From free to extra’s
Low prized places seemed to attract artists in the past. At the moment, in the contest between cities to attract and grow a significant creative class, more facilities than just low prized workspaces are needed. As inspiration, two art en design centres of which facilities complete the workspaces in the building and relate to the urban area around the building.
More and more about less and less
'In the recent years, the urgency of reviewing the general framework of European history has grown in proportion to the fashion for highly specialized, high-magnification studies. (...) Many historians and students have been drawn into ‘more and more about less and less’ to the point where the wider perspectives are sometimes forgotten. Yet the humanities require all degrees of magnifications. History needs to see the equivalent of the planets spinning in space; to zoom in and observe people at ground level, and to dig deep beneath their skins and their feet. The historian needs to use counterparts of the telescope, the microscope, the brain-scanner and the geological probe.’ Norman Davies
Growing Green _ Awareness
For centuries, the size of a city has been defined by the food production of her surrounding countryside. A century ago, technology started to create new possibilities for faster transport and slower food decay, allowing cities to grow, mostly at the disadvantage of the surrounding countryside.
No Megacity without Megacitizens
‘… the demarcation of different city concepts in the world, such megacities, megalopolises, urban areas, urbanized areas, edge cities, metropolitan areas and the like, it is not the statistical definitions which tells us the full story, but rather question how much citizens in a certain settlement configuration share an urban way of life.’
Peter Nijkamp, 2oo6.
The Green Line
‘Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.’ Francis Alÿs.