Space-Making in a Market
Studio Urban Afrikaanderwijk
2025
This project explores how market vendors in the Afrikaandermarkt in Rotterdam create and reshape public space through everyday actions and intuitive gestures. Working within a temporary and high-density environment, vendors adapt their stalls using basic tools and available materials—tying, wrapping, balancing, and hanging—to respond to their spatial needs. These acts of making are not based on formal design knowledge, but emerge from bodily interaction with space and context. Through field observations, interviews, drawings, and hands-on experiments, the research highlights a verb-based, open-ended approach to design. Inspired by the theory of errant design, it reflects on how flexibility, improvisation, and uncertainty can become core values in spatial practice. The project concludes with a soft, foldable roof structure made from recycled materials, offering one possible way to reuse everyday knowledge embedded in the urban environment.
Richar Serra, Verb List, 1967