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.