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!

Drawing tools from the world of speculative design and filmmaking, join us to gaze out across the water, imagining a world on the shores of a distant future where the waterfront shapes new ways to experience nature and culture in the city.

The built environment as a sector often fails to take a critical long-term view on placemaking, designing for ‘here-and-now’, developing places which can become redundant as soon as they’re built. Waterfront placemaking will be hit especially hard, as sea-level rises impact billions around the world.

We will introduce placemakers to the value of building long term futures-thinking into their process, providing you with tools to become more critical, confident, and imaginative.

The session combines a workshop and a walk. Drawing from tools from our work on Collective Place Futures, we’ll share our unique ‘worldbuilding blueprint’ to create a palette of future places, characters, artefacts and rituals from which you create a news report from the future waterfront. We will then take a walk along the waterfront, to play out our future news report on-location.

While place foresight is serious business, our process takes us there through serious play!

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.

Socio-Spatial Opportunities Mapping - for desired interventions

Come outside with us and explore the possibilities for placemaking, looking at and discussing the needs of the users!

Based on Placemaking education, that we teach at the University of Amsterdam, Socio-Spatial Opportunities Mapping offers an interdisciplinary research approach to inform the design of appropriate place-interventions.

During this session we engage in fieldwork in the area. We will scan relevant elements and patterns on-site and conduct effective short interviews with users. We will then integrate and visualize these insights into a multi-layered map.

You will be guided by our experienced team of university staff.

This participatory walkshop is designed to explore the connection between the city and the water. Through walking, observing and engaging with other placemakers, we look and map the presence and traces how water forms part of the city.

The first half of our walkshop, will take the participants to a playground of public space. Through a ‘Walk&Sense’ session we will explore the surrounding environment by using our senses. This experiential exercise will emphasise how we perceive, sense, frame and construct the places we inhabit.

The session will conclude with a joint reflection and analogue data visualisation exercise. This will allow participants to share their experiences and insights, showcasing the traces, marks, and narratives related to water that define our cityscape in the public space itself.

The walkshop will be conducted by the members of the Bosch Alumni Network’s Placemaking Impact Field.