Author: Zef Hemel
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Fun Palace
Read in the Guardian of 19 February 2015: The other conference I visited this weekend was ‘Flatpack Democracy Brighton’. They made me member of a forum. I told the audience about how to build local platforms of citizen-amateurs that can generate collective intelligence. Just when I was leaving the conference, Daniel Bernstein of The Synergy…
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Connect
Read in The Argus of 24 September 2015: Samer Bagaeen, teaching planning at the University of Brighton, showed me the local newspaper. In The Argus of last Thursday there were at least three pages on new high-rise initiatives in Brighton, UK. In ‘Building upwards is the way to go to meet housing crisis –…
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A neotechnic order
Read in ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ (1992) of Sir Peter Hall: While you are reading this blog post, I’m sitting in a plane flying to London, pondering on my lecture of yesterday at the University of Amsterdam for bachelor students in planning and geography. It was an introduction to planning, the last part: from the…
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The enemy is noise
Read in ‘There is simply too much to think about’ of Saul Bellow (2015): The first essay in the bulk of nonfiction of the great American novelist Saul Bellow, assembled in ‘There is simply too much to think about’, is called ‘Starting out in Chicago’. It’s about how the young man started writing novels…
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Strange, ironic
Heard in the Volkshotel, Amsterdam, on 17 September 2015: Theme of the first Ruimtevolk College last week at the Volkshotel (People’s Hotel) in Amsterdam was ‘Foreign capital in the city’. Two professors of the University of Amsterdam, Ewald Engelen (financial geography) and me (urban planning), were asked to give a lecture on the subject. Engelen…
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The city a superuniversity
Read in ‘The Urban University and Its Identity’ (1998) of Herman van der Wusten (editor): Last week the masterclass New York 2015 opened with a lecture of Herman van der Wusten, retired professor political geography at the University of Amsterdam. Van der Wusten referred to a conference he had organized in the ‘90s in Amsterdam…
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Insanely cool
Read in de Volkskrant of 30 May 2015: On 20 May 2015 Louise Fresco published her weekly column in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. That day it was on the future of Europe. Fresco is an expert in food production and president of the board of Wageningen University. Her column was a letter to…
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A wider world
Seen in the Stedelijk Museum on 13 September 2015: Enjoyed seeing ‘ZERO: Let Us Explore the Stars’ very much. The exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum is just great. At the time, when the young avant-garde artists from Düsseldorf, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, dived with their Amsterdam friends Henk Peeters, Jan Henderikse, Jan Schoonhoven…
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Remote worker
Read in Het Parool of 20 May 2015: I was asked to give a lecture on open planning for a team of politicians from Bavaria, Germany. They were visiting Amsterdam, hoping to learn more about local policies on biking. After my speech on globalization, information technology and planning (!), the team would make a…
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A new city
Read in Het Parool of 22 july 2015: Globalization. What does it mean? It means a growth of 15 per cent of internet traffic on the Ams-IX internet node last year. Ams-IX, based in Amsterdam, is the biggest internet node in the world. It’s not a node exactly, because it consists of a network of…