International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: Open City
from 24-9-2009 to 10-1-2010

Sao Paulo (via IABR)

With its young architecture biennale, Rotterdam will again make an effort to grasp the attention of the architecture world. After three architecture biennale’s on mobility (2003), ‘the flood‘ (2005) and power (2007) on the 24th of September the fourth biennale will open, themed: Open City and curated by Kees Christiaanse

(…) an Open City is a place where different social groups co-exist, cultural diversity is present, differences in scale are visible, and urban innovation and probably economic development are taking place. When all these factors come together, it can have a positive effect. We can then speak of an Open City.
Open City is not a city; it is a condition of a part of the city. The word ‘condition’ indicates that the situation is finite, that the situation changes owing to other influences. And I’m only talking about parts of the city because it’s an illusion to think that the whole city can be designed as an Open City, or that this can be engineered. Usually for political reasons, every city contains areas that are potentially open, and other areas that will never be open.

- Kees Christiaanse, interviewed by Archined

This main theme will be worked out by international teams of curators in six sub-themes: Community, Collective, Refuge, Squat, Reciprocity and The Make-able City

Volume will work with sub-curators Bart Golhoorn of Project Russia and Aleksander Sverdlov, who work on the theme ‘collective’ to make a collaborative Volume issue (#21). Also Partizan Publik’s project Social Housing after the Soviets will be part of this issue and the IABR exhibition.