Tag: amsterdam
-
The End of Biking
Read in Het Parool of 2 June 2014: The era of Amsterdam as a great city for biking is coming to an end. After twenty years of growth we will no longer cycle that much. Really a pity. The miraculous growth of biking in the Dutch capital was due to many things: high parking…
-
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…
-
International solidarity
Read in Historisch Nieuwsblad nr.9 2007: On an excursion last week, my students visited the Spaarndammerbuurt, Amsterdam. There, in museum Het Schip, they listened to the story of the Great War. The neighborhood, our young guide explained, was built in 1914-1920. In 1914 one million Belgian refugees had fled to the Netherlands in only a…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…