Author: Zef Hemel
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Winner takes all
Read in The Economist of 12 June 2016: In the UK, just like in many other countries, regional inequality is growing fast. London is the big winner, cities in the North are the big losers. As Richard Florida already forecasted years ago, the world is getting pretty spiky. The principle is simple: ‘success breeds…
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Wall of Money
Read in NRC Handelsblad of 9 and 12 June 2015: Alarming news. Vacant real estate in the Netherlands since 2010 more than dubbeled. The total amount of square meters empty office space is now 9 million, of m2 empty retail space it’s 2,7 million. And it gets worse, even after the crisis. Why? Because…
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Big mistake
Read in ‘Red Plenty’ (2010) of Francis Spufford: What’s wrong with Russian society? Also with the West? Only after reading ‘Red Plenty’ of the British writer Francis Spufford I really understood. It’s the withering of social sciences. Spufford’s book, which I can recommend everybody, is a lively, dramatised history of the postwar years of the…
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Happy tunnel
Seen in Amsterdam Bijlmermeer on 5 June 2015: This August the builders will start their amazing construction works. The Gaasperdammerweg – a six lane freeway cutting throug the Bijlmermeer – will be enlarged and tunneled. Roy Berents, an urban planner of the city of Amsterdam, gave a lecture on the engineering of this project…
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Landscape of Consumption
Read in ‘Landscapes of Power’ (1991) of Sharon Zukin: Do you remember? One of the first critical papers on gentrification was written by Sharon Zukin, the Brooklyn based professor of Sociology at City University of New York, in 1991. Long before Amsterdam planners noticed the urban phenomenon, Zukin wrote about the destructive character of…
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Alternative approach
Seen in Amsterdam Southeast on 4 June 2015: Bas Hissink Muller, San Verschuuren and me are running a studio for some forty students in urban planning of the University of Amsterdam in Amsterdam Bijlmermeer. We’re practicing platformization in this Modernist neighborhood dating from the seventies. A month long we’re staying in an empty office building…
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Global consolidation
Read in ‘Global City-Regions’ (2001) of Allen Scott (ed.): One of the students protested. My question on consolidation and which three factors explain this consolidation according to Saskia Sassen in her paper ‘Global Cities and Global City-Regions: a Comparison’, was false according to him. Her consolidation was not spatial, while I suggested it was. Sassen…
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Urban Sapiens
Read in ‘Sapiens’ (2015) by Yuval Noah Harari: Fascinating book. The Israeli world historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote a history of human beings that will thrill you when you read it. He explains how horrible the Agricultural Revolution really was for sheep, pigs, cows and chicken, and how disastrous industrial agriculture nowadays is. It is…
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Being honest
Read in The Economist of 30 May 2015: So many cities will decline. Not because of suburbanisation, but for demographic reasons. People are getting older. The younger ones are getting mobile. In Japan 20 cities with more than 300.000 inhabitants are already declining, so do 60 out of 107 German cities. In The Economist an…