Starting from the Lefebvrian notion of urban society as a society that can realise itself only when urban occupants collectively use their ‘right’ to shape it, this research explores the impact of alternative socio-spatial processes on the contemporary cityscapes. At the same time inspecting the everyday human condition in relation to the evolving built environment. Where economic competitiveness acted and acts as the prior imperative of policy-making, the struggle to empower its consequent heterogeneities corresponds to a variety of inhabitants dispossessed in their own (everyday) space. This calls for the need to promote the production of new forms of (inclusive) ‘agency’.
While the current economic drive is affecting the notion of sociality and the ecological dynamics of our cities, the city of Rotterdam prefigures as testbed for a transgressive rebirth.
Its patterns of discontinuities stage the return of the Lefebvrian experimental utopia, which could become more concrete by accepting a heterogeneous urban approach that recognises their diverse value.It’s the search for a Heterutopia.