Weblog of Zef Hemel on regional planning
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Social entrepreneurs
Read in The Guardian of 20 July 2015: In Amsterdam it’s bad. In San Francisco it’s even worse. Yesterday we made a walking tour with policymakers of the municipality of Amsterdam who want to promote local startup ecosystems. We crossed the eastern part of the inner city. How to attract new tech-jobs?, they asked.…
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Go West
Read in NRC Handelsblad 0f 21 August 2015: The number of expats in Amstelveen , the southern suburb of Amsterdam, has doubled over the last ten years. You could read it in NRC Handelsblad last summer. The newspaper quoted a research report of CBS, the Central Statistical Bureau in the Netherland. In 2005 there…
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Wat ons te doen staat
Gehoord in de Eerste Kamer der Staten Generaal op 1 oktober 2015: Vooruit dan. Nog eenmaal in het Nederlands. Omdat dit de toekomst van het Koninkrijk betreft. Over die toekomst organiseerden het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR) afgelopen week een uiterst boeiende dag in de Eerste Kamer…
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Keep it light
Discussed in the House of Lords (Eerste Kamer) in The Hague on 1 October 2015: The conference was about ‘Contours of the Third Century of the Dutch Kingdom’ in the House of Lords (Eerste Kamer) at the Binnenhof in The Hague. The seminar was organized by the Scientific Advisory Board of the Dutch Government (WRR)…
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Braindrain
Prepared on 30 September 2015 in Amsterdam: This week the Dutch government commemorated two centuries Royal Dutch kingdom in Amsterdam, the capital city (1814-2014). Today I will give a lecture in the House of Lords (Eerste Kamer) in The Hague on ‘the third age of the Dutch kingdom’ (2014-2114). How will the next age…
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Building green belts
Read in The Economist of 26 September 2015: Something’s badly wrong. On my way back from the UK, I read an article in this week’s edition of The Economist on the booming housing market in and around London. Despite stagnant incomes, Britons have taken on masses of cheap debt. All this demand has run…
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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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