The students of the first year of the XPUB master course of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam shared their Counter-Tourist Information Center a.k.a Special Issue 24.

The issue was the outcome of the trimester "ON LOITERING and other forms of in-situ computation", guest edited by our colleague Martino Morandi.

The issue will experiment with loitering as a method to do research in and about the city. It starts from the intuition that when we allow ourselves to be out in public spaces without a defined purpose, we open up to unplanned encounters with a dense fabric of human relations, economic vectors and technical networks. The proposal then is to find appropriate spots to loiter in and around Rotterdam, spend some time in company of its networks and its inhabitants, and find suitable ways to develop, execute and alter scripts for the public space. Many of us today have computers in our pockets most of the time, and the streets and squares are full with different networks and other forms of computation, too. For three months we explored together the possibilities to compute and publish while being outdoors.

This all culuminated in the pop-up counter-tourist information center, a bakk-fiets loaded with different projects that prompts you to engage with the urban space in alternative ways.