Author: Zef Hemel
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Looking backward
Heard in Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam, on 27 October 2015: The 740th anniversary of Amsterdam was celebrated this year in Pakhuis de Zwijger, on 27 October. Another ten years to go. Then the city will celebrate its 750 anniversary. What should we add to the city? What’s still missing? A selection of speakers was asked…
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Bombing does not help
Seen in the Opera house, Amsterdam, on Friday 13 November 2015: Strange. Very strange indeed. On Friday night, while we were enjoying ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ of Francis Poulenc at the Amsterdam Opera and were captured by the killing of all those nuns in revolutionary Paris by the mob’s guillotine – the end scene of…
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The End of Biking
Read in Het Parool of 2 June 2014: The era of Amsterdam as a great city for biking is coming to an end. After twenty years of growth we will no longer cycle that much. Really a pity. The miraculous growth of biking in the Dutch capital was due to many things: high parking…
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The future
Read in ‘Future City’ (1973) of Roger Elwood (editor): Today I will give a lecture at the conference for teachers in geography of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (KNAG) in Ede, the Netherlands. Subject: the future. Some 800 teachers will be there. Where to begin? How to end my story? For inspiration, I reread ‘Future…
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Look east
Read in ‘Ghost Cities of China’ (2015) of Wade Shepard: People are complaining about the steeply rising housing prices in Amsterdam. They know it’s nothing compared to cities like London, New York City and even San Francisco, which are much worse. Do they know that housing prices in the Chinese cities are the highest…
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The end of things-as-known
Read in ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet’ (1970) of Saul Bellow: Saul Bellow’s ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet’, published in 1970, is a must read. Mr. Sammler, a survivor of the Holocaust and an intellectual, is the hero of the novel. He lives in New York. His age: seventy-something. Every day he takes the bus from his apartment on…
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Oversupply
Read in ‘Ghost Cities of China’ (2015) of Wade Shepard: Tomorrow I will give my yearly lecture in the bachelor study course ‘Perspectives on Amsterdam’ at the University of Amsterdam, theme: Political Economy. This time I will focus on the Zuidas (Southaxis) project, the new CBD of Amsterdam. Will it be successful? How much…
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Constantine’s dream
Seen in The Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, on 11 October 2015: The exhibition in the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), on Dam square in Amsterdam, is on Rome, the capital city of the Roman empire at the time of the emperor Constantine, after the edict of Milano (313 AD). I visited it on a Sunday afternoon…
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Interdependence
Read in ‘Building Gotham’ (2003) of Keith Revell: We met at Penn Station, New York. From there we would take the train to Boston. He had the tickets. The station, dating from the sixties, looked like Dante’s Inferno, but then as if you’re in a science-fiction movie, from the Jetsons, a world deep under the…
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Extreme concentration
Read in ‘The Metropolitan Revolution’ (2013) of Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley: Yesterday there was a round table discussion in The Hague on the future of the so-called Randstad. Does the Randstad function as one polycentric network of cities? The discussion was mainly on innovation and agglomeration economies, I suppose. Most people in this…