and pause; sense alone and share insights together. Tools of documentation (note/sketchbooks, cameras etc) are welcome.

With Cath Colour Carver – artist, broadcaster, colour experience facilitator, curator and writer from London. Cath is the founder of interdisciplinary arts and research practice Colour Your City, which is centred in colour and place via the sensory, spatial, social and imaginal.

A dynamic session combining 'walkshop' and 'human library' experiences offering tools and strategies for fostering public participation and leadership in creating gender-inclusive, movement-friendly public spaces.

Explore parks, playspaces, market squares, and streets, using a free public tool to assess their quality, inclusivity, and movement-friendliness. Along the way, 'check out' books from our human library to gain insights from personal stories and professional experiences:

• STEPS TO CHANGE by Karen van de Spek, Municipality of Rotterdam, discusses how to improve walkability and safety for women by integrating gender perspectives and local insights.
• EMPOWERMENT AT PLAY by Lore Cuypers, Vital Cities HOWEST, and BRAVE explores how action research and co-creation can empower girls to transform public spaces for sport and leisure.
• FEMINIST PLAY by Nourhan Bassam, author and founding director of "The Gendered City," shares insights from her global work on feminist spatialities and the Women After Dark Project.
• A TACTICAL GAME by Laska Nenova, BG Active and Placemaking Europe board member, highlights temporary, low-cost methods to create vibrant public spaces that encourage movement.

Matt Roebuck from the Netherlands' Knowledge Center for Sport and Exercise will host the session, introducing the Center’s ‘Building Blocks for Movement-Friendly Environments’ and the 'Inclusive Movement-Friendly Environment Scan'.

This session provides a case study of Jane’s Walk - a rare example of placemaking that is truly community-driven. It sees everyday residents and city-dwellers – rather than just planners and architects – as the true experts on their cities and neighbourhoods. It acts on the idea that cities can and should be self-organised, by encouraging residents to lead their own walking tours on any topic they like, and encouraging cities around the globe to lead their own Jane’s Walk festivals in whatever way they see fit.

In this session, you will learn how Jane’s Walk has established itself as a global, grassroots, community-led initiative. We will share stories and anecdotes on the power it has to build connections across the 500+ cities in which it operates, celebrating the legacy of Jane Jacobs and her contributions to urban studies and city planning.

Come and get inspired by this movement – a simple yet incredibly effective means of fostering vibrant and inclusive cities. You might discover new perspectives and principles to apply in your own placemaking endeavours.

Note: This session will use headphones for audio

Flat rooftops offer a wealth of underutilised, high-potential space in urban environments worldwide. In Rotterdam, both temporary and permanent initiatives have begun to transform these spaces into vibrant hubs of urban sustainability. 

The cultural organisation 'Rotterdam Rooftop Days' explores this potential through their creative programming, showcased in the eponymous annual festival. In this session, we will visit a centrally located Rotterdam rooftop currently awaiting large-scale redevelopment. 

Participants will delve into the history of the site and its surroundings, while also exploring future plans for the site. Together, we will envision placemaking possibilities that emphasise community engagement, urban biodiversity, and enriching urban development through cultural programming. 

Accessibility Info: location requires participants to climb stairs

Like most Western cities, Rotterdam aims to be hospitable and inclusive—a city where everybody feels welcome, has the opportunity to participate in public life and can move around freely and safely, regardless of race, gender, or age. How is this ambition reflected in Rotterdam's public spaces?
Join the Public Space Detective Walkshop led by Floor van Ditzhuyzen (urban researcher) and Pedro Gil Farias(interaction designer) to explore, question, and discuss the (im)possibility of a city for all.