Posts

Soft City: building density for everyday life
Due to their increasing popularity cities are under pressure. To accommodate the influx of people, more and more buildings are being built in higher densities. The challenge is to keep these cities liveble, inclusive and sustainable. In his book Soft City David Sim gives numerous tips and examples for this challenge. He shows that higher densities and quality of life can go hand in hand. It's just a matter of people-friendly architecture and city planning.

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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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Torre David; informal vertical community
In Caracas stands an unfinished 45-story skyscraper. Despite the physical shortcomings it has become an improvised, continually revised home to more than 750 families. Urban-Think Tank, an interdisciplinary design practice, spent over a year studying the physical structure and the social organization that turned this ruin into a ‘squatters’ home. They summarized this process - were the planned city meets the lived city - in a wonderful book.

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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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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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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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