BK Talks: Why together?

Marina Otero Verzier
Architect, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
Rotterdam-based architect Marina Otero Verzier is director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI)—the Dutch institute for architecture, design, and digital culture and the Netherlands' national archive for architecture and urban planning. Alongside the direction of research projects and curation of several exhibitions at Het Nieuwe Instituut (since 2015), Otero has been co-curator of the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021, curator of the Dutch national pavilion at the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018 Work, Body, Leisure, as well as Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale.

Since September 2020, Otero has been head of the Master in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. She has co-edited More-than- Human (2020), I See That I See What You Don't See (2020), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (2016), and Promiscuous Encounters (2014).

Darinka Czischke
Associate Professor TU Delft, leader of Project Together!
Darinka is associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. In 2014 she was awarded the Delft Technology Fellowship to develop her research on Collaborative Housing. She is the founder of the Co-Lab Research group at the TU Delft and co-founder of the working group ‘Collaborative Housing’ at the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR). Since 2018 she serves as board member of ENHR coordination committee, and in July 2021 she joined the advisory board of the Dutch association of housing cooperatives, Cooplink. Darinka has published extensively about social, affordable and collaborative housing in comparative international perspective. She is currently the leader of Project Together!, a cross-sector initiative focused on realizing the potential of collaborative housing forms in the Netherlands.

Tine de Moor
Professor of Social Enterprise and Institutions for Collective Action Erasmus Rotterdam University
Prof. Tine De Moor wants to be at the heart of society, focus on important social themes, and enter the dialogue with citizens, governments, and companies. Part of the studies by her current and past research teams focuses on citizens’ collectivities, a form of collective action that nowadays seems to be needed to fill the social gaps caused by stepping-back governments and failure of free market mechanisms. Prof. De Moor has been president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons and has set-up the peer-reviewed International Journal of the Commons. She previously held a chair in Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective at Utrecht University. Since September 2021 she holds a chair as Professor of Social Enterprise & Institutions for Collective Action at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University.

Ilka Ruby
Architect, Publisher and Curator, Berlin
Ilka is a Berlin-based curator, author, and publisher on architecture and urbanism who studied architecture at RWTH Aachen University and TU Vienna. She is co-founder of Ruby Press, a publishing house focusing on architecture and the city that has won numerous awards for publications such as Reasons for Walling a House (2012), Building Brazil (2011), City of God - Cidade de Deus! (2013), Architecture Reading Aid Ahmedabad (2015), Housing Cairo (2016), 51N4E Skanderbeg Square Tirana (2017), Atlas of the Copenhagens (2018), and Migrant Marseille (2020). As a curator, Ruby has overseen various exhibitions, such as the traveling exhibition Together! The New Architecture of the Collective. In 2020, she was co-curator of Enough is Enough, the Beta 2020 Architecture Biennial in Timisoara, Romania.

Josh Ryan-Collins
Head of Finance and Macroeconomics, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at The Bartlett, University College London
Josh is an economist whose research focusses on money and banking, sustainable finance, the economics of land and housing and economic rent. He is the author of three books, two co-authored: Where Does Money Come From? (2011, New Economics Foundation), which helped establish the role of commercial banks in the money creation process in modern economies; Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (2017, Zed books) which was included in the Financial Times’ best economics books of 2017; and Why Can’t you Afford a Home (2018, Polity) which made the case for excessive mortgage credit being the primary driver of the housing affordability crisis in advanced economies. He is currently a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum and was a co-founder of the Brixton Pound, a local currency based in South London