A harbour on land: De Ceuvel’s topologies of creative reuse

Abstract

In this paper we explore creative reuse as a critical and imaginative mode of urban practice. By engaging with the case of De Ceuvel, an experimental community located in Amsterdam Noord, we submit three main affordances of creative reuse. Reuse value is accordingly discussed in relation to (a) abandonment, (b) the co-constitutive character of experimentation, and (c) the circulation of heterogeneous ideas and materials. In moving beyond circumstances of disposal and dissolution, the three affordances are evocative of a salvage value regime, which transcends conventional narratives of the city and a siloed treatment of urban sustainability. Based on the findings, we suggest that creative reuse interventions enact infrastructures of curatorship, capable of unsettling particular ways of dwelling, learning and narrating the city.

Circularity on What Grounds? Advancing Learning for Circular Area Development at the Interface of Proximity and Precarity

“…In their discussion of creative reuse practices in Amsterdam Noord, Barba Lata andDuineveld (2019: 1761) show how these practices may inform alternative value regimes through the "circulation of heterogeneous ideas and materials". Adding to their account, we suggest that such a dynamic of circulation requires the development of certain learning routines and skills to gradually but firmly establish local conceptions of value, as it happens with the adjacent repair and refurbish practices in the Binckhorst.…”

The Spaces and Places of the Tourism Encounter. On Re-Centring the Human in a More-Than/Non-Human World

“…Studies in the urban already give indications of the role of encountering the material in spacing and placing. Tonkiss (2013, p. 313) interrogates the critical spatial practices that operate "in the cracks between formal planning, speculative investment and local possibilities", and as Barba- Lata and Duineveld (2019) argue, the focus can therefore be on "minor practices, small acts, ordinary audacities and little anti-utopias that nevertheless create material spaces of hope in the city" (p. 323). Barba-Lata and Duineveld (2019) build on Tonkiss (2013) as they explore what they call 'the productive potentialities often hidden within the materialities of the urban', citing Latham and McCormack (2004, p. 719).…”