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.

In the last decades cities have become more diverse than ever before. Individuals who at first sight appear to belong to a fixed group may show different attitudes and behaviours. They may live in the same neighbourhood, but lead very different lives and have access to different opportunities. A European research team examined how cities can deal with and benefit from this diversity.

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.

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…