Tag Archives: research

Chinese Notions of Public Space

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When you cannot find the book you need to understand public space in China, it’s wonderful to see that it is finally written! Wenwen Sun delineates how public space as a Greco-Roman originated concept traversed the urban and architectural cultures of post-reform China, merging and negotiating with the local conditions, and evolved into a new phenomenon in Chinese urban design and architecture. It is hugely rewarding to promote her work!

This research first critically reviews contemporary narratives from Chinese philosophy and sociology, then materials written in post-reform China on the topic of public space. It then analyses various cases in their design and spatial conditions, ranging from ‘shared spaces’ in the areas characterised by urban dwelling and communities to ‘open spaces’ in the central city where strangers mingle and globalisation manifests. By analysing public space as a cultural phenomenon, carrying specific meaning, through specific concepts and designs, this research develops an interpretative framework within which the meanings and transculturation of public space in Chinese urban design and architecture can be understood and elucidates potential for future urban design and architectural practices. Theoretically, it moves beyond the conventional research on public space that is primarily based on Western thoughts, an Indo-European notion, and a Greco-Roman tradition. Practically, it paves the way for future development of the design of public space, highlighting the cultural, social, and spatial dynamics in Chinese cities vis-à-vis the related political, economic, and governmental conditions within the context of ongoing globalisation.

Chinese Notions of Public Space: Transculturation in Urban Design and Architecture after the ‘Reform and Opening-up’ in 1978 Read for free, and order a hard copy here

Design-Driven Doctoral Research

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The Strategic Partnership CA²RE+ develops a collective learning environment through the evaluation of Design Driven Doctoral Training. Design Driven Doctoral research (DDDr) is taken as a multidisciplinary example of an experiential learning-through-evaluation model, appropriate for identification and promoting relevance of research singularity, its transparency, and recognition, to award excellence in doctoral training for creative and culturally rooted solutions of contemporary design-driven developments. The CA²RE+ project starts in September 2019, finishes in August 2022, and represents a trigger of the CA²RE Conference developments.

As the final to the CA²RE+ series under the themes of observation and sharing (strategies), comparison and reflection (experiences), and reformulation have led to this last event under the theme of recommendation. It provides a platform where both the learners and educators contribute to chartering future recommendations for Design-Driven Doctoral Research (DDDr). To combine the accumulated experience and knowledge in the previous events, the emphasis on the doctoral candidates’ experience and views within the DDDr programmes will play a key role both in the formulation and validation of the future recommendations within the project’s last phase, namely the framework for DDDr.

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Biographies of Places

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Today, historiographies seem to have moved away from traditional political and diplomatic histories describing cities towards social and cultural approaches. In general, this current shift of interest follows a Late-Modern turn toward the marginalized and marginalizing evidence, and thus explicit hypotheses are tested, and, among others, unbiased data is collected by current biographers. Still, certain narratives stay manifest. Also in Rotterdam. Here, bifocal narratives on the world port and the cosmopolitan city, and the dichotomy among these territories, remain persistent in the most recent biographies. What is seen in everyday space does not match this ontology generally applied in Rotterdam. To greater extent, as such, the samples of the biographies of public spaces as places help to fulfill the most essential public function of researching and abiding justification, while reinvigorating the critical public present in spaces. By opening up to the multiplicity of narratives, the article ‘The Port-City Portrayed in its Public Spaces: Introducing Micro Biographies of Places’ is able to focus on descriptions of Rotterdam which fall outside the scope of the current conventional. Through the lens of ‘biographies of places’, this study particularly follows the so-called material turn, in difference to stories of lives or narratives on actor networks. Hence buildings and artifacts placed in context, are the principal unit of analysis, for a multidimensional interpretation of urban sites across regions and periods.

The approach is operationalized by linking the urban and architectural design of public space, with studies of urban history, literature, cartography, and other urban humanities. This integrated perspective on port-cities is put forward most recently in a wider variety of projects at the LDE Centre of PortCityFutures, which has been promoted and supported for the approach below.

Harteveld, M.G.A.D. (2021) The Port-City Portrayed in its Public Spaces: Introducing Micro Biographies of Places. In: PortusPlus: the Journal of RETE (Association for the Collaboration between Ports and Cities). Venice: RETE, Vol. 12.

See also:
Port-City Perspectives
Maritime Mindsets

Solving the Dutch Housing Crises

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The Port of Rotterdam as Solution
The Dutch housing shortage is manifesting itself on all fronts. There are too few rental properties, but also too few homes for starters, large families, and retirees. Mortgage rates are low, but house prices are skyrocketing. And those who do not qualify for social housing will pay themselves blue. How do we ensure that everyone has the right to a suitable home?
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“Anchorman Klaas van Kruistum, Michiel Hulshof of Tertium and Claire van der Meer of the Universiteit van Nederland believe that every complex problem has a solution. And together we use the best of Dutch science to find it!”
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In episode 2 of ‘De Oplossers’ of KRO-NCRV, Maurice Harteveld explains how the current harbour areas of Rotterdam could be the game changers in the housing crisis. Do we want to sacrifice the green pastures around the city or the harbour areas with large-scale polluting industries?		 De Rotterdamse Haven als Oplossing
De Nederlandse woningschaarste manifesteert zich op alle fronten. Er zijn te weinig huurwoningen maar ook te weinig woningen voor starters, grote gezinnen en gepensioneerden. De hypotheekrente is laag, maar de woningprijzen rijzen de pan uit. En wie niet in aanmerking komt voor een sociale huurwoning betaalt zich blauw. Hoe zorgen we ervoor dat iedereen recht heeft op een geschikte woning?
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“Presentator Klaas van Kruistum, Michiel Hulshof van Tertium en Claire van der Meer van de Universiteit van Nederland, denken dat elk complex probleem een oplossing kent. En gebruiken samen het beste van de Nederlandse wetenschap om die te vinden!”
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In aflevering 2 van ‘DeOplossers’ van KRO-NCRV legt Maurice Harteveld uit hoe de huidige havengebieden van Rotterdam weleens de gamechangers in de Wooncrisis kunnen zijn.
Willen we het groene weiland om de stad opofferen of de havengebieden met de grootschalige vervuilende industrie?

where:
Episode #2 – Woningtekort
KRO-NCRV, NPO Radio 1
Friday 17 December 2021
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Listen as podcast: NPO Radio 1 – De Oplossers, or via Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podtail, and Google Podcast.

Cross-Media Website: De Oplossers
More: KRO-NCRV Press Release

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

Maritime Mindsets

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Images of Port-City Rotterdam, through the Mental Mapping Methods

This article makes explicit why, at first, we do not usually think beyond water, docks, cargo, moving loads, and ships when we think of port-cities. By reviewing mental maps of port-city Rotterdam drawn by professionals in training, it becomes clear that the adjective ‘port’ modifies the meaning of ‘city’ in such an extent that this echoes in the mind. It does exceptionally when respondents are asked explicitly to draw the ‘port-city’ by mind. Port and city seem to have become conceptual dichotomies. In the case of Rotterdam, the established professional points of views seem to be aligned with this disunion, even though the current trend in practice turns towards a desire to (re)develop the port-city as one. Through similar mental mapping experiments on Rotterdam, yet without adding the label of ‘port-city’ in the question, much richer images of the port-city of Rotterdam are generated. Multi-scalar reviews of such maps help to explicate much more inherited relations between nature and artifice, as well as for example the flows of goods and people. Ultimately, this approach changes the perspectives on the port-city, also for professionals in practice.

Read:
Harteveld, Maurice (2021b) Images of Port-City Rotterdam, through the Mental Mapping Methods. In: Portus, the Online Magazine of RETE (Association for the Collaboration between Ports and Cities), No. 42-2021, Year XXI. RETE Publisher, Venice, ISSN 2282-5789

EN / ES / PT / IT

See also:
Biographies of Places
Port-City Perspectives

Stress Reduction and Healing

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Rosalie Moesker, an urban designer in training in our team, makes the cross-over to health. As the campus of Erasmus Medical Centre densifies, not only accessibility is at stake, more so, the human experience while traveling. In the city of the future, the medical centre needs new mobility concepts. When we design for these, we can relieve users of worries by reducing urban stress at their arrival, and rethinking public space as a healing environment during stay.


source: TV Rijnmond, Tuesday, November 16, 17:35
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Empowering Resilient Communities

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Resilient Communities | Comunità Resilienti

Following earlier presentations of the Design of Public Space research group from Delft, Maurice Harteveld participates in the ‘Empowering Resilient Communities’ event organised at the Italian Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, on Friday 12 November, from 2 pm. As part of the international scientific committee of the pavilion, he will reflect on various Italian projects, which will be presented in this session. His review relates to a broader inventory of actions, which are being currently taken in the networks of public space to strengthen community resilience. Rotterdam serves as an exemplar, and as such these actions challenge the design of public space, and with that among others the disciplines of urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture.

The Italian Pavilion has organised the event as an opportunity to present and discuss some of the experiences already included in the research project Mapping Resilient Communities, while providing a platform for knowledge transfer and capacity development, especially in most vulnerable areas, in Italy and beyond, with the participation of UN-Habitat.

when:
Friday 12 November
14:00-17:00h

where:
17th International Architecture Exhibition
Italian Pavilion
Venice
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500 Days at Home

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Deserted public space in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Image by Maurice Harteveld.

“After working from home for more than five hundred days, our daily lives and rituals have been severely changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, social distancing and other measures have affected everyone’s access to public space and exposed a range of impacts on different levels. Researchers from more than twenty universities explore those impacts in the new open-access publication ‘2020: A Year without Public Space under the COVID-19 Pandemic’.

The crisis in early 2020 immediately brought together the global community of experts on the design of public space. Maurice Harteveld (Urbanism) is part of the scientific board of the Journal of Public Space and distinctly remembers how the initiation of lockdown upon lockdown sparked debate: “Chief editor Luisa Bravo was already in lockdown in the north of Italy, another colleague soon followed in Hong Kong. The progressively worsening health situation led to images of abandoned public space. We started to share local insights, forming a global perspective on the issues arising from the pandemic for the current situation of public space. By connecting with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, this became an opportunity to re-think how cities should be.”Deserted public space in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Image by Maurice Harteveld.

Health Disparity, Public Space Restrictions and the Future of Public Space
Shared online initiatives resulted in experts from across the world exchanging experiences of care, solidarity, entrepreneurship, academic perspectives, artistic interpretations, and creative practices of human resilience. The resulting key learnings from the early stage of the pandemic are encapsulated in the publication. The research addresses questions like how we can prepare for the consequences of this unprecedented emergency, particularly health disparity, but also addresses the impact of public space restrictions. More generally, the learnings reflect on what the future of public space might be.

At first glance, the challenges for each urban region might look different. Harteveld: “I vividly remember how Casper Chigama, a community developer from Zimbabwe gave an online presentation from his car, addressing how the local concerns there were about how social distancing might be achieved in the short term. But in the long term, pre-existing concerns on urban hygiene were the main challenge. Another colleague from New York City, Setha Low, mentioned how, even with urban hygiene relatively well organised, she still noticed disparity in access to qualitative public space between different population groups of the city.” In the end, the solutions to these challenges might lie within the same realm of making public space more recognisable on a local scale. People should not only have access to public space from their own homes, they should also be able to identify themselves with these places. “We stay closer to home, shown by trends like the increase of working from home and online shopping, and the consecutive decrease of commuting and going to the city centre,” explains Harteveld. “We clearly saw this in 2020, but the trend already emerges in the 1980s. Today, that means we need to be able to feel at home within the public space. As designers and planners of urban space, we can actively contribute to the detailing and programming of the public space to make such attachments possible.” Harteveld calls this the ‘domestication’ of public space. Fellow researchers observe the same, also at places where urban hygiene and inequality is of urgent concern. Josephine Mwongeli Malonza mentions for example how neighbourhood streets function as public space in Kimisange, Rwanda. The future of public space is local, equitably accessible, and very much an interesting and continuing challenge for urban designers, planners, legislators, and other city dwellers.”

#500Days @Home
The 500th day at home passed by on Monday 19 July, 2021

Published:
2020: A year without public space
July 2021

See: Domesticated Public Space