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Newsletter November 2015

Border Shi Ao Village Xialingpai Village (photo: Lard Buurman)
Exhibition Da Lang Fever 2.0 at the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture

Following the successful event of the exhibition Da Lang Fever, organized at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, INTI now presents Da Lang Fever 2.0. It proposes urban strategies to empower migrant workers in Da Lang Neighborhood (Shenzhen).
Curator Linda Vlassenrood has invited Dr. Ekim Tan, the architecture office space&matter and photographer Lard Buurman to develop an action plan for real urban interventions in one of Da Lang’s fast changing industrial areas, the so called Fashion Valley. As top-down urban planning is losing favor worldwide, also in Shenzhen, these three participants offer more collaborative alternatives, meant to emancipate migrant society.
First and foremost, Da Lang 2.0 will showcase the gaming method Play the City, developed by Dutch-Turkish Dr. Ekim Tan. Her game invites different stakeholders to collaboratively think about specific urban interventions. In turn, the Amsterdam-based office for architecture and urbanism space&matter will present possible scenarios for re-using a new but vacant hotel in Da Lang Fashion Valley. Finally, the exhibition will be complemented by photographs of photographer Lard Buurman, depicting Da Lang workers in their neighborhood.

Exhibition design for Da Lang 2.0 by space&matter.

Da Lang Fever 2.0 is part of the exhibition Pearl River Delta 2.0 curated by Doreen Liu and Hubert Klumpner and has been developed in close collaboration with the Da Lang Government. The exhibition is generously supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou, Mondriaan Fund, Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design Limited, and 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.

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Rethinking Tema
Site visit to the Kaiserflats, the first area of reconstruction in Tema; with a.o. Rients Dijkstra (Advisor to the National Government on Infrastructure and the City), Wouter Vanstiphout (Design as Politics, TU Delft), Joe Abbey (TDC) and Michelle Provoost (INTI).

The city of Tema was built from scratch as the flagship of Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah. Fifty years later, it is in dire need of regeneration. INTI co-organized, with the Tema Development Corporation, a design workshop on the possibilities of updating Tema’s original urban ideals of progress, emancipation and equality to concepts fitting within present economic and political concepts.

At the same time, the exhibition ’The Banality of Good. Six decades of New Towns, Architects, Money and Politics’ was on show in Accra, at the Nubuke Foundation.

Workshop at the office of Tema Development Corporation (photo: DK Osseo-Asare)

During the opening debate the question ’What is a Good City and how can architects contribute to it?’ was discussed by a lively audience of designers, artists, policymakers and students. The event marked the start of a future cooperation between INTI, TDC, Kwame Nkrumah University, Technical University Delft and Central University Tema.

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Vinexmensen Final presentation

On December 15th, Vinexmensen (‘Vinex People’) will present its conclusions on the occasion of the final manifestation of the ‘Jaar van de Ruimte’ (Year of Space) in Amersfoort. Apart from revealing the research results of Utrecht and Amsterdam universities, INTI will also present a number of action plans for Vinex neighborhoods, made up by and with the people living in several of the Netherlands’ Vinex neighborhoods. The presentation is meant to provide direction for further debate on the future of Vinex neighborhoods and their development. Sign up for the event here.
Next to this presentation, INTI is preparing a new publication ‘De Vinexmensen Actie Agenda’ (‘The Vinex People Action Agenda’), in which the same action plans will be included, together with an elaborate report on the status quo in the selected Vinex neighborhoods of the project and several essays by experts in the field, explaining the most important themes for future Vinex neighborhoods. This publication will appear in 2016.

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The Future of Health Care

In cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and the Chief Architect’s Studio (Atelier Rijksbouwmeester), the new program ‘Oog voor de buurt’ (‘Eye on the Neighborhood’) will be implemented. This program is meant to stimulate the connective role of urban design in neighborhoods where livability is questioned. Multidisciplinary design teams will focus on both social and spatial dilemmas in large cities, shrinking regions and growth regions.
This year’s central theme will be ‘care and design’. With this theme, Atelier Rijksbouwmeester will again cooperate with INTI and the Academic program ‘Design As Politics’ of the Technical University of Delft. Under the guidance of JaapJan Berg (INTI), Wouter Vanstiphout and Mike Emmerik (Design As Politics), and the two designers Hugo Corbett and Stef Bogaerds, students will execute design research on the restructuring of the built environment and the intensifying relationship between the health facility and the neighborhood.

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INTI at the IFHP

This week, INTI will join the IFHP (International Federation for Housing and Planning) Summit 2015 ‘Co-act for Habitat” in Berlin (12-13 November). During the summit, the partners of IFHP will meet to share their local activities and join the urgent international agenda of Housing Refugees. INTI will present ‘Making Cities Together’: a placemaking-design project which focuses on the improvement of public space in Nairobi, co-organized by INTI, Placemakers and IFHP.

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INTI Youtube Channel

Recently, INTI has launched its official Youtube Channel. From now on, this channel will be regularly updated with the latest INTI audiovisual material, ranging from lectures of the INTI conferences to short clips on relevant topics in (new) urbanism and current topics of INTI’s research.