In July 2021 I will be guiding several street poetry walks through Utrecht, as part of the Utrecht Summer School 2021. Everyone is welcome to join. To stay safe, we will be using the free smartphone app VERS. The walk can be done in English or Dutch. 

Below you can find more information about the walks and how to register.

Street poetry walk through the Utrecht city centre with literary scholar Kila van der Starre

Did you know there are nearly 200 street poems in Utrecht? Literary scholar Kila van der Starre wrote a book on ‘poetry off the page’ (‘poëzie buiten het boek’) and founded the website Straatpoezie.nl. Join her on a street poetry walk through the Utrecht city centre and discover a whole new world within the city.

Kila van der Starre during a street poetry walk in Utrecht. Photo: Myrthe van Veen.

What is past is prologue 

(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, scene 1) 

Utrecht Summer School lustrum pop-up events for the city and beyond 

‘Creating tomorrow together’, is this year’s lustrum theme. In July and August, Utrecht Summer School is delivering, together with its partners, a number of pop-up events. These programmes all have in common that they take the participants from the past to the future. They are events open to all – students, staff, alumni, expats and the wider community.  

If ever there was a city with stories to tell, it’s Utrecht. Acquiring city rights in 1122, Utrecht evolved from a walled city in the middle ages into the open city which it is today. It has had its ups and downs, like any other city. In the 1960s one of Utrecht’s canals in the old town was concreted so that a 12-lane motorway could be built there. It soon came to be seen as a big mistake, resulting from a failure to take the city’s past into account. Recently, the canal has been restored though. The inner city is again surrounded by water and green space rather than asphalt and exhaust fumes. 

It’s precisely this unfortunate example of ahistoric thinking, grounded in the desire to obliterate the past, that has led us to set up a programme in which we explicitly try to include the past in our thinking about the future: “What is past is prologue”. 

We invite you to come and discover parts of the city that you’ve not seen before. And to learn to look at the city from a different angle.  

The pop-up events all start from a point in the past and will take you to a yet unknown point in the future. You will stroll or cycle through the city on a guided tour, or you will go on a canal cruise, depending on which event you sign up for. You will, as it were, be travelling in time as well as through the urban space called Utrecht. The themes will all be introduced by inspiring experts in the field, and you will be invited, together with the other participants, to share you views and ideas about the future. 

In the programme you will find that there are short three-hour-long events, revolving around themes such as education and upbringing in Utrecht; gardens in Utrecht; poetry in Utrecht. Our series will be concluded by a longer, two-day programme, on 23 and 24 August, about the past and the future of the city and the university.  

What is Utrecht Summer School? 

The Utrecht Summer School, founded in 1986 by Utrecht University, is the largest academic summer school in the Netherlands, and one of the largest in Europe. It delivers academic courses covering a wide range of subjects.  

The Utrecht Summer School is a partnership of Utrecht University, HU University of Applied Sciences and HKU University of the Arts. These institutions of higher education offer high quality, fully accredited summer courses on bachelor, master and PhD level. All courses are taught in English. In 2019 Utrecht Summer School attracted close to 4000 students from around 120 different countries. In 2020 the Utrecht Summer School was transformed to an online format, with 60 courses in which over 1000 participants took part.