Zoekresultaten

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.

Retention basin as impetus for urbanism: O Mon, Cantho

Tactical Urbanism in Poppelsdorfer Tunnel in Bonn. Bike Guerilla Bonn with FreshBrains.

Short clip as result of research week FreshBrains Bonn.

Introduction—The Hacker, the City and Their Institutions: From Grassroots Urbanism to Systemic Change

In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.

Responsive public spaces: Five mechanisms for the design of public space in the era of networked urbanism

This chapter explores the use of “responsive” or “interactive” urban media technologies as a tool or “building block” in the (re)design of urban public spaces. This is especially relevant as in the last two decades, urban development and digital technologies have brought out new types of urban typologies and practices often referred to as “networked urbanism.” These typologies and practices bring out specific challenges with regard to their functioning as public space. We argue that responsive technologies could reinforce qualities of public space in this condition of “networked urbanism”; however, their implementation demands new strategies and above all new forms of cooperation between disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and urban interaction design. To aid such an approach, this chapter introduces a heuristic of five mechanisms of responsive media. These are meant to function as a shared vocabulary aiding designers of various backgrounds to collaborate in an interdisciplinary design process for public spaces in a broader development of networked urbanism.

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.