The World Health Organization engages cities and communities all over the world in becoming age-friendly. There is a need for assessing the age-friendliness of cities and communities by means of a transparently constructed and validated tool which measures the construct as a whole. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire measuring age-friendliness, providing full transparency and reproducibility. The development and validation of the Age Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ) followed the criteria of the COnsensus-based Standards for selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN). Four phases were followed: (1) development of the conceptual model, themes and items; (2) initial (qualitative) validation; (3) psychometric validation, and (4) translating the instrument using the forward-backward translation method. This rigorous process of development and validation resulted in a valid, psychometrically sound, comprehensive 23-item questionnaire. This questionnaire can be used to measure older people’s experiences regarding the eight domains of the WHO Age-Friendly Cities model, and an additional financial domain. The AFCCQ allows practitioners and researchers to capture the age-friendliness of a city or community in a numerical fashion, which helps monitor the age-friendliness and the potential impact of policies or social programmes. The AFCCQ was created in Dutch and translated into British-English. CC-BY Original article: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186867 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers "Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: State of the Art and Future Perspectives") https://www.dehaagsehogeschool.nl/onderzoek/lectoraten/details/urban-ageing#over-het-lectoraat Extra: Vragenlijst bijlage / Questionnaire attachement
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In the recent ‘Regional outlook’, the OECD (2014) convincingly argues that cities can be the drivers of national growth and recovery: in principle, their diversity and density makes people and companies more productive and innovative. This is not only a tale of large cities: over the last decade, as recent studies demonstrate (e.g. Dijkstra, 2013) many smaller and medium-sized cities across Europe were important economic engines. But this did not happen automatically: to make that happen, ‘getting cities right’ is the key challenge, and action on the city level matters! As demonstrated by recent OECD data (OECD, 2014), poorly organised cities fail to reap their economic potential.
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Contribution to conference magazine https://husite.nl/ssc2017/ Conference ‘Smart Sustainable Cities 2017 – Viable Solutions’ The conference ‘Smart Sustainable Cities 2017 – Viable Solutions’ was held on 14 June 2017 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Over 250 participants from all over Europe attended the conference.
UNStudio, een in Amsterdam gevestigd, internationaal toonaangevend architectenbureau, wil hun Green Mile-plan1 voor het centrum van Amsterdam uitwerken om een 'post-pandemisch groen stedenbouwkundig ontwerp' voor de stad te onderzoeken - kunnen groene gebieden worden (her) ontworpen om ruimte aan voetgangers te geven, terwijl voorkomen wordt dat mensen zich niet op dezelfde plek ophopen? De Corona-pandemie benadrukte ook de noodzaak om vaart te zetten achter duurzaamheidsdoelstellingen, waaronder de ambitie om groenere stedelijke omgevingen te creëren. In dit voorstel wordt stadsmeubilair voor de Green Mile ontworpen en gerealiseerd met hergebruikte materialen, en met post-pandemische stedenbouwkundige en bouwkundige principes. GPGroot en Schijf, leveranciers van rest- en gebruikte bouwmaterialen2, willen hun kennis over circulaire materiaalverwerking en -levering in de stedelijke context graag verder ontwikkelen. Het initiatief van UNStudio biedt een unieke kans om deze kennis te ontwikkelen, in samenwerking met de HvA en het onderzoek in de Robot Studio, dat zich tot nu toe met name richt op circulair gebruik van hout voor binnen-toepassingen. Het project volgt een iteratief ontwerpproces van parametrisch ontwerp en digitale productie. Bij het ontwerp wordt rekening gehouden met functionele eisen en beschikbare materialen, evenals met de specifieke kenmerken van de stedelijke context waar het prototype zou kunnen worden geplaatst. De productie van het prototype zal worden uitgevoerd met 6-assige robots in de HvA Robot Studio. De resultaten zijn ontwerpen en een prototype, maar ook kennis over het verbinden van parametrisch ontwerp en robotproductie met buitentoepassingen, met bijzondere aandacht voor rest- en gebruikte materialen. Innovatieve aspecten zijn de overstap naar structureel belaste buitentoepassingen en het gebruik van een breder scala aan materialen dan alleen hout. Hiermee kan het project bijdragen aan de ontwikkeling van “smart industry” en de circulaire economie, beide relevant voor de maatschappelijke uitdagingen zoals vastgelegd in de nationale Kennis- en Innovatie-Agenda’s voor wetenschap en technologie.
The message we intend to communicate is that in the future, our cities can (partly) feed themselves with healthy foods grown in microbial gardens, which can be part of a household kitchen or community garden for providing fresh green "vegetables" where the energy for the artificial LED lighting for the microbial garden is coming from solar panels on roofs thereby making this system free from fossil energy.For Floriade 2022, we would like to introduce the Urban Microbial garden pop-up restaurant for feeding and greening the city. The menu will include a speciality microbiota vegan burger made from algae, seaweed, fungi and fava beans served on dishes made from baked mycelium. Our objective is to elicit consumer perception and opinion on the future of our new microbial food chain, which is fully sustainable and safer for the environment. Consumer opinions will be video recorded and compiled into a short movie/video for further inspiration and analysis for product/service development. This pop-up restaurant is a logical extension of the Art-Work by 4F.STUDIO (Kim van den Belt, Joshua Kelly, Steven Wobbes) already present in Kavel 123 at Floriade as part of the Light Challenge. The artwork depicts a future object for community gardens which supports the idea of locally produced microbes. Since we already have work at Floriade, this living-lab project has the benefit of broadening the vision of their work through more in-depth and visceral feedback.
In recent years there has been an increasing need for nature inclusive solutions in the construction sector. The practice asks for new solutions contributing to the development of sustainable, resilient and liveable cities. Under the guidance of the Dutch government, greening of the cities has become one of the aims of municipalities in the Netherlands and the focus of some emerging companies and design offices. In cities, quay masonry walls, thanks to their close contact with water, have the potential to be ecologically engineered to favour vegetation, thereby contributing to the renaturing of urban areas. By building a prototype of an innovative masonry building system, this project aims to investigate the potential for improving the integration between masonry quay walls and vegetation. The set-up consists of a dry-stacking system for brick masonry: strong polyamide elements interconnect the bricks, providing strength to the masonry without the need for mortar. The space in between bricks, traditionally filled with mortar, is to be filled with compost material, providing an ideal substrate for plant growth and a buffer for water storage (figure 1). In addition to improved integration between masonry walls and vegetation, the proposed dry-stacking system allows for easy reuse of bricks, thereby contributing to circularity and sustainability of the building industry. The project broadens and strengthens the national network in the field of urban ecology by bringing together expertise from the fields of architecture, ecology and the construction sector, from both academia and practice.
