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The Street-Wise University: The Amsterdam Knowledge Mile as an Intermediary and Place-Making Concept

Universities have become more engaged or entrepreneurial, forging deeper relations with society beyond the economic sphere. To foster, structure, and institutionalize a broader spectrum of engagement, new types of intermediary organizations are created, going beyond the “standard” technology transfer oces, incubators, and science parks. This paper conceptualizes the role of such new-style intermediaries as facilitator, enabler, and co-shaper of university–society interaction, making a distinction between the roles of facilitation, configuration, and brokering. As a case study, the paper presents the Knowledge Mile in Amsterdam as a novel form of hyper local engagement of a university with its urban surroundings that connects the challenges of companies and organisations in the street to a broad range of educational and research activities of the university, as well as to rebrand the street.

Birthplace of the beatles: place making and the power of passion

Place-making: From a Residents’ Initiative to a Participatory Effect: The Case Study of BOMBAST.

Yes, We Can: Putting co-creation into practice at Spinoza Imaginaries Lab & Café

In Amsterdam we have been working with a diversity of partners in the city for more than a decade now. Our study and research in our research group Cities & Visitors have been focused on the image and reputations of our cities, including the image and reputation of different areas of the city itself. Year after year, we have seen together with our students in different European cities, how somehow intangible concepts truly influence the prosperity and the prospects of those living in different city areas. While some areas have been considered cool and ‘the place to be’ (mostly in the carefully restored older city centers) others suffer from a resilient bad reputation (see especially some neighborhoods in the peripheral areas)However, we have also realized that good and bad reputations do not last forever. Before the covid pandemic, many of the beautiful but overcrowded historical centers had become ‘no-go areas’, according to many residents. Simultaneously, we were also starting to identify clear signals that the reputation of some ‘peripheral’ places that had been considered the ‘worse places’ for years were beginning to be reframed. Operating from one of these peripheral areas in Amsterdam, the Bijlmer in the South East, we had already started to discover the interest, the knowledge and the creativity that slowly but surely had been nesting in Bijlmer, home to people from all over the world. We also realized that many of these areas had also become the home of our university campuses, including student housing. At the same time we also saw that lots of work still needed to be done and that all of the appealing potential was not necessarily visible at first sight. The area has been lacking infrastructure to articulate and put the already existing interest on the map. Challenged by our students, we reflected on our role as a university of applied sciences and decided to put some results of our research into practice. We have started a real life Lab & Café with a number of partners in Amsterdam South East. In the Lab we work on place making, building maps, exploring and documenting in cooperation not only with our students and co-researchers but also (and especially) with many key actors in Bijlmer who believed in and advocated for its potential before others. These experiments and practices respond to the need to develop (by doing) a more polycentric mapping of our cities and to stimulate different views on creativity and creative business initiatives. The work has the extra impact of being part of a consortium of five cities in Europe linked by our project IMAGE. In the Ureka workshop we would love to share with you how Spinoza Imaginaries Lab & Café has enabled us to become better ‘agents of change’ in our campuses. Through a ‘’Yes We Can,’’ approach one finds commonalities and discovers that co-creation is also a matter of commitment and trust and that creativity is inherent to life and belongs to all life phases and facets.

The Challenges of Urban Ageing

Urban ageing is an emerging domain that deals with the population of older people living in cities. The ageing of society is a positive yet challenging phenomenon, as population ageing and urbanisation are the culmination of successful human development. One could argue whether the city environment is an ideal place for people to grow old and live at an old age compared to rural areas. This viewpoint article explores and describes the challenges that are encountered when making cities age-friendly in Europe. Such challenges include the creation of inclusive neighbourhoods and the implementation of technology for ageing-in-place. Examples from projects in two age-friendly cities in The Netherlands (The Hague) and Poland (Cracow) are shown to illustrate the potential of making cities more tuned to the needs of older people and identify important challenges for the next couple of years. Overall, the global ageing of urban populations calls for more age-friendly approaches to be implemented in our cities. It is a challenge to prepare for these developments in such a way that both current and future generations of older people can benefit from age-friendly strategies. CC-BY Original article: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15112473 https://www.dehaagsehogeschool.nl/onderzoek/lectoraten/details/urban-ageing#over-het-lectoraat

Shared decision making in chronic care in the context of evidence based practice in nursing

In the decision-making environment of evidence-based practice, the following three sources of information must be integrated: research evidence of the intervention, clinical expertise, and the patient’s values. In reality, evidence-based practice usually focuses on research evidence (which may be translated into clinical practice guidelines) and clinical expertise without considering the individual patient’s values. The shared decision-making model seems to be helpful in the integration of the individual patient’s values in evidence-based practice. We aim to discuss the relevance of shared decision making in chronic care and to suggest how it can be integrated with evidence-based practice in nursing. We start by describing the following three possible approaches to guide the decision-making process: the paternalistic approach, the informed approach, and the shared decision-making approach. Implementation of shared decision making has gained considerable interest in cases lacking a strong best-treatment recommendation, and when the available treatment options are equivalent to some extent. We discuss that in chronic care it is important to always invite the patient to participate in the decision-making process. We delineate the following six attributes of health care interventions in chronic care that influence the degree of shared decision making: the level of research evidence, the number of available intervention options, the burden of side effects, the impact on lifestyle, the patient group values, and the impact on resources. Furthermore, the patient’s willingness to participate in shared decision making, the clinical expertise of the nurse, and the context in which the decision making takes place affect the shared decision-making process. A knowledgeable and skilled nurse with a positive attitude towards shared decision making – integrated with evidence-based practice – can facilitate the shared decision-making process. We conclude that nurses as well as other health care professionals in chronic care should integrate shared decision making with evidence- based practice to deliver patient-centred care.