Weblog of Zef Hemel on regional planning
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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…
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Out of control
Heard in Boston City Hall on 22 October 2015: Leaving Penn Station early in the morning, I took de Amtrack train from New York City to Boston, Massachusetts. There I would meet some people at City Hall, to discuss the planning of the city-region. Boston – a city of some 640.000 inhabitants – is preparing…
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Urban university walk
Seen and heard on 20 October 2015 at Morningside Heights, NYC: The weather, that day, was excellent. His walk started at the old campus site. Then he took us eastward, to the rim of the heights, showing us West Harlem deep down below. Wonderful view! John Reddick is from Yale, where he studied history…
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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…
Got any book recommendations?