research

Event

Housing debate: Alternatives to Ownership

On Thursday, the 28th of March Amateur Cities organised a housing debate Alternatives to Ownership at the Independent School for the City in Rotterdam. During the evening, we discussed ways out of the housing crisis and how to diversify forms of home ownership in the future. | In het Nederlands hieronder | The debate Alternatives to Ownership was the last of three public […]
Event

Woondebat: Vormgeven aan (samen)leven

Het publieke programma Vormgeven aan (samen)leven, georganiseerd door Amateur Cities bij CASA/NiCo, in Arnhem vond plaats op 30 november 2023. De avond maakt deel uit van een drietal publieke evenementen rondom het thema Anders werken aan wonen, als onderdeel van het gelijknamige programma van het Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie. | English version below | Tijdens het woondebat Vormgeven aan (samen)leven was de ‘normaliteit’ van […]
Research
Making Public identity by Loes Claessens

Making Public

How can independent publishers manage speed, quality, and positioning to better respond to contemporary urgencies? Making Public was a two-year-long research project led by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with 1001 Publishers, Amateur Cities, Amsterdam University Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Hackers & Designers, Mind Design, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, […]
Publication
Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing cover

Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing

Publication Concluding the Making Public research project. Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to publishers in the cultural and research domains to conceive, produce, and position their contents in an urgent way? Revolving around the key notions of relations, trust, and remediation Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing […]
Research
Letters to the Mayor Rotterdam. Photo: Petra van der Ree. Courtesy of Nieuwe Instituut.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Our Letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam. The exhibition ‘Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam’ is a result of a collaboration on the theme of ‘City Forces’ between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. As a part of this project, 66 architects and urbanists wrote 46 letters to the Mayor […]
Publication
Book cover Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

In this book, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on the occasion of the 9th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction Festival of Architecture Tomasz Fudala, Werner Huber, Grzegorz Mika, Michał Murawski, Ania Molenda and Cristina Ampatzidou, Artur Jerzy Filip, Marlena Happach, Magda Grabowska, Aleksandra Litorowicz, Bogna Świątkowska, and Tim Tompkins write and discuss how to turn a parking lot into an urban square, the shadow of Stalin and the Palace complex.
Publication
Footprint 16 cover

New Media in Old Cities: The emergence of the new collective

New media give rise to a new set of spatial strategies and tactics that can be employed to either build on a centralized technocratic view of the city or lead to the definition of a new type of public. Published in Footprint Journal #16 – Commoning as Differentiated Publicness, this article examines the new ways […]
Event

Woondebat: Bouwen met een langdurig perspectief

Het debat Bouwen met een langdurig perspectief georganiseerd door Amateur Cities vond plaats op donderdag 8 februari 2024 bij Waag Futurelab in Amsterdam. Tijdens de avond keken we naar de woonopgave en de toekomst van ons wonen, en naar hoe we écht langdurige relaties met het landschap en onze zowel menselijke als niet-menselijke buren op kunnen bouwen.  Het debat maakte […]
Research

Feminist Economies Collective

We create contexts to break the crisis of imagination in capitalist realism. Together with others, we imagine futures, in which shared values are no longer primarily appropriated for profit and accumulation of wealth but open up new perspectives on economic realities. Through this process, we build fragments of new worlds based on feminist values, facilitating […]
Research

Nearest Neighbour

How to use maker ethic, creative tinkering, and critical thinking to strengthen citizenship? The Nearest Neighbour was a research collaboration between Creative Coding Utrecht, Creative Urban Methods of Utrecht University, and Amateur Cities with the objective of learning how to think critically about the relationship between urban politics of space and technology through hands-on creative […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Bottom-up Turned Inside Out

Decision-making in urban development today isn’t defined by the needs of empowered citizens but by two mutually supporting mechanisms: big corporate interests and retreating governments. Rather than a political vision of how life in cities ought to be organized, contemporary planning resembles a managerial task that coordinates flows of money, materials, people, and information. Paradoxically, […]
Research

Possibility Space

Over Hundred Years of Transformations in Six European Squares Possibility Space: Over Hundred Years of Transformation in Six European Squares was a research project commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw for the 9th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction Architecture Festival, presented at the Palace of Culture in 2017. This research and […]
Research

UrgentCity: Towards a New Vocabulary of Terms

Exploring the role of language in contemporary urban questions. UrgentCity: Towards a New Vocabulary of Terms is a research project and a program of activities, which investigates the challenges present in communication and collaboration between disciplines involved in city-making. We start from the premise that the language we use does not only describe our reality […]