Josep Bohigas Lecture in the Amstelkerk, Amsterdam

On Tuesday the 11th of November 2025, Manifesta 16 Ruhr’s First Creative Mediator Josep Bohigas gives a lecture in the Amstelkerk in Amsterdam on his urban research This is not a Church, conducted for Manifesta’s upcoming biennial edition.

Bohigas is widely recognised for his expertise in global urban transformations and their implications for everyday neighbourhood life. He has been one of the key contributors to the development of the “Superblock” concept, a systemic strategy that reconfigures urban environments by foregrounding proximity as a tool for regeneration. Bohigas co-founded the transnational agency Urban Front and served as the director of both Barcelona Regional and the BCNEcologia agency. Currently, he teaches as a professor at the ETSAB (Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona).

In this lecture, Bohigas will present his research in Germany’s Ruhr Area, where the mass closure of Catholic and Protestant churches has produced an unprecedented landscape of spiritual and spatial redundancy.

Many of these buildings are known as "Pantofflekirchen" - post-war Modernist and Brutalist churches originally built as instruments of physical and moral reconstruction. Embedded in everyday neighbourhood life, these buildings developed into symbols of a newfound democracy, functioning as spaces of care and gathering. Today, these once-vital community anchors face abandonment or demolition.

Rather than fetishising them as inert heritage or allowing them to be absorbed by real-estate speculation, Bohigas argues for redefining these buildings as contemporary civic infrastructures - spaces of proximity and collective agency, capable of rebuilding social cohesion in an era of growing polarisation.

The lecture is organised by Manifesta, with the generous support of Stadsherstel.