Taking Back Housing! International New Town Day 2020

Taking Back Housing | International New Town Day 2020 is an online International Symposium from the International New Town Institute and the Independent School for the City taking place on 16 October. During this symposium, speakers from the Netherlands and abroad will talk about the challenges of alternative housing projects, such as housing cooperatives, DIY builders, former squatters and developing architects. These projects radically challenge the conventional planning methods. There are many obstacles to overcome, mostly in the institutional unwillingness or inability to deal with non-professionals or with a not-for-profit approach. Who and what is holding back these projects? What can be done about it? During the symposium Taking Back Housing! we will bring together examples from the Netherlands and abroad to clearly state the problem and to formulate ways forward.

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The Independent School for the City is a post-graduate educational platform based 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.