Is it possible to plan your own city nowadays? Or are we all moving too fast impacted by globalization and technological advancements to even react to the world around us? Our next speaker, Jeroen Beekmans, believes that people can indeed impact change within their cities and build them for the better through the concept of flexible urbanism and architecture. The concept of a city has changed significantly over the last ten years and is no longer owned by professionals thinking in terms of structures designed to last over 100 years. Urbanism now allows for city inhabitants to take initiative in shaping the environments surrounding them through projects such as community gardens or temporary restaurants.
These ideas and trends impacting cities are things that inspired Jeroen to co-found a blog called The Pop-Up City. The thought of the blog came during a trip to Berlin that he took with his now business partner Joop de Boer in 2008. Inspired by the various events, designs and art around the city, they decided these ‘cool things’ were something worth sharing with the rest of the world. Today, The Pop-Up City is curated by Jeroen and Joop, has city-minded readers around the world, as well as whole team of international reporters adding content to it on a daily basis.
Jeroen also co-founded an Amsterdam-based urban design and creative agency called Golfstromen that does marketing campaigns and events, web development and publishing as well as interaction and urban design for clients such as Hewlett Packard, Rotterdam Police Department, and Philips. In 2011, their project Gentrification Battlefield has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You can see some of their other work here.
During his TEDxKraków talk, he will discuss the worldwide shift from ‘city-planning’ to ‘city-making’. Let’s see what inspirational ideas he finds in our city of Kraków!