Urban Springtime

It felt like a kid in a candy story. So much inspiration during Placemaking Week 2017 in Amsterdam. With more than 400 attendees from 46 countries the key conditions were fulfilled. Besides the wonderful opening speech of Fred Kent ("We have to turn everything upside down, to get it right side up") and a lot of other interesting presentations and discussions these are my favorite candies.

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.

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. 

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 …