Zoekresultaten

Travelling large, the carbon footprint of Dutch business travel in 2016. An air-based affair.

Air, Money and Space

Airports look alike all over the world. Schiphol has conformed to the patterns of the airport, but its unique design makes it stand out. The book Megastructure Schiphol looks into the history of the Netherlands’ most famous national airport and its sophisticated appearance.Schiphol has grown in fits and starts as a result of ever-expanding traffic in freight and passengers. The area around Schiphol is constantly evolving, yet there is great consistency in the visual aspect of this airport, which can rightly be called a ‘megastructure’. This is not merely due to the efforts of its designers, who have strived to achieve a spectacular simplicity. Other factors, such as its location in a polder and the local planning culture, have also played a role.In Megastructure Schiphol an analysis of its metamorphoses over the past century demonstrates Schiphol’s unique character and its function as a model for other airports.

Crowd-pleasing, niche playing and gentrifying: Explaining the microgeographies of entrepreneur responses to increasing tourism in Amsterdam

Touristification of consumption spaces describes a process in which retail and hospitality businesses adapt to the tourist demand, eroding place attachment among local residents. While this is an important cause of resistance to tourism, little is known about the mechanisms that drive or mediate this process. We address this gap by interviewing entrepreneurs in Amsterdam. We found three distinct areas in close proximity where entrepreneurs responded to increasing tourism in markedly different ways; by crowd-pleasing, niche-playing and gentrifying. The resulting microgeographies of touristification of consumption spaces have not only been overlooked in literature, but also in urban policies. This causes a mismatch between the more generic, city-wide regulation and the highly differentiated effects of tourism on consumption spaces.

Practical guidelines for designing recycling, collaborative, and scalable business models: A case study of reusing textile fibers into biocomposite products

Our current take-make-dispose economic model faces a vital challenge as it extracts resources from the natural environment at faster rates than that the natural environment can replenish. A circular economy where businesses lower their negative impact on the natural environment by transitioning towards recycling business models (RBMs), one of the four principles of circularity, is suggested as a promising solution. For a RBM to become viable, collaboration among several stakeholders and across several industries is required. In addition, the RBM should be scalable to make a positive impact. Hence, developing RBMs is complex as organizations need to consider multiple principles imposed by the recycling, collaborative, and scalability dimensions of these business models (BMs). In addition, these principles often remain general and not actionable to the practitioners. Therefore, in this study, we researched the practical guidelines for viable RBMs that are also collaborative and scalable. The empirical setting is the reuse of textile fibers to develop biocomposite products. We studied three cases using a research-through-design approach. We contribute to the literature on RBMs by showing the six minimum practical guidelines for recyclability, collaboration, and scalability. We draw implications for within sector collaborations and advance the thought that lease constructs challenge the scalability of RBM.

Ownership perceptions in European hotel management agreements

The hotel management agreement is a common, but arguably at times misunderstood, hotel operating structure. This study has sought to explore how both owners and hotel management companies (“operators”) perceive aspects of ownership in managed hotels. In-depth interviews were held with both operator and owner executives and it was found that, even though interviewees appeared to be aware of the nature of the relationship established by a hotel management agreement, in practice operators in particular use a working definition of the model that is more akin to a lease. Misunderstandings of the hotel management agreement can cause confusion as to where risks and responsibilities lie. Based on these findings, we argue that ownership of the operating business, in addition to that of the hotel’s real estate, deserves to be more explicitly acknowledged and addressed.