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The future of Nature-Driven Urbanism

Current urban design and urban planning aim to facilitate global, regional and local urbanization programs. This implies most of the planning documents give room to the types of land use that seem to require space ‘here and now’. The amount of new housing, office and other industrial and commercial space, accompanying amounts of parking lots and the necessity of new transportation routes, infrastructure and corridors are the main topics in the majority of future oriented plans. This is what is called ‘fast urbanism’ ((Roggema, R., Special Issue Urban Planning 6:946-956, October 2015)). It is the natural preferred habit of planners, decision-makers and politicians, and many developers, economists and municipal land departments. It seems as if this way of future planning brings the highest revenues, and this may be true, on the short term and for only a limited part of involved groups in the city. The impact of this way of planning the city has negative consequences for our health in general (see Roggema, this volume, Chap. 5; Han and Keeffe, this volume, Chap. 4; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11), and more specifically the quality of nature and biodiversity in our urban and natural environments (Birtles, this volume, Chap. 10; Tillie, this volume, Chap. 6; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11; Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3; Sijmons, this volume, Chap. 2). One way of coping with the effects is to ‘repair’ the damage after the city has been built. Aiming to increase the quality of small green spaces (Veldman, this volume, Chap. 13; Casagrande, this volume, Chap. 7), add temporary nature (Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3), or greening buildings (Bosse, this volume, Chap. 15), could help to prevent the largest impacts of fast urbanism. However, this will always be a solution that repairs, or greenwashes urbanization that has neglected the natural systems in the first place

The riddle of the real city

Does our knowledge about city and urban planning have solid ground? Can historical research promote creative thinking? How can we theorise about urban design and architecture in our age of the media? These questions have guided the creation of this multi-layered, richly documented and illustrated triptych, in which the Dutch architectural theorist Wim Nijenhuis pursues a creative goal: to stimulate new ways of thinking in architectural culture.Each part of the triptych treats distinctive issues with a particular style of writing:I – a treatise on urban history. Using the archaeological-genealogical toolkit Nijenhuis reveals the difference between urbanistic discourse in the modern and the classical age; the first staging the street and public space, the latter adhering to representation and mathematical order. In great detail he shows how modern urbanism did not emerge from idealistic motives and technical urgencies, but from an accidental mix of medical, engineering and aesthetical parlances, and how classical thinking on the city dissociated from Renaissance by an intertwining of military science, political science, anthropology and ethics.II – a bundle of essays about the condition of the city in our media age. In strikingly composed texts the author prophesies how rapid traffic and transmission speed of media will distort the perception of our real cities. This gradual event will profoundly influence the cultural role of architecture.III – a set of meditations about epistemological problems. Questioning the practice of critical writing, Nijenhuis proposes change of subjectivity (and thereby worldview), ethical indifference, parody, curative mythomania and hypermodern dilettantism.The book is composed as a cloud essay that serves to enrich the reader’s theoretical understanding of urban interventions. Dialoguing with philosophers like Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Sloterdijk and Virilio, Nijenhuis covers multiple disciplines such as urbanism, architecture, history, media science, philosophy and art. Stretching urbanistic thinking beyond its limits he carries the reader along into the miraculous world of the street, the engineer, the norm, the form, order, fortresses, discipline, army camps, city frontiers, the Temple of Salomon, the quest for beauty, the ‘impressiveness’ of images, speed, the tragedy of the omnipolis, solidification of time, and the liquidising potency of apocalypticism and Taoist non-action.The Riddle of the Real City testifies to four experimental exercises: transitory subjectivism to reveal hidden dimensions of the person, transhistorical verticality to communicate with singular events from the past, theory as toolkit and pursuing a personal path in reading and investigation.

The convenient city: smart urbanism for a resilient city

The surge of smart city technology, thinking, publications and consultancy offerings is significant. This implies there is something seriously developing. But to what extent is this a new development? In this paper the case will be made that urban design has always had to include new technologies and the smart city movement is just another wave of technology that demands inclusion in urban design practice. Nevertheless, city designers and policy makers should make use of the new possibilities on offering. Interactive urban environments could support healthy living, while smart and responsive regulators could minimize our energy use, and anticipative traffic management could help minimising congestion. Further to this, crowd-sensing could smoothen urban mobility and new forms of 3d-printing may re-use and reduce waste. The core of all new technological potential however is still to service people and to make life for urban citizens better. How could people in search for a convenient life be better serviced? Many of them want to have a nice house, a clean, safe and healthy environment, access to resources such as clean water, renewable energy and healthy food, a resilient place that is not vulnerable for all kinds of climate impacts and possibly some room for contemplation. With Maslow’s ladder in mind, achieving this not only depends on the availability and use of technology, rather a well-designed and integrated urban plan is asked for. Meeting the needs of contemporary urban citizens must be served by what urban design is supposed to deliver, only now with current available technologies in the back pocket. The paper emphasises how to design the convenient city by making use of the available technology, but it also takes a stand on the relativity of the current hype of smart cities.

Urbanism on water and ecology: The early example of Westerpark, Breda

In this chapter we move back in time, to when it was not an usance to base our city designs on the natural systems of water and ecology. By the end of the 1980s the dogma of separation of functions, and dividing the city in areas for working, living, leisure and traffic was slowly abandoned and especially the focus on the traffic system, more in particular the car, was leading to uproar. In this timeframe an alternative to apply the principles of nature in urban design was very new and, in the beginning, needed to be conquered on the traditionalists who would pertain using their old-school design standards. In this chapter the development story of Westerpark, and Heilaar-Steenakker is presented. This area in the western outskirts of the city of Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, was one of the first, maybe even the first to use knowledge about the water system, ecological typologies and nature as the basis for urban planning. This article starts with a description in sections two and three of the policy context at national level to illustrate the momentum of change from rationalism towards ecological planning. In section four the policy context in Breda in the early nineties is presented as the context within which the planning of Heilaar-Steenakker (Sect. 8.5) and Westerpark (Sect. 8.6) could be based in a strong sense of the natural processes of ecology and water that formed the landscape in history.

Retention basin as impetus for urbanism: O Mon, Cantho

Mid-Size Urbanism

Middelgrote steden zijn gedurende de 20e eeuw vaak aangepakt met een metropolitaan instrumentarium. Vraag is wat er gebeurt als we steden, regio's en zelfs metropolen benaderen vanuit een middelgrootstedelijk perspectief.