Author:
Dagmar Keim
Climate change, population growth, new technologies, and globalisation and the consequences of Covid19 are changing the physical environment. Cities grow and the urban economies gained importance. European cities are increasingly on the agenda of national governments and the European Commission. Decentralisation changed the role of local authorities. Metropoles and regional partnerships have emerged all over the world.
Author:
Dagmar Keim
Habitat is a disruptive term in the discipline of architecture. This might be a surprise to some, since habitat seems to be naturally and closely related to architecture. After all, the term stems from the Latin habitare, to dwell, and architecture provides houses and housing.
We have become completely dependent on the omnipresence of maps. We locate ourselves with simple clicks on our smartphones, and we blindly follow the navigation systems in our cars because we trust their ‘objective’ data. We accept as scientific arguments the geographical maps that illustrate news articles. These maps, showing certain parts of the world or of cities, are visualised on the basis of geographic measurements and so-called facts that are generally perceived to be neutral, impartial – the distances can be measured, the information can be checked, and the language appeals to objectivity
Author:
Annelys de Vet
In mid-2021, three years after the introduction of the Environmental and Planning Act, all cities in the Netherlands must have developed a new environmental vision – a local translation of the new Act with considerably fewer rules. The issues are complex – energy transitioning, circular economy, ecology, and social inequality. It calls for an integrated and inclusive approach to the city, determined more by underlying values than by rules, and interpretations differ for each municipality. Thinking on the basis of values and frameworks is not new, but it is gaining new impetus with this Environment and Planning Act. On 26 March 2020, municipal thinkers and doers in the field of environmental vision met online to explore spatial and democratic possibilities and difficulties. This Zoom meeting was moderated by Farid Tabarki of Studio Zeitgeist.
Speakers: John de Ruiter, Frank van den Beuken, Martin Verwoest, Irma Ramackers, Ellen de Bonth en Arjan Vedder
Text: Farid Tabarki en Rindert de Groot
Martien Kuitenbrouwer and Paul Gerretsen spoke with each other online about the development of the Environment and Planning Act, taking place against the background of three developments. In 2021, this new environmental law will come into force in the Netherlands, replacing and streamlining an enormous thicket of earlier laws and requirements with regard to the built environment, and enabling municipalities – in principle – to make their environmental plans in a comprehensive manner. At the same time, Dutch municipalities have to deal with the increasing complexity of the issues they face. In addition to extant issues such as mobility, accessibility, clean drinking water, and safety, newer objectives such as circular economy, social inclusiveness, energy transitioning, and ecological regeneration must all be realised in the same areas.
Authors:
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer
Martien Kuitenbrouwer
Paul Gerretsen
In mei 2016 bleek de luchtkwaliteit in Amsterdam, Maastricht en Rotterdam zorgwekkend slecht te zijn. Al binnen een maand verscheen er een Nederlandse start-up die hierop inspeelde, met nieuwe slimme technologie, die beloofde het probleem op te zullen lossen. TreeWiFi is een klein vogelhuisje dat de huidige luchtvervuiling communiceert aan voorbijgangers door van kleur te veranderen; wanneer de luchtkwaliteit goed is geeft het groen licht en als beloning voor de bewoners biedt het vogelhuisje dan gratis wifi aan. The Guardian wijdde er niet veel later een artikel aan en speculeerde dat dit type uitvindingen onze stedelijke leefomgeving kan helpen verbeteren: Onze steden ‘slimmer’ maken zou de beste manier zijn om klimaatverandering en milieuschade te lijf te gaan.
Author:
Maria Kaika
Located in the K district of Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer neighbourhood, the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest is a 55-hectare area now being designed, implemented, and maintained by a group of active locals. The group includes people aged 26 to 82 that are representative of the area’s diverse backgrounds.Together they form a ‘community of practice with a wide range of knowledge and talents in gardening, permaculture, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, technology, urban landscape maintenance, management, sewing, cooking, and food conservation techniques, but also marketing and communications, art, sports, education, and neighbourhood history. The community of practice also interconnects the networks of the individual members in order to strengthen support for the food forest project when many hands are needed. Valuable connections have been made with the area’s community gardeners, and many related neighbourhood organisations whose work focuses on health and well-being.
What is a food forest?
Food forests are the oldest form of agriculture, which is still widely practiced, especially in the southern hemisphere. An established food forest reproduces gaps in the forest and forest edges, where most of the biodiversity can be found. From a plant-technical point of view, a food forest consists of 7 planted layers: tall trees, lower trees, shrubs / shrubs, climbing plants, herb layer, ground cover and tubers / bulbs. Some add a separate underground fungi layer, and water boards to this list and on 9 layers. A food forest is park-like and very suitable for urban public space.
A food forest is a timekeeping in an ecological succession, that is to say that instead of allowing nature to take its course, which would create a dense, dark forest, a specific development phase is maintained through management. After the initial study and implementation period, a food forest requires relatively little maintenance.
Author:
Debra Solomon
Multispecies urbanism (MU) puts forward a just urban development, policy, and practice driven by giving primacy to reciprocal relations between humans and non-humans. MU reorients urbanisation processes towards the strategies implemented by non-humans as a means to survive societies’ crises of democracy, planetary climate catastrophe, and uneven resource distribution. Crises, such as the current global pandemic caused by Covid-19, are further exacerbated by poor health conditions that could be substantially decreased by applying the principles of MU as a development model. Describing the methods, values, and domains in which the natural world’s inhabitants acquire agency, and in which humans become participants in multispecies communities, this new urban planning and design paradigm has yet to take place on scale.
Author:
Debra Solomon
Aangezien steden steeds complexer worden en meer verbonden worden met en door netwerken en infrastructuren, gaan ze steeds vaker een wezenlijk onderdeel vormen van het dagelijks leven van hun inwoners en, belangrijker nog, worden ze kwetsbaar voor ontwrichtende gebeurtenissen en systeemveranderingen. Deze ontwrichtende veranderingen kunnen sociaal, fysiek of natuurlijk van aard zijn of technologie dan wel milieu gerelateerd zijn. Ondanks het huidige publieke draagvlak voor groene initiatieven mist het beleid nog de vasthoudendheid om Nederland een volhoudbare duurzame weg te doen inslaan. Dit duidt, zou je kunnen zeggen, op een verstoord waardesysteem, of op ernstige cognitieve dissonantie. Daarbij komt dat het onvermogen om veranderingen manifest te maken niet voortkomt uit een gebrek aan (technologische) kennis, maar uit onwil. Tegelijkertijd zijn we ons tegenwoordig volledig bewust van het feit dat de status quo onhoudbaar is en hoewel we de technologische capaciteit hebben om in de basisbehoeften van alle mensen te voorzien, draaien onze technologische en economische systemen om risicomijding en winstmaximalisatie. Echter, we moeten ook onder ogen zien dat technologie alleen ons niet kan redden. Als radicale technologische innovaties niet gepaard gaan met even radicale veranderingen in onze levensstijl en onze sociale en politieke instellingen en gebruiken, worden de eerstgenoemde zinloos. Echte maatschappelijke transformatie kan pas plaatsvinden als we ons realiseren dat innovatie geen kwestie is van het simpelweg veranderen van het metabolisme – het herschikken van de onderdelen van de stedelijke leefomgeving (gebouwen, infrastructuren en de manier waarop ze worden beheerd) en als we niet langer denken dat we alle puzzelstukjes al op tafel hebben liggen.
Author:
Arjan van Timmeren
In the plant kingdom there are 35 species thathave been legally banned in Europe. These are ‘invasive alien plant species’ whose ethnic and biological characteristics pose a threat to native European plants. Throughout the EU, it is prohibited to cultivate, trade and transport these species. In response to this legal ruling, Studio Wild aims to launch The Forbidden Garden of Europe as an international discussion on new ways of living together. Do spatial, social, and legal restrictions contribute to the creation of a more diverse society?
Author:
Het Fisheye-project verkent de wateren van de Venetiaanse lagune, een hybride gebied waar een grote diversiteit aan protagonisten te vinden is – vongole,1 bricole,2 gondole,3 zoutmoerassen en cruiseschepen. Van deze protagonisten, fungeren de bricole als navigatiebakens, die het waterverkeer van de lagune regelen, en tegelijkertijd de leefomgeving zijn van een gemeenschap van species. Door microscopisch in te zoomen op een enkele paal ontdekt men een wereld van micro-organismen, hun relaties en zoneringspatronen.
Het project verbindt uiteenlopende schalen, van micro tot macro, en ondekt zo de verborgen lagen er tussen in. Elke schaal bevat een ander narratief en laat zich anders lezen. De relaties tussen deze zichtbare en onzichtbare werelden, codes en processen staan centraal in dit project. Alle afbeeldingen tonen de verborgen grafische code van de bricole.
Author:
Bureau LADA
The European Union presents in its Green Deal great ambitions to transform EU’s economy to a sustainable future. These ambitions relate to eight core themes; climate, clean energy, circular economy, resource efficiency, toxic-free environment, biodiversity, fair food and smart mobility. To reach the goals set-out, we’ll change the way we live our everyday lives, and we live these lives mostly within cities. These Green Deal ambitions obviously are highly interconnected, with all types of possible trade-offs and lock-ins that we would like to avoid, but also with all types of possible synergies that we would love to exploit.
Author:
Annemarie van Wezel
“Multiplicity of Other (de ‘meervoudigheid van de ander’) staat voor de meerderheid van informatie, gewoontes, gebruiken en waarden die niet onderdeel zijn van de dominante cultuur; een hele eigen wereld van doen en zijn. Om steden te ontwerpen die daadwerkelijk functioneren op diverse en meervoudige niveaus, moet deze andere wereld gewaardeerd en begrepen worden.”
In de essaybundel The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power (1995), hebben Jan Nederveen Pieterse en Bhiku Parekh toonaangevende denkers gebundeld om de relaties tussen cultuur en macht, tussen overheersing en verbeelding, in diverse contexten kritisch onder de loep te nemen. Het boek bekritiseert eurocentrisme (en andere vormen van westers etnocentrisme), maar stelt eveneens cultureel nationalisme ter discussie, dat in delen van het zuidelijk halfrond (toen nog ‘de derde wereld’ genoemd) opkwam als een vorm van verzet tegen imperialisme. Het boek biedt een andere invalshoek en bepleit de normalisering van cultureel pluralisme en een ‘post-kolonialisme’ dat Noord/Zuid begrenzingen overstijgt.
Author:
Azza Karam
Failed Architecture (FA) brengt architectuur terug in verbinding met de echte wereld. We zoeken nieuwe manieren om naar de bebouwde omgeving te kijken en de betekenis van architectuur in onze hedendaagse maatschappij te begrijpen. Sinds 2011 bieden we een platform aan voor een inclusief en kritisch debat over steden en architectuur. We brengen onconventionele verhalen samen vanuit ons internationale netwerk van auteurs met uiteenlopende achtergronden.
Mounir Samuel Werkt als politicoloog op de scheidslijnen van media, kunst en cultuur. Hij is herhaaldelijk bekroond journalist, auteur van tien boeken, performance artist, theatermaker, trainer, dramaturg, documentairemaker, diversvaardigheidsmanager, expositiemaker en meer. Hij beweegt gracieus tussen verschillende werelden en weet zeer uiteenlopende disciplines naadloos met elkaar te verbinden.
Author:
Mounir Samuel
Obesitas, ondervoeding en klimaatverandering zijn drie pandemieën die de mensheid wereldwijd bedreigen. In 2019 verklaarde de Lancet Commissie voor Obesitas dat deze drie pandemieën samen een mondiale syndemie vormen – ze spelen zich op hetzelfde moment op dezelfde plaats af, ze hebben een onderlinge wisselwerking waardoor complexe gevolgen ontstaan, en ze hebben gemeenschappelijke onderliggende maatschappelijke oorzaken.1 Welke waarden maken het mensen, gemeenschappen, professionals, beleidsmakers en onderzoekers mogelijk om op een zinvolle manier te overleven in een omgeving die obesogeen is, waar voedselonzekerheid heerst en die de uitstoot van broeikasgassen bevordert?
Authors:
Lieke van Houtum
Siegnella Concincion
Vincent Busch
Karen den Hertog
An academic-engaged project focused on refugee inclusion brought various stakeholders (refugees, policymakers, HR managers, NGOs working with refugees) together to debate issues of diversity, power,
and inclusion. The most profound example of this project came from Sarah, who had come to the Netherlands as a refugee 10 years prior. When Sarah was asked to describe the moment in her life when she felt strongest, she answered, “I don’t think I have such a story”. After encouragement from the group to think about which aspects of her narrative she would consider as powerful, she remained silent. “I don’t
know”, she confusedly answered. […] After several sessions of silence, Sarah ended up telling an astonishing story of herself as a young woman fighting for her freedom, and that of other women, in an oppressive, male-ruled environment in Eritrea, eventually joining the armed fight for the freedom of her country, leaving her family, social position, and her daily certainties behind.
How can one account for such a story being forgotten? Sarah, who was invigorated by revisiting her activist past, shared that she had only heard negative responses in the Netherlands – “No, you are not good enough”. “No, your language needs to be improved”. “No, you do not have the proper papers”. Thus, she had lost not only her confidence but also her life story. In the Netherlands, she was exclusively addressed about her shortcomings and the need to improve in order to fit into society. She became someone who had ‘nothing to say’.
Author:
Halleh Ghorashi
Metropolitan challenges such as energy transitioning, climate change, or increasing equal opportunities, for example, are both a challenge and an opportunity for developing and applying new insights, methods, and
technologies. The government is under constant pressure to further improve performance and effectiveness, and challenges are becoming more and more complex. Increasingly, there are multiple collaborative relationships with different partners, and that is why it is so necessary to have an optimal picture of all
available information immediately to hand. Research, knowledge on research, and the sharing of this knowledge at the right time and with the right people is increasingly necessary. Knowledge arises through social interactions, and communication amongst experts, stakeholders, and others is crucial for the knowledge needed in the city.
Author:
Caroline Nevejan
On 21 April 2020, openresearch.amsterdam launches after two and a half years of development. This digital platform allows researchers from the City of Amsterdam and its local universities and colleges to collaborate on, in, for, and with the city, as well as find each other while working on research projects to strengthen each other’s work from different perspectives. In the city, tasks are integrated and interdisciplinary – energy transition, for example, is about infrastructure, ICT, behavioural change, culture, mobility, health, and more besides. openresearch makes it possible to publish one’s own research and then see who else is working on the same subject from a different perspective. The Chief Science Office at the City of Amsterdam is developing and managing this platform with the ambition to create a place for research and innovation about, with, by, and for Amsterdam and the region, in order to create synergy between research in universities, colleges, and the city
Authors: Caroline Nevejan, Ida de Freitas, Elisabeth IJmker, Thijs van Schijndel, Carrie Leermakers, Bernadette Hillege
A traveller arrives in a village. She is hungry and asks several residents if they have food for her. “No”, says one after the other. Somewhat tired, she looks for a stone and makes a fire in the middle of the village. She puts a pot of water on the fire and puts the stone on the bottom of the pot.
Author: Caroline Nevejan
Local governments and universities have specific administrative cultures, and it is a complex task to introduce a new way of structurally sharing knowledge between them. Is it possible to design a structure of governance
for a platform where content is added by editors from all kinds of different organisations, each with their own culture and hierarchy? Even if participating parties are public organisations, sharing knowledge and making
information public is not a given. This has to do with the fear of risks –of disclosing potentially confidential or otherwise sensitive information. In the academic world, the power of publishers, through their management of intellectual property rights, is considerable to this day, and this regularly complicates knowledge sharing for academics. That is why a major movement has been set in motion that propagates and facilitates ‘open access’. Several cities, such as Amsterdam and Barcelona, propagate a policy in which data and information are open unless there are good reasons for them not to be, though even here, the reality is often different from practice.
Authors: Elisabeth IJmker en Ida de Freitas
A common challenge for digital platforms that support communities of practice is in finding ways to connect newly emerging knowledge to local areas where specialisation is actually happening. Looking at IKEA, and knowing it well as an employee, it is obvious that this global home furnishing retailer is continually enhancing its knowledge in order to keep its competitive advantage. Newly acquired knowledge is made available to the workforce through digital platforms to enhance ways of working, leading to further specialisation. This poses the question, ‘can a digital platform close the loop between the enhancement of local expertise, and still be relevant on a global scale? Can this local, practical knowledge become a back-and-forth sharing of craft knowledge globally?’
Author:
Ino Paap
Scientists at Dutch universities are among the most productive in the world. A great deal of knowledge per capita is created in our country by hardworking academics who also provide intensive education. As a result, their students are not only taught how research is done, but also how to generate new knowledge themselves. You would think that we in the Netherlands make optimal use of that, but we don’t. This is partly due to the way research results are published – in a large number of highly specialised scientific journals. In recent decades, scientific research has strongly focused on writing specialised articles that have been decisive in the extent to which they are quoted by other researchers, as well as the number of research grants acquired by them. Those who did not write enough were taken less seriously.
Author:
Paul Wouters
In 2016, I had the chance to work with around 200 students in four minor programmes in TU Delft’s TBM faculty on the TU Delft Open Research Platform. These students engaged with collaborative research within
teams, developing their own projects around real issues in the Netherlands and abroad. A project page was created for each group, and students were asked to make articles for every step of their work (analysis, communication tools, meeting notes, ideas) and share these online so that other students, as well as the stakeholders, could see them and give feedback.
Author: Pinar Sefkatli
Around 1700, the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley asked himself, ‘is there a sound when a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it?’ His bold answer was esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived. Thankfully, Berkeley believed in a God who perceived everything, and thus safeguarded existence. Does a researcher produce knowledge when there is no one around to perceive it? This might be a tad polemical, but it does go to the core of the issue – when does something count as knowledge? To start with, Plato defined knowledge as a justified, true belief. Usually, scientists do fine when it comes to justification with their methodologies, protocols, and logs. With truth, things start to get troublesome. Opinion differs on the feasibility (be it for theoretical or practical reasons), but most researchers agree that truth is at least something to aspire to. Yet who decides when the truth is reached? The researchers themselves?
Author:
Veronica Baas
In het eerste essay pleit Peter van Assche voor een radicale circulaire architectuur als een choreografie van transities van materialen van vast naar vloeibaar en gas en weer terug. Eveline Jonkhoff introduceert vervolgens de redenen waarom een circulaire strategie voor een stad als Amsterdam noodzakelijk is en beschrijft hoe deze is gemaakt met vele collega’s, bedrijven en bewoners van Amsterdam
Author:
Peter van Assche
Amsterdam’s ambition is to be a fully circular city by 2050. A city in which everyone can live and stay comfortably, with an eye for the boundaries imposed by the earth. This is good for the economy, for nature, for the people of Amsterdam, and its visitors.
Author:
Eveline Jonkhoff
What is the shape of progress? The 20th century defined it as an ever-rising line of growth, measured as national GDP. No matter how rich a nation already was, its success was seen to lie in yet more growth. But the
compounding crises since the turn of the century – from financial meltdown to climate breakdown to coronavirus lockdown – have now revealed how absurdly narrow a definition of progress that turned out to be.
Author:
Kate Raworth
Climate change sometimes seems like a Star Wars battle between the Force and the Sith. Information about the relationships between people, things, the environment, and ecology has been denounced since the Club of Rome announced their findings about the limits of material growth in 1972. Their argument is crystal clear to this day – the current rate of population growth, food production, industrialisation, depletion of natural resources, and of pollution in the Earth’s water, air, and soil is serious. The ‘bigger picture’ is too big, though, and information about sustainability has a paralysing effect. Because of the trees, the forest of information can no longer be seen.
Author: Juan-Carlos Goilo
How do you know where you are and who you are? How do you know with whom and with what you are? The City of Amsterdam is measuring its progress to see if it’s on the right track to becoming circular. It monitors the extent to which the city economy is circular and identifies the areas where more needs to be done. This will enable the city to measure whether its goal of halving the use of primary raw materials by 2030 is feasible, as well as the ambition to be 100% circular by 2050. The monitor specifically contributes to generating up-to-date insight into the raw and secondary materials the city consumes and produces that become waste at a later stage.
Author: Juan-Carlos Goilo