On June 15, within City in the Making (Stad in de Maak) initiative in Rotterdam, STEALTH.unlimited are organising half-a-day seminar, moving between the floors of our building at Pieter de Raadtstraat. A group of about 20 participants (from Stockholm, Paris, Netherlands) will come together to reflect on our ongoing endeavour from the perspective of how and on which premises to common the city, in the context of the unravelling welfare state and re-emergent struggles for urban existence. The event is one of the final stages of STEALTH’s practice base PhD research at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, titled Practices of the Essential In-between, which in parallel to urban commons and alternative economic models discusses role of spatial practices in these processes.
From 2014, City in the Making is engaged in bringing a fraction of the stalled public housing stock (back) to forms of common use, set in three apartment buildings right at the Central Station in Rotterdam, for a period of ten years. Although in itself a modest attempt, knowing that hundreds of apartments and workspaces in the city are lingering in the same status (as a result of disruptive governmental policies, but foremost due to mismanagement and speculative risk-taking of its current real-estate owners), the intent is to take it as a starting point to open up paths to the much larger potential of re-commoning these urban resources to collective benefit.
To provoke thoughts in this direction, we have asked input from Martijn Jeroen van der Linden (researcher at TU Delft / Economics of Innovation and Technology, who’s PhD thesis focuses on the purposes of money and capital, and aims to propose a new design for the monetary system), Aetzel Griffioen (political philosopher, co-ordinator of Skillcity Rotterdam, who researches new forms of collective prosperity and works on socio-ecologic education in neighbourhoods of Rotterdam-South) and Saskia van Stein (curator, director Bureau Europa Maastricht).
Limited number of places available, contact us for more info.