WTC in Rotterdam

On 23/09/2021 Lietje Bauwens and Wouter De Raeve presented their film WTC A Love Story during the Thursday Night Live! as an introduction for a public talk addressing similar spatial inquiries at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

Through the fictionalised story of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in Brussels, the film explores public participation in urban redevelopment. Jack Segbars will then lead a public talk with a hybrid palette of activists, artists and other experts who organize themselves within the context of Rotterdam, against similar socio-political developments.

The talk with initiatives from the Rotterdam context, moderated by Jack Segbars, explored which methods are useful to critically analyze the current political-governmental climate, characterized by bureaucratic elusiveness and appropriation of resistance, and what new forms of organization may offer to counter the socially deep and affecting processes of gentrification and the destruction of living environments, as is happening in the Tweebosbuurt in Rotterdam. In what activist ways can we engage in the political-societal debates and in city planning? What possibilities are there for art and artistic practices? Which actors need to be included in regards to the ‘redevelopment’ of the social sphere, and what would such a cast look like?

With Cultural Workers Unite/Anti-gentrification School, Fucking Good Art, Florian Cramer, Joke van der Zwaard, Mustapha Eaisaouiyen (Recht op de Stad/ A Right to the City)