Stories of a Street
Rebekka Schächer
The caring research practice Stories of a Street is developed by Leyla and Rebekka, a research-design duo doing architecture differently. Both graduated from TU Delft Bouwkunde Faculty in 2023 with a fascination in uncovering everyday stories of the urban environment. Through collecting, drawing and sharing stories, they co-create unconventional graphic archives of overlooked narratives through community making. In their eco-feminist practice they are drawn to female-coded work like stitching, weaving and quilting.
They have hosted workshops for Architecture Master courses at TU Delft - The Living City elective - and KU Leuven - A House is not a home (for all) studio; a walkshop for Rotterdam’s Placemaking Week Europe 2024; and multiple story-collecting and stitching events in the city. Their work has been exhibited at Rotterdam Architecture Month: in 2024 at the exhibition Current Traces #1 at OMI, and in 2025 at the main exhibition Sustainable Space Making. The project is funded by Stimuleringsfonds, Rotterdam Municipality and Fleur Groenendijk.
Leyla works as exhibition designer and programmer at OMI Gallery Rotterdam and teaches architecture to teenagers. She has researched with architectural charity Stephen Lawrence Trust in London, while working in architecture for 2 years. With the 2019 Abraham-Broad Fellowship at Rice University and the 2022 NL Institute Fellowship in Istanbul, Leyla developed methods of community engaged-research into informal practice, applying them with Istanbul Technical University through weaving workshops in the post-disaster context of SE Turkey.
Rebekka, in her graduation project at TU Delft with a scholarship from DAAD, has researched a communal guerilla garden in Porto, where she actively engaged with the local community. She developed a storytelling method combining illustration, photography and architecture to support the garden’s fight for emancipation, situating it within the broader political landscape of the city.
How can a caring architectural practice serve as a means of preserving and disseminating the socio-cultural narratives of a diverse city fabric?
Stories of a Street developed an interdisciplinary spatial research method that repositions the architect as carer and listener. Through three adaptive steps - Collecting, Drawing, and Sharing - we co-construct unconventional graphic archives of everyday urban life with inhabitants. These archives take the form of large-scale public tapestries that visibilise hidden urban narratives in response to the erasure of social fabric through gentrification and spatial inequality.
Urban developments often overlook the social fabric of the city, despite being essential to vibrant urban life. This underscores the need for a caring architectural research and archiving practice that precedes development - one that values existing connections first. Stories of a Street addresses this urgent need. We operate at the intersection of art-making and urban theory through community engagement, fostering dialogue on the value of diverse cities with inhabitants as well as policy-makers. Our approach is ecological in its ethics - resisting extractive top-down urbanism by valuing relationality and slowness. We, as architects, take the role not as builder of structures, but as builder of relationships, connecting the social, ecological and political threads of the city.
Over the past 1.5 years, the method has been applied to Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Binnenweg, a rapidly gentrifying street. Tapestries made are exhibited in empty shopfronts, at neighbourhood events, in galleries and soon to be embedded in a growing digital archive. Its success lies in gathering across ages, experiences and city contexts - story-sharing and stitching side by side. Our proposal is to apply this method in a new context, collaborating with a partner to expand knowledge-sharing of local invisibilised narratives and offer an alternative starting point for urban intervention.