Tag Archives: landscape architecture

Port-City Perspectives

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Infographic of the Comparative Analyses on the two Sets of Mental Maps

In the Minds of People: The Case of Rotterdam

Following the geographical ‘Any-Port Model’, urban design has stipulated and enforced the disunion of port and city over the recent decades. In conjunction with other disciplines, the emphasis has been laid at the dislocation of production activities in favour of logistic-productive dynamics. At the same time, the professional focus was on the urban areas where most citizens are. While this practice has led to the redevelopment of abandoned harbour areas too, foremost the approach stimulated stronger physical boundaries between lived city and the remaining and new harbour areas. This article describes the application of the dominant model in Rotterdam over the recent decades, on the basis of literature review, and, it confronts this with the concepts of Rotterdam which are in the minds of professionals-in-training, through the method of ‘mental mapping’. On the one hand, mainly harbour areas are memorised when respondents are asked to draw the port-city of Rotterdam, even though its efficient port infrastructure makes public space in these areas rare, and most harbours are located behind inaccessible borders. On the other hand, civic areas, which have a refined network of public spaces and are places for daily life, reveal also all kinds of tangible and intangible signs and symbols related to characteristics of the port-city when memorised; even more. Various elements, linked to water-land or the flows of goods, people, and ideas, dominate the minds of the people when they think of Rotterdam in general. These outcomes reconfirm the unique unity of port and city and provide a way to find an alternative or supplementary model accepting the complex nature of port-cities.

Read:
Harteveld, Maurice (2021) In the Minds of People: Port-City Perspectives, The Case of Rotterdam, In: European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes (CPCL), Vol. 4, No. 2.

See also:
Maritime Mindsets
Biographies of Places

Digital, Virtual, and Physical

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Physical Public Space X Virtual Space

Urban designers and landscape architects observe physical public spaces as spaces that are able to accommodate accidental meetings, reveal places’ identity, provide impulsive on-the-spot choices, and allow human-nature interaction through wind or sunshine. However, the recent crisis unfolds the intertwining between physical public space and virtual space. During two days, we focus on the shift of the planner’s outlook on physical public space and virtual space.

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When: Thursday, November 5 and 6, 9.00am – 6.00pm CET
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Bits of Public Space 3.0: Trailer, published by Polis on YouTube
Video credits: Ioanna Kokkona
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Mapping Maritime Mindsets: Mental Maps

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Imagine: You are asked to draw a port city from memory. What would you put on paper? Do you think of harbours? Water, docks, cargo, moving loads, and ships? If your drawing shows these elements, don’t be surprised. Sixty-five graduate students also took on the challenge. In answering: “draw the port city of Rotterdam by mind”, the drawings of the participants (fig.1) displayed exactly the above features. Of course, this makes sense. A port just happens to be a place on the water in which ships shelter and dock to (un)load cargo and/or passengers. A harbour is a sheltered place too, and in its nautical meaning, it is a near-synonym for sheltered water, in which ships may dock, especially again for (un)loading. So, all the above linguistic lemmas are there and all these are connected to imaginable objects.

Keep reading on Port City Futures | Leiden•Delft•Erasmus

The Future of the Netherlands

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In a special event Chief Government Architect Floris Alkemade gives a glimpse into his new essay “The Future of the Netherlands” and urban designer and architect Maurice Harteveld will explain how the city of the future can continue to offer everyone a place. Discussion is open to the public.


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City of the Future Competition

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Making Cities in Times of Major Transitions

On January 10, 2018, our research ‘The City of the Future’ has starts. This study explores new ways of city making by using five test locations of 1 x 1 km in the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Eindhoven (five most populated cities in The Netherlands). We question how we can interrelate urban development, whilst urban design, planning and engineering, to upcoming challenges like shifts in transport, energy transition, circular economy and other system and network innovations, in times of the next generation of densification.
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Architecture and the City

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The Architecture and the City: Public Realm/Public Building research group of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology focuses on questions regarding the mutual relationship between the city and its public realm. This is a relationship that can only be considered in socio-cultural and economic context. The idea of the public realm here refers to an intermediate ‘space’, which facilitates and mediates between different groups of inhabitants and individuals; the idea of the public realm as the space of (ex)change of ideas, opinions and beliefs of the different groups of users. Therefore, the architecture of the city and its actual qualities form the main framework of this research. Within this context urban blocks, as interface between architecture and urban design, and public buildings are seen as crucial architectural elements. Their functioning and organisation are physically, symbolically, socially and economically fundamental to the city. As such they form a domain both of architectural convention and experimentation. In terms of research and design methods architectural typology, typo-morphology and research-by-design hold a central position in our group’s approach.


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Exploring Metropolitan Design

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The Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), the Delft Deltas, Infrastructures & Mobility Initiative (DIMI), and the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) joined Delft University of Technology in the organisation of the interdisciplinary 2017 Summer School:‘Making the Metropolis: Exploring Interdisciplinary approaches in Metropolitan Design Engineering’.


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Mastering the Metropolis

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As the majority of the world population is living in cities today, urban environments have become a place for many people. We are obliged to aim at sustainability and safeguard people’s quality of life, and human wellbeing. These challenges are motivating science and society to approach metropolises differently. Advanced metropolitan solutions to overcome problems are being made possible by today’s revolution of new technologies, theories and methods. But no actor or stakeholder can make metropoles move in one certain direction. Metropolitan solutions require cooperation between knowledge institutes, companies, governments, between cities, citizens and civil society.

The new MSc programme Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering (MADE) integrates analysis, design and engineering in the sphere of the flows in the city; the physical, digital and social environments; and the city and its citizens. As full master programme, the MSc MADE prepares students to be specialised on one hand and an integrator on the other. A MADE graduate will be able to create synergy between specialists from other disciplinary backgrounds. You can make a cross-over too!

MSc MADE

The new trans- and interdisciplinary programme will be offered as a joint degree programme by Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University. It is built on their joint research activities, and consolidated in their participation together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS).
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For Example Delft

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Delft University of Technology
Julianalaan 132-134
Delft

Our conference ‘For Example Delft’ addressing approaches in architecture education: What to teach in the context of Radical Realities? What to learn from the Humanisation of Design? How to prepare for Multi-Actor Approaches? How to be qualified in an age of Animated & Automated Creation? – with resp. Merete Ahnfeldt-Mollerup (Royal Danish Academy) Peter Staub (University of Liechtenstein) Maria Rubert de Ventós (ETSAB) and Thomas Bock (TU München). In the evening: Laura Lee (Carnegie Mellon University) and Diane Ghirardo (University of Southern California).

poster_A2

See:
EAAE Annual Conference & Assembly September 2016 (available in 2016)
European Association for Architectural Education / Association Européenne pour l’Enseignement de l’Architecture

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