Placemaking: Sense, Space & Strategy

This three-week program explores the web of relationships between people and places. As a philosophy and practice, placemaking is concerned with improving urban spaces by including its users in the transition for change. Through a bottom-up planning process, it intends to give the right to the city back to its inhabitants. This innovative course borrows from human geography, experimental and environmental psychology, history, and sociology, problematizing the urban environments in which we live. Course topics include public space, community, diversity, and 'the right to the city.' Experiencing Amsterdam is at the heart of this program. It presents exciting alternative ways to understand how people live in, respond to, and imagine their cities. Urban spaces can be imagined as territories of negotiation. Sensory experiences often inspire a strong sense of belonging and might, therefore, play an important role in the co-creation of space. In the afternoon, we will use Amsterdam as our living laboratory, exploring placemaking practices at various locations.