Studio René Boer

René Boer (1986, he/him) is a queer organizer, researcher and critic with a focus on spatial justice, urban imaginations and radical heritage, based between Amsterdam and Cairo. He is managing editor at Failed Architecture, part of the Non-fiction collective and involved in various urban social movements. He has recently taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, Design Academy Eindhoven and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

selected projects
Architecture of Appropriation
Contemporary Commoning
Failed Architecture
Grounded Urban Practices
Misericordia
Post-Fossil City
Reimagining Cairo
Smooth City
Terraforming Indonesia
The Right to Build
Useful Life
Wallen2020

mail@reneboer.net
@rene_boer_

Contemporary Commoning

This two-year artistic research project, which started in the spring of 2020, investigates the potential relations between the arts and the commons. It is grounded in Amsterdam's Zeeburgereiland, a newly developed neighborhood on an island at the city's eastern fringes, where the project's researchers will collaborate.



Researchers Ronald Rietveld (RAAAF), Socrates Schouten (Waag) and Suzanna Tomor (University of Amsterdam) will examine the many ways in which 'commoning' can contribute to new forms of public space, in the physical as well as the digital realm. It takes the potential contribution of design and art in these processes of 'commoning' as the main point of departure.



The project is developed in collaboration with Jeroen Boomgaard of the Research Institute for Art and Public Space of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Casco Art Institute and the Nautilus housing community at Zeeburgereiland. By having researchers from different disciplines working closely together, the project seeks to develop a multifaceted toolkit with 'recipes for the commons'.