Saskia van Stein grew up in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Baghdad, Iraq and subsequently, the Netherlands. She graduated cum laude from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) but despite this received no government stipend, with the justification that her portfolio was too diverse. Result: she leaves for New York City and becomes a bicycle courier.

With (at that time still) blonde hair and loaded with deliveries, one day she was not allowed to enter the main entrance of a destination on 5th Avenue and had to deliver the package at the back of the building. An insightful moment; Van Stein has become part of the city’s infrastructure; “I developed a curiosity about the truth behind the ‘co-’ in ‘coexistence’. And by that, I don’t mean one truth. We can completely disagree with each other, but from there we can understand complexity, comprehend it, and build.” This critical curiosity brings Van Stein back to the Netherlands, Rotterdam. In Rotterdam she organised debate evenings with additional programming such as videos, soundscapes and special snacks. Perhaps for the first time, she unpacked her diverse portfolio again. There she was approached by the director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Aaron Betsky: “You seem to have an opinion, come and have a coffee.”

Now decades later, she is the director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and co-head teacher of the master’s program Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Her first exhibition for the IABR, Its About Time, was about time, sustainability and the architecture of change. We meet at the IABR office, where a huge tapestry with the text POWER hangs at the entrance. With a view over the port area in Rotterdam, we talk about the many forces of power she has encountered in her world.

It’s about time

The whole reason we had Saskia in mind for this interview series is because of the 10th edition of the IABR, which was the first produced under her direction: It’s About Time. The exhibition presented hopeful possibilities of new, more radical courses toward a livable future, inspired by generational thinking and action. Special knowledge was gathered from Indigenous wisdom to residents of the Rotterdam neighbourhood Bospolder Tussendijken, and through conversations with environmental activists to workshops with children. And although it deals with enormous questions of social change, courses of action became much more tangible through local, fundamentally-human and als often historical perspectives. For example, we learned to revalue monumental storage space through the research project Storage Revival by Paul Landauer. Many cultures have monumental storage architecture, such as granaries, which also helped people to look ahead. Not comparable to today’s monuments, which mainly focus on the present. In addition to the many works that each in their own way fuel the thought exercise of ‘generational thinking’, three strategies were formulated that designers can follow: the Accelerator, the Activist, and the Ancestor.

According to Van Stein and the team of curators: “The Accelerator focuses on efficiency by using smart technology. The activist designer works in the here and now with local communities on small-scale bottom-up projects with strong social support in neighborhoods and districts. From the Ancestor strategy, the designer considers the consequences of design choices made now or in the past for future generations.” More information about the three strategies, the work presented and the supporting programme can be found on the IABR website.

Rigid or region

“Only recently have I become aware that my view of the world is thanks to my time in Tanzania and Iraq,” says Van Stein. “Take the parking lot. When I arrived in the Netherlands, that was a totally foreign concept to me, a piece of land so explicitly for the car. Just like the concept of ‘waste’ – not that we didn’t have waste, but I was used to an integral attitude there, where everything flowed circularly.”

“The Dutch planning tradition is of course at odds with this, by keeping out the water and the ideas of social engineering, the idea of control is still very strong. We should think more in terms of porosity and fluidity. The landscape as a basis. The planetary reality translated to the local.” The parking lot thus symbolises our mentality in an organisation while there are so many more cross-connections in border areas. Both the boundaries in the landscape and the boundaries of regulations in our systems provide an example of this. According to Van Stein, revaluing the local can lead to new forms of organisation. She sees two interesting roles for the designer in this regard.

First: the designer localises. “Working with what the environment offers is something we have historically done before and we can now do it with new technology,” states Van Stein. And second: the ‘immaterial’ designer. This involves the search for systemic flaws or things we don’t immediately see, and redesigning them. “The problem of this time period is that the design profession, as well as the formation of social structures, has become so entangled with politics and electoral gain. As a result, major societal issues are hijacked. We need to break through that cleverly,” notes Van Stein.

Hacks to connection

Van Stein mentions feeling hopeful about initiatives where people dare to interconnect systemic complexity. “I find it inspiring what happened in Ukraine, where Oleksandra Azarkhina, the Minister of Community, Territory and Infrastructure, hacked the Corona app and repurposed it as a reconstruction app. Here, people don’t receive information from the government about Corona but can report reconstruction matters, such as 5 windows that are missing and need replacement. This naturally has problematic privacy aspects, but in the end necessity knows no law. The power lies in utilising what connects everyone.

Similarly, in parts of the United Kingdom, when cycling without lights, no fine is issued but instead, a bikelight is provided. An intervention that ultimately reduces costs, given that it prevents accidents and police having to respond. Additionally, citizenship and the social field are experienced much more positively.

Another example: his name escaped Van Stein, but during the International Literature Festival of Odessa, she interviewed a politician. Upon his appointment, he and volunteers spent months inventorying what people considered important in their urban fabric. At a public interview, a promise was made to address the three prominent wishes from the community in the coming term, after which the rest would follow. And because everyone wished for greening, it was proposed that everyone would give each other a tree or plant as a gift over the next three years, whether for a birthday or wedding. With the approach: we ultimately do this together!

Intergenerational solidarity

We ask Van Stein what – besides courage within systems – seems important to her for good ‘Design for Generations.’ “A bottleneck that I foresee in the long term is the lack of intergenerational solidarity. There is enormous ageing, and boomers are pointed to as part of the problem. We must ensure that we keep holding on to each other,” Van Stein states thoughtfully. Respect for each other’s perspectives is essential, she emphasizes. As an inspiring example, she refers to Sphinxpark in Maastricht, where a vacant lot was programmed before construction work would begin. It resulted in intergenerational gardening, with seniors sharing gardening knowledge with younger generations who often no longer possess that knowledge. This resulted not only in knowledge sharing but also in a joint neighbourhood barbecue, prepared with products from their own garden. “This makes me wonder, how am I an intergenerational being?” reflects Van Stein. She mentions the tension between what we biologically inherit through DNA and how we are socialised, thus which habits we adopt from generations before us or where we grow up. “Sometimes I experience more kinship with a new friend in Nairobi than with my own family,” she adds, illustrating the complexity of modern connections that extend beyond just family ties or direct locality.

Genius Loci

“When I walk through the city, I think that I’m walking through the thoughts and design decisions of our ancestors. Although it can never be fully traced anymore, the Zeitgeist is present everywhere in fragments,” says Van Stein. Ornamental facades next to sleek glass residential blocks, the monumental from the 18th century next to brutalist concrete. Because certain places in cities especially become such a collage of styles, political ideas, and dreams, the place gains a layered identity, a connection with history and emotion; a genius loci. “And genius loci cannot simply be implemented,” Saskia continues.

Designing the genius loci is often what the architect aims for because if a place can make such a connection with its users, it will be cared for and a strong community will form. Despite loving attempts to do so, this doesn’t always work well. For example, Bijlmermeer in 1960/70 is now an iconic example. The designers tried to capture an abstract, idealised version of the Dutch landscape tradition in modernist high-rises and geometric structures but missed the essence of what makes a place meaningful. The honeycomb structures and elevated roads had no historical or cultural roots in the local context and offered residents no opportunity for personal identification or appropriation. The enormous communal spaces and anonymous corridors were more alienating than connecting. Eventually, a rootless environment emerged in which residents could not develop a meaningful bond with their living environment, which contributed to the social problems and deterioration of the neighbourhood.

How should it be done then? How can we organize a connection with a place in such a way that care and identification arise that stimulates what is good for living together? For this, Van Stein refers to Erik and Ronald Rietveld (RAAAF) and their research on ‘affordances’, or, the inviting. Affordances are opportunities for action that the environment offers – especially in the human environment, which is mostly designed. Like how a cup invites you to grab it by the handle, and a chair invites you to sit. Thus, the absence of a bench in the public environment results in no invitation for encounter. This means that architects and designers don’t just create new objects or buildings, but can also create new opportunities to change patterns of human activity and even influence entire socio-cultural practices. Floris Alkemade said it beautifully recently: we must learn to design from the Tabula Scripta, working with what exists and, from there, seek new ‘spaces’.

Half an hour in Weert

When we ask what Van Stein once experienced as impressive and formative, the bench—surely not by coincidence—comes up again. A bench in Weert, where Van Stein sat down when she was half an hour early for an appointment. “Next to me, a man sat down and told me he was going to vote for the PVV. Why? Because Rutte had promised him 1000 euros and he had never received it…” What was an electoral trick for Van Stein was an important promise for this man. “Where people get their motives from I could never have imagined—that people can’t see through that 1000 euros,” continues Van Stein.

For her, this encounter illustrates a deeper societal problem described in the “Atlas of Disengaged Netherlands” by Josse de Voogd and René Cuperus—a study that maps the growing gap between prosperous urban areas and disadvantaged regions, where people feel politically, economically, and culturally ignored. Higher-educated people, young people, and those with above-average incomes have much more confidence in government and parliament than older and less educated people, who more often have ‘disengaged’ and consequently vote in the radical margins. Worrying, according to Van Stein. She notices that people’s trust has been damaged, and they are stuck in traditional ideas and lack the mental resilience to deal with social changes. According to her, this contributes to the growing loneliness and polarisation in our society. She sees a possible solution in education: “Personally, I would be in favour of meaning-of-life classes or political resilience in our schools. We talk too little about existential matters. The church used to do this, but nothing concrete has ever replaced it.” Despite the concerns, she remains optimistic about building bridges: “I will always look for connection with people I completely disagree with.”