Zoekresultaten

Forgotten Neighbourhoods

In the Netherlands, almost everyone has an image of 1930s neighborhoods, post-war neighborhoods, and Vinex locations. That is very different for the neighborhoods with social housing apartments from the 1970s and 1980s. They are forgotten, hardly known, even professionally. And that is a problem because a wave of restructuring and densification projects is imminent for these areas. They are related to the post-war neighborhoods, but also have fundamentally different spatial characteristics. Moreover, within the fragmented practice of spatial development, there is little shared knowledge on plans in other municipalities or housing associations. Even less is known whether these neighborhoods offer space for tackling the persistent housing shortage and solving other major social challenges, such as energy, biodiversity, circularity and inclusion. It is time for an inventory, and this project undertakes the challenge.In the planning for these residential areas, municipalities, developers and housing corporations set the framework, but it is the urban development and architecture firms that have to translate this into concrete design solutions. We focus on these SMEs. With this research project, we map out the ambitions, challenges and opportunities of the restructuring of these residential areas in three steps: What type of plans and ambitions are there for these residential areas? To this end, we investigate cases by means of policy analyses of the environmental visions and area visions. What characterizes the spatial-social structure of these neighborhoods? To this end, we make a comparative spatial-social analysis of several cases, also in relation to pre-war and early post-war ones. What opportunities and challenges does their restructuring offer? To this end, we use the acquired insights to explore strategies in co-creation sessions with external partners. In this presentation, we will share some of the outputs of this process.

The climate is right up your street

This book of examples suggests a variety of options for easy and accessible climate-resilient retrofitting of residential areas. The case studies for a set of common streets in the Netherlands will match urban settings in other countries. The examples show that effective climate-resilient retrofitting is usually quite simple and does not necessarily incur higher costs than traditional approaches, particularly in flat areas. An examination of typical Dutch urban street designs shows how climate resilience can be incorporated under different conditions while keeping costs down with retrofitting. We have investigated the effects of four retrofitting variants and specified their cost and benefits, applying a typology of common residential street characteristics. We sincerely hope these case studies inspire you to get started in your own town, city and country, because the climate is right up your street.

Using neuro-architecture to reinforce participatory planning and design

Urban renewal and urban area development projects are by nature highly complex processes involving a multiplicity of professionals, stakeholders, and conflicting interests. Adding to this complexity are the formulated ambitions and societal challenges projects have to answer to. One of these ambitions emphasizes a more inclusive planning process, involving the inhabitants in all stages of the planning process. In terms of design, another challenge is to create environments on a human scale while building in high density such as with tall residential buildings. The metropolitan area of Amsterdam intends to have 100,000 new dwellings by 2025. Most of these dwellings have to be added within the existing urban fabric, planned on obsolete inner-city brownfield locations, at the waterfront, nearby highways whereas others are going to be built in deprived neighborhoods. The deprived neighborhoods are mainly located in the postwar areas of Amsterdam, on its northern, western, and south-eastern sides. The deprived neighborhood called the Bijlmermeer located on the south-eastern side of the city, for instance was the first high-rise development project in the Netherlands. It was designed as a single project with identical high-rise buildings in a hexagonal grid surrounded with large green spaces.These deprived, modernistic neighborhoods lack the classic housing block structures with a clear articulation of buildings and street spaces. They appear to be responsible for an ‘inhuman’ scale and demonstrate the lasting impact critical design flaws can have on the daily lives of inhabitants. Hence, the question is how to develop liveable environments where people feel fully supported by building architecture and streetscape configuration. To prevent new urban area developments that will again fail to incorporate human scale, scientific methods and user input are needed to inform the practice of planning and design, and their applied design solutions. Building on two research projects (one on participatory planning and the other on neuroarchitecture research), we explore how the newly emerging field of neuroarchitecture - and the eye-tracker in particular, might enhance urban area developments on a human scale.

English colonial architecture in the late 19th century

Keep it looking beautiful! Historicised residential architecture as a means of reproducing the middle class self

This paper explores how residents of Helmond Brandevoort, a neotraditional neighbourhood in the Netherlands, socially construct a 'classed' place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries which were explored here by analysing residents’ narratives. Two prominent types of narratives were found: their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicized aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. In the neighbourhood explored, the way of boundary drawing based on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged.

Effective IT use among residential caregivers

Abstract: Technological innovation in the healthcare sector is increasing, but integration of information technology (IT) in the care process is difficult. Healthcare workers are important agents in this IT integration. The purpose of this study is to explore factors that feed motivation to use IT. Self-determination theory (SDT) is applied to study how motivational factors impact effective IT use among frontline caregivers in residential care settings. As the team is very important to these caregivers, the team is our unit of analysis. In an embedded single case study design, interviews were conducted with all nine members of a team effectively using IT. All three basic psychological needs from SDT - autonomy, competence and relatedness - were found to have impact on effective IT use, though autonomy was primarily experienced at team level. Conversely, the effective use of an IT collaboration tool influences relatedness.