Posts

Messy cities: how to strive for more spontaneity in the planned city?
What do we mean by vibrant and liveable cities? Which buildings, activities and groups are desirable or undesirable in this context? And can this be planned and regulated from above by experts and professionals, or is it primarily a matter of leaving room for bottom-up initiatives? The answers to these questions ultimately determine how our cities look and feel: neat and orderly, raw and exciting, or a bit of everything. In the book Messy Cities, numerous authors express their preferences and s…

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Pop-up City; city-making in a fluid world
After the success of the blog, this summer the book arrived: Pop-Up City. A city where existing urban planning frameworks and architectural landscapes do not hinder spontaneous human activity, but rather serve as an encouraging platform for innovative, inspirational and time-bound activities. In the book a diverse collection of these temporary initiatives pass by. Ranging from funny ideas to interesting improvements to the urban landscape.

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We Own The City
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.

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Arrival City
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.

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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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Youth talks to youth
Policymakers and politicians love statistics. The statistics are often presented as the truth, while the research methods, the way of counting and the type of respondents often have a major impact on the real meaning of a statistic.

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Civic economy
Mutual involvement, active citizenship and the ability to manage for themselves of inhabitants. Themes that, also prompted by cutbacks, become more and more prominent. But does this ‘civil society’ exist in the Netherlands? What can we expect of the self-organizing capacity of inhabitants?  And to what extent can a local authority or corporation stimulate or facilitate this?

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