Urban Springtime

Last week I saw some interesting information at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) about the so-called  Privately Owned Publicly-Accessible Spaces (POPS). POPS are a specific type of open space which the public is welcome to enjoy, but remain privately owned and maintained. What are the pros and cons of these POPS?

Last week the book ‘We Own The City’ was launched in Amsterdam. The book is about the rise of community planning. It focus on the way traditional top-down players are employing to enable and support bottom-up initiatives in cities. The result is a book with descriptions of inspiring urban development processes around the world.

In 2011, the British-Canadian journalist Doug Saunders wrote the bestseller 'Arrival City' about the drift to the city. Because of this process, there are worldwide more people living in the city than in the countryside since last year. The Guardian called it "the best popular book on cities since Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities." That was reason enough to travel to Leiden, where Saunders gave a lecture.

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.”

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…