Harvesting: Kleineschalige publieke interventies in de stadswijk (original) (raw)

From District to Building: A Control Conundrum

2023

De Wallen has historically been a highly contested area within Amsterdam’s city centre. It is being plagued by issues such as overcrowding, as well as criminal activity, which have led the municipality to propose the relocation of several of its brothels into an Erotic Centre outside the historic centre of Amsterdam. This relocation however does not incorporate many typological features that currently enable a decentralized model of control in the district, allowing strong communities to exist. Instead, it is a representation of the centralized model of control that is currently in place in the city of Amsterdam, causing areas like De Wallen to be gradually "smoothened".

Policy and practice restructuring urban neighbourhoods in the Netherlands: Four birds with one stone

Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 1999

Since 1997, the Netherlands Ministry of Housing has taken a new course in its effort to restructure urban neighbourhoods. Compared with traditional urban renewal policy, the new approach is both similar and different. The traditional policy was to 'build for the neighbourhood' and was thus mainly concerned with accommodating sitting tenants and providing social housing. The new policy differentiates its approach and targets a diverse urban population, specifically by reducing the stock of social rented housing and expanding the stock of expensive owner-occupied dwellings. This paper reviews the new policy and questions the conventional wisdom of avoiding spatial concentrations of low-income households. Instead, it proposes objectives that seem much more viable: objectives related to strategic housing stock policy, economic vitality, and the sustainability of the city.

The private sector and public space in Dutch city centres

Cities, 2009

Private sector involvement in the design and financing of urban redevelopment projects has been relatively rare in the Netherlands. The public sector has traditionally played a central role in spatial planning and development. Since the 1980s, however, local authorities have been sharing the responsibility for urban development with the private sector. This article explores the viability of claims drawn from the literature about the effects of private sector involvement in redeveloped public space. Confronting those claims with our empirical material, we expected to find that the participation of the private sector would increase the redevelopment budget but would also lead to restrictions on public access. These two expectations are evaluated in light of the experience in four redeveloped squares in four Dutch cities: Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Enschede and 's-Hertogenbosch. We found that actors on the public and private sides have different interpretations of what constitutes a direct financial contribution. Those from the private sector believe they have made significant contributions, while those from the public sector see themselves as the sole funders. But they agree on the issue of free access: both public and private actors deny any negative effects of private sector involvement in this respect.

Overcome Gentrification: New Dutch Urban Paradigms

Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture

The study is related to the city of Rotterdam, investigated in relation to the spatial changes caused by the massive immigration that took place since the 1940s and of which contemporary spatial planning is taking place. The urban regeneration program, promoted by the Municipality of Rotterdam, provided for the reconnection of the district to the urban dynamics of the city and the improvement of public spaces and private accommodation to encourage a process of social gentrification. The social challenges that characterize contemporary cities, especially caused by the violent immigration, have defined a new urban paradigm and new forms of collaboration; as urban planners, we must continue to promote the formation of inclusive, multi-faceted and multitasking cities that are able to capture the diversity of sociality that inhabits the strategic character that makes them different and unique and to experiment welfare and social governance models that allow the shared experience within the urban analyzed contexts; only by making the immigrants protagonists of sociality and of urban civilization can we build stainless cities that resist to climate change and above all to social changes.

IJERT-Exclusion And Inclusion: Regenerating The Inner City In Dessau, Germany

International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology (IJERT), 2013

https://www.ijert.org/exclusion-and-inclusion-regenerating-the-inner-city-in-dessau-germany https://www.ijert.org/research/exclusion-and-inclusion-regenerating-the-inner-city-in-dessau-germany-IJERTV2IS70774.pdf Over the past 100 years Dessau has changed radically due to industrialization, war damage, socialist reconstruction and unoccupied buildings, which result from the shrinking of the city. Two third of the city were destroyed beyond recognition. Many historical buildings were ruined. The situation arose with the fact from the consequence with the effect of former GDR style and subsequent radical changes in all sphere of the society. This upheaval was accompanied by a loss of identity. The beginning of deindustrialization in the city caused mass unemployment and a devaluation of the city. The proposals/scenarios to overcome the situation comes up with the fact that architecture and city planning influence each other and are mutually dependent, much concern with organic and functional. These various elements should tied together and give it a historical legitimization, tracing its root back to the tradition of medieval, renaissance and baroque architecture and to the nineteenth century technological development. The proposed scenario is intended to realize the objective potentials of the domains from their esortic forms.

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2006

A central difficulty faced by the contemporary urban designer is that of giving shape to the formlessness of urban sprawl, creating collective spaces when human interactions are increasingly dispersed across electronic and vehicular communications networks. But until relatively recently it was difficult for the practitioner and student to readily locate literature on the phenomenon untinted by polemic and partisanship. Urban Mutations combines two sorts of essay, one hailing from academic analysis, the other from the architectural studio, which combine to produce a generally calm and considered appraisal of the dilemma faced by cities and their designers. The book originates in a small international symposium organized by the Aarhus School of Architecture in September of 2002, and the Danish editing of the volume retains a northern European and Scandinavian flavor in both its topical approaches (for instance, Poul Baek Pedersen's history of the Danish welfare city) and its somewhat uneven Englishlanguage editing (though credit is owing to the editors for making the selection available to English-language readers). Readers will find in here some statements of belief but no overall clarion call. The volume accepts that the management, through design, of the contemporary urban landscape is a challenge of such magnitude that it is best approached with a cool head: before we do anything, the title of the book tells us, let's step back and plot the mutation of the urban. When did it begin? (The book's short answer: with the relaxation of European and Scandinavian welfare state principles, and the adoption of neoliberal maxims.) What is its scale? (It is regional, national, international-'XL', to borrow architect Rem Koolhaas's shorthand, as several contributors do-but it equally affects small spaces and everyday life, and the welfare state bears a responsibility for increasing the political and physical scale of the urban footprint in the first place.) What is its nature? (Mobility-physical, social, economic-which apparently threatens traditional, fixed, concentrated cities.) Essays by political sociologist Bob Jessop and urban geographer Stephen Graham are notably helpful in getting the lay reader up to speed on these problems. An urban specialist might read the above abstract and contend that these phenomena have been known for a fair time now. Nonetheless, the serious literature on the politics and economics of the city is ever-more vast and dispersed, and there are few formats in which it is concisely connected, as it is here, tentatively, to the problems faced in the studio. When contemporary urban theory and practice are bridged it is usually as a supermodern eruption, headlines converted through CAD into mega-projects. Urban Mutations has dalliances with such projects, though their authors (like Jan Willem van Kuilenburg) will likely be unfamiliar to readers from American conference and publishing circuit, and more importantly, some chapters, like Morten Daugaard's, provide a commendably systematic account of pressing spatial issues (like 'after-sprawl'). Urban Mutations is actually of immediate interest to an architectural historian like the present reviewer. How long, one wonders, will the legacies of three successor waves of avant-garde architects who tackled urban mutations-Team X in the 1950s, Archigram in the 1960s, Rem Koolhaas and the 'Superdutch' school since-provide Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors .