The New Academy
Testing ground as a method
The city of Rotterdam and its port are subject to major societal challenges, including climate change, social injustice, populism, racism, xenophobia, and unequal access to technological innovations and sustainable solutions. It is also a hub of activities, including architecture, digital culture, music and design — making Rotterdam a perfect testing ground for developing new approaches to designing social and spatial transitions at a time of high climate emergency.
Testing transition
To involve the citizens of Rotterdam in the process of transitioning to a more sustainable and inclusive future, two factors are essential. The first one is that Rotterdam’s inhabitants can recognise Rotterdam as a place where multiple forms of knowledge are produced in a distributed manner. They need to be able to see themselves as vital actors in the city and as producers of this knowledge. The second is to include the wealth of this unrecognised knowledge into the collective effort of transitioning into a sustainable city for the people and by the people. This citizen-driven environmentalism aims to make the city Co2-free, keeping with the climate sustainability goals and the New European Bauhaus Project. The transition process brings the future of the port and the city closer together than they are at present.
Developing tools
The New Academy connects a community of knowledge producers in Rotterdam and develops the tools to foster knowledge sharing, creativity, building imaginaries, and developing applications in the city. The project aims to unfold gradually, starting with identifying organisations and communities who are active makers of knowledge in the city. Together with them we collect, question, share and operationalise locally rooted processes of knowledge formation and exchange in a multi-dimensional manner. Throughout these steps, we take care to include and highlight the relevance of posthuman and more-than-human actors, participants, and perspectives. They include organic matter, material elements, and the technological systems that shape the city and how we navigate it. Those insights will be operationalised into actual tests and probes, realised with partners and the affected communities as prototypes of sustainable futures.