28 June 17

City in the Making

As a Director of The Generator Loughborough CIC I'm taking part in an exchange programme with another hub in Rotterdam called City in the Making (Stad in de Maak). This is my blog about my week long immersion in this amazing undertaking to create a different kind of city.
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04 July 17

Lunch at the Stokerij – Stad in de Maak (City in the Making)

I arrived in Rotterdam on Sunday evening and headed straight to the Airbnb in Blijdorp district, a lovely ground floor flat looking out to the park.

On Monday I arranged to meet Marc Neelen and Ana Džokić from Stealth Ultd http://stealth.ultd.net, two architects who are directors for Stad in de Maak (SindM) City in the Making. It was a 20 minute walk (and an even closer bike ride) from where I was staying and I got to walk along two canals on route. I love Dutch lunches, essentially more cheese than you can imagine in the UK, several varieties of bread and humus and salad all thrown in.

Our ‘working lunch’ focused on getting Marc and Ana up to speed and introducing their partner Piet another director for SidM to our own project, the Generator in the UK and learning about progress on the City in the Making.

As we are not in our building yet we talked about what might be some useful things to think about as we are in the planning stages. Here are some tips from Marc and Ana about the preparation stages.

  • When taking on and planning a building first think about what the concept is. Is it just a refurbishment or are you offering more? Do you just need to guarantee Health and Safety to those who will be in it or more than that? This is the basic step and here you can think about material choices also.
  • Second think about what the spirit of the intervention you are planning is. Are there certain words that express what you are trying to bring to your community, such as ‘raw, bare, or undressed’ space.
  • ‘Radical choices’ are often what makes something interesting.
  • When choosing your engineers or your architects you need someone who thinks along your lines, shares the same spirit.
  • Can you ‘workshop’ with different architect to choose an approach you like.
  • Next look at the ‘capacity’ of the users. Who presents a RISK and who is NO RISK. It helps to know what people can do themselves and that this also helps you decide who goes where in your space(s).
  • To attract people who are proactive and are ‘pioneers’ there needs to be a sense that nothing is finished, so they feel part of creating the space. This can also be a financial necessity. The sense of being able to improvise and ‘anything is possible can be inviting.
  • There are lots of people all looking for workspace so it needs to flexible. There needs to be a balance – improvised and open on the one hand and some things that have been fixed to provide a decent place to work (and in some cases live). For SidM they needed people who could fix things. What these people then get in return is space for free. There was also seed funding (grants) for people from the Cultural Foundation which contributed physically to the state of building and also helped fund certain projects.
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