My Present Outlook on and Plan for the Year of 1979 (original) (raw)
Related papers
New York 2140, Back to the Future
An extended consideration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). The story is a heist plot engineered by residents of the Met Life Building in the year 2140, when the seas had risen 50 feet. Topics: Fiction and reality, patterns, transportation infrastructure, formal order encompassing narrative chaos, politics, from the micro politics the Met Life Tower, to New York City politics, and beyond that to the nation and the world financial system. Includes photographs of the current New York skyline in which you can see the Met Life Building as it currently exists.
My Research Plan for the coming years
How is strategy done? How can we do it better? Those are central questions for my research agenda. I draw on data about the present and lessons of the past.
AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 2008
Giving form to the links between human activities and physical space is the essence of environmental design. The association of social-scientists, architects and planners within lAPS has therefore been a deliberate choice, some twenty years ago. lts international character bears evidence to the interrelatedness of problems manifesting themselves in many different countries: quite often the problems of a particular period vary less from one country to another, than they vary between our period and another within one country. In its recent 4th Memorandum on Environmental Planning, the Dutch gouvernment has strongly emphasized the value of spatial quality. According to our Minister of Housing, Planning and Environmental Management, spatial policy should aim at the realization of th ree values: the functional, the experiential and the future value. The first and the second va lues were not invented by our Minister, but already formulated about two thousand years ago by Vitruvius. The functional value expresses the necessity to fit our buildings, cities and landscapes to the needs of society. The experiential value touches upon that complicated relation between design and its appreciation by the users. The thirdelement, the future value, is relatively new. Sometimes one has the feeling, that this value was formulated at a time that relatively new buildings and urban areas appeared to be little valued, necessitating major rehabilitation af ter only a short period since their completion. Put paradoxically: "Areas with future value are those which we re not planned with that principle in mind". One can think of areas from a more remote past, e.g. the medieval inner cities, which in hindsight have proved capable to accommodating major socioeconomic changes in their buildings and urban spaces. This brings me to the theme of IAPS-IO, "Looking back to the future". I think it was an excellent choice to hold this conference in Delft. Delft has a beautiful medieval inner city, relatively unscarred by time. This core is surrounded by the succesive layers of 19th and especially 20th century extensions. The University of Technology, originally integrated in the historical core, has grown so impetuously after W6rld War Two, that a separate campus with all its advantages and disadvantages became necessary. The intimate links of the university with the totality of urban life had to be cut because of the large scale of the faculty buildings; yet another con tribution to a world whieh falls apart. The theme of this conference urges us to look back to the past, to see which qualities were won and which were lost in the historie development of our spatial environment. In principle, one might expect that growing experience would bring a clearer insight in the needs of the future. Very of ten however, a new generation seems to demand the right to make its own mistakes. Probably the rapid evolution of our society poses a host of new problems, for which lessons from the past can only provide partial answers. In the City of Delft, the present, the past and the orientation towards the future show themselves clearly in the varied urban landscape. I wish the participants of lAPS-IDa good and succesful conference, and, inspi red by the past, a bright future. Co van Tol Dean of the Faculty of Architecture
Futures and Foresight Events 2025
Nuts About Leadership, 2025
The third edition of the Futures and Foresight Events calendar (2025) covers selected professional development opportunities that primarily focus on the use of futures studies and foresight in societal, technological, economic, environmental, political, and value-based (STEEPV) contexts, as well as training and learning in foresight. Only announcements that were publicly available until December 31, 2024, were used to prepare this list, which includes dates, titles, descriptions, locations, and links to the respective web pages.