The Toronto Waterfront plan: A Slow Landscape as basis

A Slow Landscape forms the basis for redevelopment of the harbour area's at the Toronto waterfront. Together with a mixed-use strategy and slow traffic lanes and parks, this will be the place where, acording the masterplan, communities should 'grow'. Though in the renderings I do see also very big buildings, it seems there is place for small initiaves of groups of people or familyhouses.

To me these form the small seeds voor a slow transformation to a real city. The video shows a timeline where the built up area is growing. So there must be some rules or strategies in the masterplan to be flexible and react to changing programmes, circumstances and crisises. Check the movies:

Slow urbanism and private housebuilding in Holland

A video of the Dutch ministrie of internal affairs promoting self building of your own house. Main reason for them is the cancellation off many projects in Holland because of the absence of project developers and investers. Projects only get built when at least 70% is sold. Because of the crisis this is very hard, though private persons and families can get a loan from the banks to build there own house. But there are almost no possibilities for this in the most urban part of Holland the Randstad (Amsterdam-Utrecht-The Hague-Rotterdam)

Slow urbanism promotes this creating of city structures based on the smallest unit. The city will later transform itself into a more urban setting by natural processes. There is no need to always built 'instant city' ensembles by project developers. City life needs time to grow.

Check the movie, it is in Dutch.

Sketching Riga: Study area Vec Riga, Andrejsala and Petersala

In order to communicate my graduation project to a Dutch audience who are unknown with Riga I made a sketch of the area, and will illustrate with photo's the important buildings, public spaces and atmospheres.

Overview Sketch:

My graduation project is located north of the old center, Vec Riga

Presentation techniqs: ceci n'est pas un magritte

Two years ago I had presentation techniqs at the Academy of Architecture. We had to learn painting using oil-based paint. Subject was free to choose but the thema was the new and old. I choose Magritte's painting 'Dangerous Liaisons' and to replace the mirror by a Philips LCD-tv.  I like the surreal paintings of Magritte a lot. His intention was to make observer think. Like with his most famous painting 'ceci n'est pas une pipe' where he wanted to say it's not a real pipe, it is a painting.


Ceci n'est pas une Magritte




The Hague - Leeuwarden: Slow Urbanism and High Speed Train connexions

Today I had to go to my native Leeuwarden for a family visit. By car I get there within 2 hours. By train it takes almost 3 hours! And I did go by train. So I had all the time to think about this problem.

Finally, after much thinking, I got to Leeuwarden!

Slow Urbanism promotes public transport within the city. In case of the Netherlands this also means public transport in between cities as we don't have one big city. We are a country with a network of small interconnected cities. The strength of cities is it's own attractiveness and it's connectivity to other attractive cities. The trainstation environments themself have become attractive places.

How urban development can be a sparkle for revolution

As Tunisia's leader Ben Ali fled, many Libyans were occupied with local government meetings, where, at least in theory, decisions about local problems are made. The proceedings of one such meeting in a remote western corner of the country, broadcast on Libyan television, were an improbable spark.

Postcard from Tripoli

The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi has a habit of attending such meetings, dropping in unannounced at local halls. But when he arrived at this particular meeting in western Libya, the discussion quickly shifted to a rather difficult subject. A member of that local council pointed out that many people had no place to live.

Structural Vision 2040 of Amsterdam

 An unanimous approval on 17 februari by the city council of Amsterdam makes the Structural Vision 2040 defenitive, after a preparation of years. The vision aims at an attractive, sustainable, green city with enough houses on suitable locations. Briefly said this means adding about 70.000 dwellings to the existing city according to the municipality. Most must be accomplished by intensifying within the city and not by the traditional green field developments. This is a positive step because dutch cities, also Amsterdam, are usually not so dense compared with other European cities.

Slow Urbanism and Out of the old box; Oilcrisis of the 70s

Latest news is exploding oilprises world wide because of the democration wave what hit the Arab countries lately. Eventough there still is enough production (Saudi Arabia easely compensated the absence of Libyan oil lately) emotions of more revolutions bring back to mind the days of the 70s of the previous century. Here a interesting video about a new oilcrisis.

Slow Urbanism: 'Organical Urbanism' in Almere

Almere is a 'new town' built in 1975 on new polder land where before 1932 was the sea. It started out as a compact city where a lot of commuters lived on 30 train minutes of Amsterdam. Later it developed more suburban with nowadays a lot of (semi)detached and row housing estates. The suburbs are car orientated resulting in a grid lock on the highway to Amsterdam every day. Previously whole estates where developed within 5-10 years with uniformity in architecture and urban styles per developement. Now the developers are not able to build en masse because of lack of finance and demand on this scale a turning point in urban development is reached. Previous plans to build around 60.000 houses till 2030 are being abandoned.

previous plan shows in light red the expansion plans of Almere and needed public transport

Recently, 1 februari, the municipality presented a organical urban design development strategy (organische stedenbouw) and the task to apply it for a specific area called Europakwartier or Europe quarter. The Alderman Adri Duivesteijn is the driving force for these new urban developments. He is known when being Alderman in The Hague to have changed the city renewal projects drastical. Five years ago he introduced on a big scale  the private-house-building method in Almere to offer choice besides the big project developments.

Slow Urbanism in Antwerp and Oostende

A short video showing the slow urbanism of Belgium cities. Antwerp used to be a city with a lot of Belle Epoque buildings. With the invention of the lift and the firebrigade demands not to build higher than x layers because they could spray water higher a transformation started. Which is still ongoing. The video shows in some scenes clearly the transformation from a beatyfull but a bit provincial city atmosphere to a quite urban metropolitan setting. Mostly only the public space stayed the same showing again how important the urban design of these lanes and profiles are.

Slow Urbanism literature: The Spontaneous City of Urhahn

The buro of Urhahn has a long tradition on the theme of spontaneous development and how to accomodate it in urban design plan or strategies. Recently they published a new book called the 'Spontaneous city' (de Spontane Stad) with a manifest on spontaneous development. It's mainly about facilitating small initiatives and co-producing the development of an area as a municipality.

Slow Urbanism gains more publicity

The Netherlands used to be a quite consolidated development market. Developers and municipalities could afford to make big projects for whole areas and finance them in one go, off course in phases. The projects depended on just a small amount of big developers. Nowadays because of the crisis things changed. Municipalities and urbanists are looking for different way of developing because off the absence of big developers, big financing and absence of housebuyers demand. A new way of development is needed.

Recently at the digital forum for urbanists Ruimtevolk an article was written by Jurgen Hoogendoorn (municipality Amsterdam) en Herman Swen (municipality Zaanstad) about the topic. Summary and translation of the article 'Slow Urbanism as answer to the crisis' (' Langzame Stedenbouw als antwoord op de crisis'):

Results competition Lammermarktgebied Leiden

Sadly my entry was no winner, anyway I liked doing it. It's fun to be under pressure and design in a short time making the design a bit raw and pure but that's ok. A competition always generates a lot of ideas and energy when you make it. To finish it off I made a short explaining film of my design Bastion 2.0 hope you like it!

The winners of the competition were Edwin Santhagens (of buro Santenco) and Alex Letteboer (of atelier PRO) both from The Hague. Their design 'Outstanding Point' (Puntgaaf) won by, also like Bastion 2.0 , restoring the old bastion and rerouting traffic around it creating an pedestrian square with the museummill de Valk as landmark.

Competion Lammermarkt in the city Leiden

The former city architect of The Hague, Maarten Schmitt, is nowadays city architect for the municipality of Leiden. Together with the local architectural center RAP he set out an idea competition for the Lammermarkt area.

map of Blau made in 1649

The area used to be a bastion of the defense works of Leiden. In the end of the 19th century it was reconstructed into an english parkstyle. Nowadays it's a popular parkingplace for innercity shoppers. It has more or less a parasythical character as it doesn't bring any quality itself and lifes of this popularity of the innercity. Demand for parking is much bigger than currently is provided.

present situation Lammermarkt with the popular museum mill The Falcon

The goal of the competition is to design a parking garage for about 400-800 parking places and to make the area part of the surroundings. It should provide new quality to the area and even get cultural institutions or meaning.