City Curriculum: Constructing a common place for culture and knowledge exchange

Abstract

The city of Nijmegen is in a process of losing its unique identity and urban fabric, as a result of a continuous commodification by the interests of private investments. The rise of commercialization creates an environment of strangers where the emphasis lays on individual perspectives and activities, accessible only to particular social groups, the privileged ones. As a result, the everyday life and the needs of the residents are overlooked. Social spaces and local organizations are instead located in the fringe areas of the city providing only a few meeting spaces for the community. As a reaction to this, the project derives from the notion of commons and the ambition to provide a space for the community to flourish. Through careful observation and appreciation of the existing building Molenpoort, the project is a redefinition of the site from a shopping center to a community learning center where the existing people of the city and the existing materials come together. The design aims to embrace the complexity of the act of learning as a social process between diverse groups of society. A place where people of great variety engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, accept differences, and thus form, a social bricolage in Nijmegen.