Freehouse would prefer to imagine Rotterdam South as a Social Harbor. Traditionally harbors not only serve as gates between the city and the world, they are also dynamic places in which there are always plenty of social, cultural, and economic developments going on. They generate movement of people, ideas, and goods and are nodes of migration flows. Harbors stimulate innovation and create employment. This in turn attracts new people, which means that harbors play an important role in the development and positioning of the city, the region, and the country.
At the request of the IABR and in collaboration with the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative, Freehouse has brought these ideas together in
Social Harbor, an activity and intervention program that will take place during IABR–2016 in the Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam.
Social Harbor demonstrates that dynamic reciprocity empowers future development and thus creates room for experiments regarding new forms of work on the basis of locally available qualities and expertise. Workshops, presentations, and knowledge exchange between local, national, and international experts are used to examine how entrepreneurship, migration, identity, and the power of networks set the stage for the Next Economy of Rotterdam South.
The
Social Harbor program includes an expert meeting, Labour in Transition and Urban Transformation in collaboration with the Department of Social and Policy Sciences of the University of Bath, a Rotterdam version of London’s
Museum of Water, a workshop led by Greek artist Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, and a meeting of Happy Go Lucky at which the women of Rotterdam can share their knowledge, experience, worldly wisdom, and networks. There are
't Borrelt op Zuid-meetings in the public domain, and presentations and small exhibitions in
Het Gemaal, among others by
Johannes van Assem and
Wolfgang Tillmans.
The program is in constant development, always check our
agenda
