Category: economie
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The Amsterdam Dream
Read in ‘’Landscapes of Power’ (1991) of Sharon Zukin: Walt Disney, the urbanist, is one of my heroes. His EPCOT, dating from 1982, was a very optimistic, brave enterprise, a utopian landscape of imagination that inspired many ordinary people. EPCOT is the abbreviation of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Disney wanted to build…
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Start-up City
Gelezen in Het Parool van 2 januari 2016: Alweer een voorbeeld van extreme ruimtelijke concentratie. Het gaat hier om tech start-ups. Dat zijn jonge, kleine bedrijfjes die nieuwe internetdiensten verkopen. Ze zorgen voor de digitalisering van de oude economie, zeg maar de toekomst van ons allemaal. Retail, mode, design, financiële dienstverlening, recruiting, reisbureaus, onderwijs,…
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Bad news
Read in NRC Handelsblad of 1 December 2015: There was some news on the future last week. Bad news. Hope you didn’t read it. In ‘The Netherlands will look like this in the future’, NRC Handelsblad reported on a scenario study of the Netherlands in the year 2050. The two long term scenario’s were made…
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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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Powering forward
Read in ‘The Metropolitan Revolution’ (2013) of Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley: The US economy is broken. How to repair it? Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley wrote a book about ‘how cities and metros are fixing our broken politics and fragile economy’. It is similar to Benjamin Barber’s ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’, only…
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Size, density, proximity
Heard in Brooklyn, NYC, on 19 October 2015: His name: Eddie Summers. Mr. Summers is the executive director of Brooklyn Education Innovation Network, NYC (BE.IN). He showed us around in Brooklyn. His walk was more than twenty kilometers long, the weather was beautiful, although a bit cold. We crossed downtown Brooklyn, headed for DUMBO,…
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Growth or decline
Heard in City Hall, New York, on Monday 19 October 2015: Last Monday, on the first day of the masterclass NYC in New York, we visited New York City Hall. The masterclass, initiated by the city of Amsterdam, studies the interaction between cities and their universities. Master: Zef Hemel, holder of the Wibaut Chair at…
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Inchoate
Heard in New York City on Wednesday 21 October 2015: Sharon Zukin, professor on urban sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY), was our guest on the morning of 21 October 2015. She told us about CUNY, how this local university of some 500.000 students was structured, who owned it (public, the state,…
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Filling in the blanks
Read in ‘Ghost cities of China’ (2014) of Wade Shepard: So how does the story end? In ‘Ghost Cities of China’, the New York based writer Wade Shepard tells ‘the story of cities without people in the world’s most populated country’. “Between now and then, the country’s urban population will leap to over one…
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Dutch enlightenment
Read in NRC handelsblad of 9 August 2015: Early August this year, some thousand historians gathered in Rotterdam for the 14nth ISECS conference on ‘The Long Eighteenth Century’ (1650-1815). A long report of the conference proceedings I read in the science supplement of NRC Handelsblad, written by Dirk Vlasblom. Fascinating stuff. It was about…