Upscaling without innovation: Taking the edge off grassroot initiatives with scaling up in Amsterdam's Anthropocene forest (original) (raw)
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Although recently much has been done to improve planning both operationally and practically, spatial planning and urbanism are still dictated by the old Cartesian way of approaching the world. Reality however has taken on an enormous fl ux. Next to the space of places, we need to deal with the space of fl ows too. Next to economic global dimensions, we also need to deal with social, cultural and political fragmentation and reclustering processes on a local level in several ways. In this article, initial arguments are given on how planners and urbanists could possibly deal with these ongoing multi-dimensional worlds in space and time: fl uviology. It is a plea for a more actor-oriented approach in effi cient networks of surprising reciprocal fragments of mutual interest, for more consistant interchange between theory and practice and for associative democracy beyond the plan. The article is therefore accompanied by a few recent planning examples and planning experiments in the Netherlands.
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Global climate change impacts the future of urbanism. The future is increasingly uncertain, and current responses in urban planning practice are often human-centered. In general, this is a way to respond to change that is oriented towards improving the life of people in the short term, often extracting resources from the environment at dangerous levels. This impacts the entire ecological system, and turns out to be negative for biodiversity, resilience, and, ultimately, human life as well. Adaptation to climatic impacts requires a long-term perspective based in the understanding of nature. The objective of the presented research is to find explorative ways to respond to the unknown unknowns through designing and planning holistically for the Zernike campus in Groningen, the Netherlands. The methods used in this study comprise co-creative design-led approaches which are capable of integrating sectoral problems into a visionary future plan. The research findings show how embracing a n...
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Our daily territories are built by traditional planning that not only use sophisticated methods of decision top-down, but is also influenced by strong economic interests. Therefore, this kind of process imposes technocratic and political important changes in the ecosystem and living space of people without their awareness about what is happening around. This article presents a growing alternative in territorial planning that has drawn from various disciplines as well as social and historical circumstances constantly changing over the last forty years. Since the 70s and 80s several social and academic movements begin to question the logic of rational and authoritarian planning as well as experiment methods and techniques that involve people participation to bring processes into the sphere of everyday life needs. From this emerging point of view, Urban or Regional Planning was seen as an opportunity, a tool to recognize the resources of territories and reposition the capabilities and role of local communities in the protection and management of their commons (Alexander, 1977). In the 90s social sciences that started to work with planning processes, particularly anthropology, indicated that this view was not complete because the lack of attention to cultural issues and local identity, underlining the need to add this fundamental dimension to planning (Althabe and Selim, 2000). In the early 2000s, the revolution in multimedia languages and consolidation of Civic Art end to form a transdisciplinary scenario that we call collaborative planning. That means hundreds of experiences of emerging democracy in the world with the collaboration of artists, planners, universities, local governments and communities, reinforcing the practice of Do it Yourself, against total democratic delegate. In that sense, there has been a great work in the last years in order to find better methodologies to safeguard natural and social commons (Ostrom, 2005) as well as understand how to make a collective management of them.
Advocating for the Landscape: Representing Silent Interests in Southern Limburg
Design Principles and Practices 16.1: 31–39, 2023
Who speaks for the landscape? It has no voice, yet it communicates. It is not represented, yet it has silent interests. The multitude of spatial claims on the landscape makes the tension between these interests and functional and/or economic demands often painfully clear. We discuss how our architectural practice advocates for the interests of the landscape. Instead of treating it as a bare substrate that we can manipulate, we treat it as a dynamic and integral life support system that is required for our common future existence. The landscape is an active, open, and systemic totality composed of interacting abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic systems. By understanding the interactions of these systems and dynamically linking their features, we create “landscape frameworks” in which we make the landscape qualities and identities speak for themselves. When we have grasped with sufficient clarity what the landscape tells us, we advocate for it, providing roadmaps to address upcoming transitions like sustainable agriculture, climate adaptation, the energy transition and space claims for of various economic domains.