Cities in Transition @ University of Amsterdam

Students of the University of Amsterdam explored European cities, visited local initiatives and interviewed City Makers.

Interview City Makers New Europe @ Cities in Transition, University of Amsterdam, 8 July 2015

City Makers Summit

The Dutch Presidency of the EU, the first half of 2016, brought representatives of all thinkable governments, institutions and companies from across Europe to The Netherlands and particularly to Amsterdam. Meetings were scattered throughout the city, but especially the Maritime Museum and the new Europe-building on the old Navy grounds were places of encounter. To give the bottom up urban innovators, the City Maker, a voice in this story there was the New Europe City Makers Summit.
After the Pre-Summit (4 and 5 February), the Summit was the most important moment of meeting for City Makers from all over Europe. There came 600 of them from 150 cities to Amsterdam for these four days. Each of the four days had its own theme. Day 1 was all about meeting up again, day 2 to get more connected. Thereafter, the focus of day three was learning from each other and the fourth and final day was all about the actions that arise from this.

City
Makers

What is Hybrid Space Lab?

‘Hybrid’ stands for combining fields, ‘Space’ is our expertise, ‘Lab’ means that we work experimentally, in an innovative way. We’re architects-urbanists with a strong connection to media and design. Hybrid Space Lab has two components: the Think Tank that is about knowledge development, and the Design Lab that focuses on experimental architecture and urban design.
‘Hybrid’ is also a strategy. We started by working on the combination and interaction of digital and analog space – and developed this into combining creative fields in general. Most of our work is connected to urban issues: from the redevelopment of the Beijing art district 798, to the DIY pavilion in Hong Kong or “Co-Creating the City : Athens”.

What is the focus of your work?

We work with a network of professionals from different fields: from urbanism and architecture, from industrial and communication design, landscape planners, hardware- and software-engineers…
Apart from working on assignments together with international clients we also initiate research-oriented projects.

How is the Hybrid Space Lab organized?

We are not traditional architects focusing only on architecture. We also look at other developments: socio-cultural, scientific, technological developments… We think the challenges of today need to be addressed in an interdisciplinary way.
We work with a ‘hybrid’ approach and use the crossover strategy as an innovation method: taking ideas from one field and trying them out in another in order to approach the issues we deal with from a new perspective, reframing the challenge.

Why innovate?

It’s really not about the ‘New’; we don’t think that innovation in itself is a quality. But we do live in times of enormous technological developments, and need to find ways to deal with them, and to shape them in the way we want them to influence our lives.