People, Movement & Public Space

Improving our ways to urbanise and innovate urbanisation processes are needed in order to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, hence deliver the Quito New Urban Agenda promise. During the Future Days event, participants renewed the listing of urban topics. They bridge the gaps between academics and practitioner. They have presented much more evidence-based policies at the global level and with local examples and test-beds. And, they generated a better understanding of the driving forces of urbanisation and of the needs for better regulating the processes.

People, Movement and Public Space
In a keynote at the Future Days 2019 event, themed ‘Legacy and Future of our Cities’, I illuminated the interdisciplinary topic ‘people, movement and public space’, in order to understand assembled complexities of cities which go along with this topic. I introduced a four-step approach: First, a network-theoretical approach in the analyses of path systems, aiming to understand the complex dynamic systems of real cities better. Second, the analyses of personal perspectives on these paths apply more a non-linear approach to understand complex trajectories and interactions in reality. Third, engaged with the human-adaptive approach, analysing the psychology of place helps to understand patterns in the evolutionary inter-subjectivity of being in cities. Lastly, by observing public life, understanding the emergence of life in real cities, and non-equilibria, may be understand from a self-organising approach.
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Stand up for Public Space

Global Campaign to Support Public Space at the 10th World Urban Forum
on 8-13 February 2020, taking place in Abu Dhabi


Future cities need public space for a more human(e) togetherness!

In August, City Space Architecture launched a global campaign to support public space, inviting global stakeholders to join forces in order to ask the WUF Secretariat to include a clear reference to public space in their Concept Note. The campaign attracted strong interest, with insightful statements from urban experts and activists. After that, the Concept Note has been revised, now public space is included in the document and this is a great achievement.
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Fluid Urbanism

Should dwelling options be re-conceived in the city of the future? Are the urban fabric and its public spaces more fluid in the future thanks to the advantages of emerging and new techologies?

Sharon Wohl, assistant professor in Architecture and Urban Design at Iowa State University, examines the creation of housing as a more nimble, flexible component: one capable of deploying to different sites and atmospheres, while simultaneously providing more broadly distributed access to amenities that otherwise remain limited to the privileged few. These ideas are operationalised through a speculative case study: a mobile dwelling architecture that can be deployed to various sites across the city – each being characterized by particular ‘niche’ offerings. Here, rather than dwelling units being considered as static entities within the urban fabric, they are re-considered as nimble, deployable agents – able to relocate to different sites and settings in accordance with different parameters that are customized through individual cost-benefit analyses and feedback dynamics. Accordingly, over time, bottom-up, self-organizing ‘niches’ of fit inhabitation emerge. The talk associates this kind of designed urban environment with the dynamics of complex adaptive systems – where emergent global features arise from the bottom-up. Here, a new kind of ‘swarm’ urbanism is deployed: one adjusting over time in response to atmospheric variables.

(closed discussion in The City of the Future Lab, TU Delft)

Resilient Communities | Community Resilience

Short keynote and debate exploring both the idea of resilient communities as well as of community resilience(s). Whereas sociological resilience is defined as the ability to recover from change, alike ecological resilience and technological resilience, community resilience applies to the ability of a specific community to maintain a healthy state in response to similar destabilising influences. This presumes a few simple subsets of abilities, which have been explained during the Peccioli Conferenza. If we know what are community resiliencies, we may know what are resilient communities. Particularly this, more so improving such resiliencies, may be seen as an investment in the human capital.


Peccioli Conferenza, spazi di Fonte Mazzola, 4 November 2019

WhatsApp Chat with Professionals

A professional often thinks in the existing structures from practice, in defined tasks and ditto responsibilities. Students think beyond. It is one of the reasons that students and professionals have been linked to each other during a parallel running professional design study and master studio, called ‘The City of the Future’.
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Public Space and Inclusive Cities

How do we make public space that is inviting for all? What is public space in open cities? What can we learn from public space abroad? Three interesting lectures to inspire and to take lessons from. Sharing visions on public space at the HUA in Amersfoort.
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