Tag: new york

  • Postmetropolitan University

    Read in De Omslag of 2015:

  • Immigrant city

    Seen at the IDFA, Amsterdam, on 29 November 2015: ‘In Jackson Heighs’,  the new documentary of Frederic Wiseman, opens with muslims praying in mosques, garages, sheds. Welcome to Queens, New York. On the last day of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2015 I went to see the three-hour movie in a cinema at the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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,…