Last October, Studio SHIFT participated in Placemaking Week Europe 2024, an event that brought together over 700 professionals, including placemakers, urban planners, and policymakers, in Rotterdam from across Europe and beyond.
This annual festival is a key platform for exchanging best practices in urban regeneration and an opportunity to foster new collaborations.
The 2024 edition took place in one of the Netherlands’ most innovative cities — Rotterdam. With its ever-evolving urban fabric and increasing focus on climate change, the city provided the perfect setting for placemaking initiatives and workshops exploring the relationship between urban spaces, nature, and resilience.
The Walkshop: “City Flows: Discovering the City with Our Senses”
During Placemaking Week Europe 2024, Studio SHIFT took part in the “City Flows walkshop”, a participatory experience led by our CEO and Design Director, Elena Giunta, alongside an international team of experts:
- Tímea Szőke, researcher and facilitator at the International University of Catalonia
- Cemre Ceren Asarlı, expert in cultural dialogues and resilient communities
- Katya Romanova, co-founder of re:imagine your city and designer
- Silvia Chakarova, urban planner and co-founder of Placemake Ltd.
- Louisa Kistemaker, expert in participatory theater and socio-ecological transformations
The walkshop was designed to explore the relationship between the city and water through a multisensory approach.
Participants engaged in a Walk&Sense experience, using their senses to navigate and perceive public spaces in Rotterdam. This method allowed them to investigate how we experience and shape the places we inhabit, highlighting the water traces embedded in the urban fabric.
The initiative included a collective reflection session “on the move” and concluded with an analog data visualization exercise. This final step transformed individual insights and experiences into a visual representation of water’s presence in the city, creating an interactive and narrative map of the relationship between public space and water resources.
Reflections & Impact
Studio SHIFT’s participation in Placemaking Week Europe 2024 reaffirmed our commitment to social innovation and sustainable urban design. This experience allowed us to contribute to a broader reflection on placemaking — rethinking how we design public spaces to be more resilient and inclusive. A challenge where collaboration makes all the difference.
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Make a Shift is Studio Shift's e-magazine, focused on design and social innovation, where you can find articles and case histories of our projects.
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