Incubate!

Industrial Sites as Urban Society Laboratories
Hosted by dérive - Society for Urban Research

The economic transformation in the western world from an industrial to a service society did not only clear away lots of businesses from the cities or transfer jobs to regions with lower wages and marginal environmental laws. It also deeply changed the image of cities. Large parts of the industrials areas, ports or railway sites lost their functions and orphaned. During the last years many of them disappeared and became residential areas, business parks and the like. But there are still numerous sites that await a new function. The need for cheap, extraordinary space for people nowadays called „creative class“ and the rising importance of the „creative industries“ increased the attention for those old industrial sites.

In many cities artists and urban activists occupied those places transforming them into art spaces, studios, venues, research labs, offices, living spaces and workshops creating a surplus for the urban society: These sites function as laboratories for new ideas, support unusual cooperations and solutions and operate as urban interfaces in a multifaceted manner by connecting experimental and established social, cultural, technical and economic approaches and practices.

One example for cooperative development is the former shipyard NDSM in Amsterdam. The NDSM-Project has been initiated by Eva de Klerk in 1999 and developed into the largest center for alternative culture in the Netherlands since. NDSM-Founder Eva de Klerk will present the successful bottom-up-strategy in a keynote speech and will also join the following discussion on the necessity and possibility of an independent cultural site in Vienna.

http://www.ndsm.nl/

Eva de Klerk, Project Booster, Concept Developer, Amsterdam