Tag Archives: typology

Designing from the Cross-Section

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The Subsurface as a Building Block for the Future-Proof City

The approach to urban transformation tasks is undergoing a major overhaul. After all, there is insufficient space to accommodate today’s major challenges – in the areas of climate, energy, circular economy, mobility and housing. It is high time we learned to look at our cities through three-dimensional glasses and to view the public space and buildings in relation to the subsurface. By tackling tasks from the cross-section (instead of the plan view), new and surprising solutions are brought to the table, which not only lead to an improvement of the living environment but also encourage multifunctional use of space.

Urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture student teams within the City of the Future Lab, and multidisciplinary design teams from practice have set to work in Amsterdam, Leuven, Maastricht, Mechelen, Ostend and Rotterdam. Together with academic and municipal experts, they have developed design propositions and exemplary solutions for city making in times of major transitions, and they have reflected on the importance of the subsurface and designing from the cross-section.

This design research resulted in a publication in Dutch. ‘Ontwerpen vanuit de Doorsnede’is the result of a collaboration between TU Delft, the COB Platform of Subsurface Construction, the Environmental Department of the Flemish Government, and the Delta Metropolis Association.

Title:
Ontwerpen vanuit de Doorsnede
De Ondergrond als Bouwsteen voor de Toekomstbestendige Stad
Order here: Donner Bookshop online

Partners:
Centrum voor Ondergronds Bouwen / COB Platform of Subsurface Construction
Departement Omgeving Vlaanderen / Environmental Department of the Flemish Government
Deltametropolis Association / Vereniging Deltametropool

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

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

Expo SubTerra

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New Roots for Underground Urbanism – Exhibition


photo by Joran Kuijpers

City x Space: Cross-Section Thinking

How can the integral and multifunctional use of public space, subsurface, and buildings -within a densified urban environment – create space and value that contribute to an attractive and future-proof living environment?

“This seminal question generates various answers depending on the specific context and location of asking. International interdisciplinary students from Delft University of Technology have outlined various design solutions. Manifest in all cases are the spatial bottlenecks on the level of public space. Connecting the intervention areas with the surrounding socio-spatial networks, therefore, forms the basis of all solutions. In addition, in the densification challenges we see the attention for the multi-layered space: on the one hand, a train or metro station, for example, generates flows of people at several levels; on the other hand, building in higher densities and/or living and working in collectives, generates new shared spaces.” As Maurice Harteveld explains in the exhibition; “The hybridization of the urban and architectural program also requires a cross-section thinking. This can be seen in future-proofing both large-scale sports or industrial areas, as well as small-scale residential houses in neighborhoods where work is shifting to local entrepreneurs and home workers. Finally, the subsurface plays an important role in greening the living environment and in water storage.”
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People, Movement & Public Space

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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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Graduation Ceremony MADE

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The first lucky 7 students have graduated from the MSc MADE (Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering) programme! They received their well-earned MSc diploma during a festive graduation ceremony at AMS Institute. Two years ago, they joined AMS Institute together with elven others for classes on metropolitan challenges, entrepreneurial skills, and data analysis in the urban context. Now they have developed to be the first generation of interdisciplinary metropolitan innovators.

On September 24th, we have celebrated this milestone together with their family and friends when receiving their joint degree diplomas from Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University & Research. This is extra special as these are the first engineering degrees that are handed out in the city of Amsterdam in over 450 years! It has been quite an adventure to write this progrogramme from 2016 until its successful accreditation, and, subsequently, I am happy to have been the first director of this programme. Continue reading →

Pasáži Renesance

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Prague has more arcades than Paris. Still, they are less known. This is unfortunate, because these arcades underlining the identity of Prague and the Czech Republic. This is underpinned particularly during the 1990s arcade renaissance. New arcades have been designed, like Pasáž Jiřího Grossmanna (1995 –1996), Rathova Pasáž (1996), and the redesign Hrzanska Pasáž of 1702-1704 (1996). These projects have upgraded existing arcade systems, introduced new styles, but foremost new hopes… It echoed an update on the Czech Awareness.

Throughout history we have seen this happen in the design of arcades in Prague. This particular study brings us back to the rise of Bohemian identity and unfolds an epistle illuminating an alternative arcade project. As such, the study reframes relations between design of public space and society and provides a way to understand shifts in these.


Pasáže Černé Růže (1936), by Oldřicha Tyla

Pražské Pasáže
Arcade Projects in Prague
Public Buildings | Urban Architectural Design | Contextual Assignment
as projects for people, and projects within Society

African Public Spaces?

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What is public space in African? Does it exist as we may presume? At the current, we are analysing and comparing urban life and presumed public spaces in selected segments of four African cities to map what we know about these cities. It is a first step in deepening cross-cultural understanding: An exiting start of a new exiting scientific journey along Dakar in Senegal, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Maputo in Mozambique, and Lusaka in Zambia.


Image by Vaggy Georgali
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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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The Entrepreneurial City

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‘The Entrepreneurial City’ is the theme for the 10th conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU). Nine conferences have been held in various countries across the world. In face of global and local environmental, social and economic challenges, the conference brings together international planners and designers to deliberate on theories, design and practices related to the entrepreneurial city. The conference will be hosted by the School of Architecture of the Chinese University of Hong Kong on December 14-16, 2017.
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