Twen­ty years ago, the archi­tec­ture office ZUS moved into an anony­mous Schieblock in Rot­ter­dam as an anti-squat­ter. At that time, how­ev­er, the areas sur­round­ing this block were cut up and sep­a­rat­ed by roads and rail­way lines. This is how the idea of a bridge was born. The hope: new impuls­es and uses for emp­ty build­ings and urban waste­lands. Inter­est­ing­ly, the bridge brought peo­ple togeth­er even before it exist­ed. Via an inter­net plat­form, peo­ple were able to pur­chase wood­en plank­ing for the future bridge, which was ful­ly opened in 2015. Oth­er aspects of the project were strong­ly sup­port­ed by the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Rot­ter­dam: Work and office space, restau­rants, cafés, and green spaces. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about the quarter’s new vital­i­ty but also about the con­se­quences of upgrad­ing and exclusivity.

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The works of con­struct­Lab unfold in the cos­mos between imag­i­na­tion and life. But the focus of the collective’s work is not on cre­at­ing fixed and unal­ter­able facts. Instead, they active­ly seek ways to give form to the desires and hopes expressed in appro­pri­a­tions. The Baukiosk takes on the role of a sym­bol in this con­text. As a com­plex struc­ture, it embod­ies a par­tic­u­lar form of city-mak­ing that combines—or delib­er­ate­ly collides—differing inter­ests with dif­fer­ent oppor­tu­ni­ties. Thus, the kiosk is a meet­ing place as well as a col­lec­tion point. Ana­log bill­board and dig­i­tal dis­play. Infor­ma­tion sys­tem and rest­ing point. It is always many things and every­thing at once.

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The mov­ing images show Bogotá and St. Peters­burg, Rabat and Seoul, Naples and Tokyo, Doha and Shang­hai, Kyoto and Venice. We are immersed in scenes of the every­day. There is fish­ing, clean­ing, danc­ing, and laugh­ing. What we see here is city. But it is not that city that shuf­fles from one mega project to anoth­er to claim its own in inter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion. Rather, the spaces in this film speak of use. They show us that cities are, above and beyond, lived spaces that come alive only through us and our activ­i­ties. We do not find the same­ness of glob­al cities here. Instead: plu­ral­i­ty, het­ero­gene­ity, and again and again, site-spe­cif­ic being, mak­ing, and doing.

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The film Swim City shows us how vital rivers are for the well-being of the entire urban pop­u­la­tion. Whether in the Danube baths in Vien­na, the botan­i­cal gar­dens of Tbil­isi, or the rivers in Basel and Zurich—everywhere peo­ple are jump­ing into the water on warm and even cold days. In oth­er cities, too, where rivers are only just being redis­cov­ered as open spaces, ini­tia­tives are being formed to raise aware­ness of the val­ue of water in the city. This, how­ev­er, goes far beyond the mere pop­u­lar­iz­ing of swim­ming. They are also move­ments that fight for pub­lic access to water against the back­ground of increas­ing pri­va­ti­za­tion of riv­er banks. They make it clear that rivers must be tak­en seri­ous­ly as impor­tant arter­ies in larg­er eco­log­i­cal structures.

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In the north of Brus­sels, sur­round­ed by streets and yet almost hard to find, a small par­adise has emerged. In 2013, a diverse team put an idea into prac­tice: they com­bined the spe­cial and unique fea­tures of a park with urban agri­cul­ture and micro-farm­ing. Involved were local ini­tia­tives and groups that had been using the fringes of the fal­low land for some time for the col­lec­tive cul­ti­va­tion of fruit and veg­eta­bles, small ani­mal hus­bandry, and pigeon­ries. The result­ing location—Parckfarm—still brings the neigh­bor­hood togeth­er today. Dif­fer­ent actors orga­nize var­i­ous activ­i­ties, work­shops, gar­den­ing, and debates. How­ev­er, a land use plan for the area is now in place. Neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tions and ini­tia­tives see access to and use of the park as threatened.

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