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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Happy City from a Dutch perspective
Dear Mister Montgomery,
My name is Gerben Helleman and I'm an urban geographer from The Netherlands. This summer I finally had the time to read your book 'Happy City'. Admittedly, a bit late, but my jobs, blog and six years old daughter kept me 'occupied'.

I really enjoyed reading your book. It is a great summary of all the movements in the last decades in urbanism, architecture, planning and design. With all the inspiring things you read on social media and websites abou…

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The Open City
Nowadays we make cities to much as a closed system: segregated, regimented, and controlled. Instead of this 'Closed City' we need an 'Open City' where citizens actively hash out their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope. This is the main message of urban sociologist Richard Sennett in his new book 'Building and Dwelling' that came out last month. Yesterday he gave an inspiring lecture at the Rotterdam Academy of …

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Arrival cities: the need for precision
In the winter of 2015 the City Builder Book Club, an online book club about cities, is reading Doug Saunders’ award-winning best-seller Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. An interesting book about migration to urban centers around the globe with illuminations on all sorts of paths, policies, and people. I was invited to contribute a short response on chapter 10 ('Arriving in style') about migrant neighborhoods in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Bangl…

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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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Triumph of the city
It is probably the most pro-cities book of the last years: Triumph of the City. Written by Edward  Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard University. The book’s core thesis is that ideas spread easily in dense environments. “We must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete”. A summary and review of the book by using some of my favorite statements.

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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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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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The city from above
At a certain point, each Dutch Urban Planner or Human Geographer has to face it. At least, it used to be compulsory study material: the book ‘Ruimtelijke ordening’ by Van der Cammen and De Klerk. The book represents the history of the planned city and shows how tight The Netherlands is regulated. It does so by using descriptions of a great number of examples of spatial planning and many memoranda. I have no idea whether this book is still compulsory, but at the time I thought it was dry stuff b…

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Urban Springtime Books
This blog is on the interface between the planned city and the lived city. It describes inspiring projects, articles, books and private observations. And it represents the beautiful, fun and exciting sides of the city. It is about making the most of opportunities, about creativity and unorthodox regulations. Summed up with the term ‘City in the spring’. This term is hard to define. It’s more a feeling than anything else. Like the first day of spring. In the specialist literature, there are seve…

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