Posts

Making Vital Public Spaces: the power of observation, community wishes and activities
Last Thursday Fred Kent, president of Project for Public Spaces, gave an inspiring lecture in Amsterdam about placemaking: a community-driven, bottom-up approach for improving public spaces. Over the past 37 years, Kent has worked on hundreds of projects, including Bryant Park and Times Square in New York. “We have to turn everything upside down, to get it right side up.”

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Places in the making
In the past, remaking cities has been the stuff of big visions and product-focused interventions. Now, as cities try to rejuvenate themselves, there is a new approach: bottom-up, flexible, temporarily and interactive. 

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Gurgaon: the unplanned/planned city
Since 1991, India has been going through an enormous economic rise. The new middle class, who in the past sought their salvation abroad, are now looking for accommodations in satellite cities with large houses and a public space that has to be clean, intact and safe. Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, is such a place. In ten years time, three to four big developers have created a new world for about 1.5 million people. An extraordinary urban development in which the correct relations between marke…

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What's in a name?
Maps provide a modeled representation of the earth’s surface: a geographical representation of the countryside or the planned city. On the basis of different kinds of lines, shapes and colors, you get an overview of the most important roads, buildings and facilities. Convenient for those on the road. However, there are also so-called typographic maps, these are maps with mainly words. Words that can be places within the physical structures to represent a social theme or an activity: the lived c…

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Le Medi
There are projects that you just don’t know what to think of. Projects that are food for discussion.  Or at least raise some questions. Le Medi in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) is such a project. A new complex that I personally find beautiful, it gives me a true feeling of a city in spring, but that’s a matter of taste. There are much more interesting questions, like: is this an interpretation of multicultural building and/or multicultural living? Is there a market for these kind of living …

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Greening the ghetto
Visiting Ted.com is like being a kid in a candy store. For who doesn’t know it: you can find inspiring and pioneering lectures on Ted.com. Their motto is “Ideas Worth Spreading”. Their mission is mainly to offer a platform for great thinkers and doers to convince their audience of their vision or their new ideas. Each speaker has a maximum of 18 minutes for their talk. The content of the lectures does not include any heavy theoretical stuff. It is not about overall knowledge, but mainly about g…

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