Experience

Independent School for the City

• Netherlands
• Higher Education
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Educator

  • Oct 2018 - Present

  The Independent School for the City is a post-graduate educational institute and international meeting place in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The school is an initiative of Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles) and is rooted in their practices of combining a critical and activist approach to the city with effecting real change through architectural and planning projects. The independent school for the City is founded on a strong belief in an incremental instead of a tabula rasa approach to city planning which blurs the lines between critique and practice on the one hand, and research and policy on the other. Show less



Delft University of Technology

• Netherlands
• Research Services
• 700 & Above Employee

• Chair at the Architecture Faculty

  • Jan 2009 - Sep 2020

  Initiated by the Dutch National government and initially housed within the faculty of architecture at the Delft University of Technology, the chair of Design as Politics was exploring, researching and defining the boundaries, commonalities and tensions between the fields of politics and design. In 2020, the chair, its ideology and legacy has been integrated in the Independent School for the City – A post-graduate educational institute that is initiated by Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles), based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands Design as Politics understands politics in the widest sense possible: it defines it as that level in society on which conflicting interests of groups of people become visible and are being solved, oftentimes through debate and negotiation, but possibly by exerting power or using physical violence. The political consequently implies succeeding in formulating a description of society in which certain interests are consciously given higher values than others, and the skilled use of a toolset to physically enforce this descriptive approach. Design & Politics does not consider design and politics to be two separated worlds, but rather considers politics to be an important dimension of design and, simultaneously, design an equally important tool for political action. An alternative name for the chair could thus be ‘Design as Politics’. This means that the toolset of the designer will be renewed by looking at the realm of politics, while the spatial perspective of developments in society will be considered to enrich the existing set of political instruments. The chair is explicitly looking for alternatives for classical top-down planning methods and control mechanisms, through which governments have manifested themselves in the 20th century. Show less