Placemaking Week

Placemaking Week is a multi-day international conference about leveraging the convergence of many global issues around public space—from health to sustainability, innovation to equity. This year organised by pps, stipo, pakhuis de zwijger and placemaking plus. Primarily geared at practitioners, activists, and policy makers, Placemaking Week provides a series of topic-specific sessions and workshops highlighting project experiences, best practices and major thought leadership in the placemaking field. For this event I was part of the organisation as well as participator in workshops. 

Broedplaats WOW

Broedplaats WOW is a cool cultural venue in a lesser-known area of Amsterdam, housed in an old sixties school building. WOW hosts artists in residence with fifty spaces for recent graduates from Amsterdam art academies. It complements these studios with a 350-bed hostel, a restaurant, and urban farm called PlantageLab where guests, visitors and tenants meet one another. During the place game portion of the workshop, we challenged participants to combine local knowledge with their (inter)national expertise in identifying lighter, quicker, cheaper interventions to seek how the liveliness of WOW can radiate into the outside area. 

City Trip Zwolle

On this daylong trip to Zwolle we focused on how to get great public squares and plazas. Zwolle is one of those typical beautiful historic Dutch cities from the Golden Age. Its picturesque inner city has wonderful squares that have been made car free. But two squares adjacent to the city's central rail station are in need of a lot of placemaking. How can we reimagine a station square so that it will become a centerpiece of a vibrant city centre? How can we learn from the historic city squares? How can we open up the surrounding buildings and offer more focus from the sun and wind? How will we facilitate the community to be expert?