mapping the mobi

It’s my pleasure to share with you an animated map I created for the Mobiation Project.

The map charts the Mobi-01′s nomadic travels through Amsterdam — from its first semi-built incarnations at the Fiction Factory, Friekens and NDSM in Amsterdam Noord, its official launch at the 2012 Magneet Festival on Zeeburg Eiland, it’s short stint as an art piece at Huize Frankandael in Frankandael Park, its winter stay in a playground in sleepy Watergraafsmeer, to its current location on the banks of the Nieuwemeer, in an artist community called Nieuwe en Meer. The map playfully animates this clockwise journey around the city and the trail of goodness the Mobi has left in each of its locations.  The Mobi-01 is the first manifestation of the Mobiation Project. It is a self-built, foldable, fully transportable living space/open house that is working to be off-grid by summer’s end.

It was enjoyable to take a break from digital media and make the map by hand, using a cut and paste technique, with paper and cardboard. I quickly returned to digital media by animating it in Powerpoint, and creating a GIF.

The map was created for the Mobiators’ presentation at the Pop-Up City Live, this Tuesday at Amsterdam’s Brakke Grond. As I have been doing internships with the Mobiators and at the Pop-Up City over the last few months, Tuesday night marks an unexpected colliding of worlds, that appropriately marks the end of my current stint in Amsterdam. Just how will the radical-squat-autarchiks clash with the trendy-urbanists in this surreal manifestation of the extreme sides of my personality and interests? We’ll see on Tuesday night!

a north sea crossing

Traveling a far distance always comes with some sort of immersive change in your material reality.

Out of an airplane window, you are privy to the novel world of clouds. On a train, the scenery passing quickly gives way to a blurred reality.

I recently traveled by ferry across the North Sea from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. Viewed from out of the windows of the ferry and from its deck, my material reality transformed into the water world.

Might I recommend to opt for this dreamy form of transportation to anyone traveling between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, rather than an enticingly cheap EasyJet flight. Being immersed in the world of the North Sea for seven hours is incredibly meditative. Pushing slowly away from the Dutch coast, we drifted gently toward Britain.

It should also be mentioned that generally, people who take the ferry are not in a rush.

Immersed in a water reality, and in the good company of Ferry-People while floating along the expansive North Sea toward England had me relaxed and curious — a good position from which to enjoy the geography of the world.

(It should also be mentioned that the Ferry was staffed by Filipinos who did not have a Visa for England or the Netherlands. They were stuck — perpetually on the boat, for periods of up to 6 months — after which they returned to the Philippines. A poignant situation to consider the state of borders, visas, and immigration today.)

two strong aural memories

// Two strong aural memories

i. Morning on a mid-spring Sunday in Toronto. The city is relatively empty and a street car makes its way north on Bathurst. The distinct hum of the street car’s motion is set against a back drop of almost silence — but of course there are other sounds. The rustling of trees’ leaves, collectively heaving in one direction & then the other, a rattling and whooshing of the city’s canopy as a single entity. The faint city sounds of car doors closing and people shuffling are sharp above the rustling trees but blurred beneath the street car’s hum.

ii. Biking in Amsterdam, also mid-Spring, though the day of the week doesn’t matter as much. The jangling of my keys as they bang against my bike’s frame, hanging out of the back wheel’s lock. I cycle over a loose brick on the road, and hear its clack as my weight pushes it up. It clangs back down. A tram’s hesitant bell clucks soon after; it whirs by.

how community blogs become a tool for city-making

This post originally appeared on the Pop-Up City

This year, we’re marking five years of blogging on The Pop-Up City. To celebrate, we’ll be hosting The Pop-Up City Live on May 21st. The event is a great opportunity to celebrate the best of what blogging can do to shape the cities of the future. We’ll be reveling in what we’ve learnt from five years of pop-up, DIY, and bottom-up solutions for the cities of the future with exciting performances, guests, discussions, visuals and drinks.

City blogging is a great tool to share ideas around the world toward better urban futures, but it’s also a potent tool for hyper-local community development. In the Netherlands, many community blogs have popped up and we’re excited to be inviting the founders of three Amsterdam community blogs, Ilovenoord, BoloBoost, and Nice Nieuw West, on stage to discuss the importance and potential of local blogging efforts.

Taking a look these examples from Amsterdam, we can see that community bloggers play a very important role in the city making process. They are the promoters, ambassadors and defenders of the neighbourhoods they represent, acting as the social sensors of their communities. With many of them representing gentrifying neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, these community blogs are also addressing an urban and social need for participation and inclusivity in formal planning initatives for all residents of these areas.

Ilovenoord

Amsterdam Noord, a short ferry trip across the IJ from the city-centre, is the frontier of gentrification in Amsterdam, home to a mix of hipster artists and immigrant communities. Ilovenoord features daily news and events about all the happenings in the neighbourhood. It could be said that the blog has been a catalyst for gentrification in the area, but it also has established an important forum for all locals to express their experiences/concerns regarding the development of the neighbourhood. The high visibility of the blog has meant that the opinions expressed on the site have reached the ears of the formal policy makers and have actually affected the decision-making process. For now, gentrification in Noord has become more inclusive, with greater initiatives in participatory planning.

BoloBoost

Based in Bos en Lommer, or Bolo as its residents affectionately refer to it, BoloBoost is the ambassador of this neighbourhood in Amsterdam West. Peacefully tucked away from central Amsterdam, Bolo is home to 127 of the 189 nationalities that live in the city. Cheaper rents also attract many students and artists. BoloBoost has emerged as a central platform for residents of Bolo, highlighting events in the neighbourhood and places to live, work, shop and play. Established in 2011, BoloBoost arose from a feeling that the people who live in ’Bolo’ are living in a great neighbourhood, but it could be better and it “should avoid getting worse”. BoloBoost is also involved in community-event planning, such as the Bolobooze (a neighbourhood pub crawl).

Nice Nieuw West

Nieuw-West is a large residential area comprised of many neighbourhoods with a centrally located park. Like the other Amsterdam blogs, Nice Nieuw West is a platform for the community, with events, markets and business listings highlighting hotspots in the neighbourhood. It is exhaustive in its coverage of the happenings in this relatively large part of the city. Nice Nieuw West actively seeks neighbourhood ambassadors  to contribute to its blog, another way it is actively ‘making community’ in this part of the city.

Join us on May 21st for The Pop-Up City Live to hear from the founders of these three community blogs in Amsterdam about their initiatives, their vision for community blogging, and their exciting future projects!

farming the city: food as a tool for today’s urbanisation

This post originally appeared on the Pop-Up City

With the popularity of food trucks, food-apps, and pop-up restaurants, preoccupation with what we eat has never been greater. Along with our eating obsession, urban agriculture has been fervently adopted by conscious urbanites seeking to reconnect with their food. The principles that guide many urban agriculture projects and initiatives, however — a do-it-yourself ethos, a preference for bottom-up, community planning, and hyper-localized solutions — don’t lend themselves to the forming of a unified social movement capable of major change at a global scale.

Seeing an opportunity to unite the wide-ranging efforts of urban farmers worldwide, CITIES Magazine and Trancity have published Farming the City: Food as a Tool for Today’s Urbanisation. Farming the City’s mission is to link international activists and thinkers to increase their potential for positive impact on society, actively ‘joining the dots’ between independent initiatives around the world. Farming the City provides a platform for knowledge-sharing, motivation and inspiration for the diversity urban farmers worldwide.

A central message of the book is how food can be used as a tool for urban development. With thoughtful planning, clustering and the facilitation of local food projects, the book argues that we can dismantle the urban paradox that “the closer we cluster together, the further removed we get from our sources of sustenance”. In an introduction by Carolyn Steel, UK-based architect and author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, Farming the City sets a hopeful tone, proclaiming that “across the world’s cities, food is coming home”.

Farming the City establishes that urban agriculture is an inherently a bottom-up process. Urban agriculture is also “opportunistic by nature,” adapting to “the possibilites and limitations of the city”. Accordingly, municipal bureaucrats and planners should recognize this, and shift their role toward mapping where urban agriculture can take place, and facilitating the process of finding space.

The book is organized as a collection of essays by a variety of activities, thinkers and urban farmers, followed by case studies that elegantly straddle the line between thoughtful academic analysis, and accessible, engaging descriptions of projects around the world. The book is animated with beautifully designed infographics that illustrate important concepts, their consistent design unifying the diversity of projects. The infographics illuminate concepts such as Jan Jongert’s ‘Resilient City’, which argues for a reconnection of urban flows such as food, energy, water and money toward an integrated and regenerative city. Gro Holland, a company that supplies restaurants with mushrooms grown in coffee grinds collected from restaurants is a prime example of how to reintegrate urban flows.

Farming the City also includes a wide range of case studies from around the world, such as a history of FoodShare, a place-based food security organization in Toronto, and Debra Solomon and Mariska Van den Berg of Amsterdam’s Urbaniahoeve, a social design lab that specializes in bottom up transformations of public space into socially driven, edible urban foodscapes. Urbaniahoeve’s experience in establishing a ‘Foodscape’ in The Hague taught them that convincing decision makers is a lengthy process, but important in its bridging of cultural and professional gaps. Eventually, the struggle with municipal bureaucracy is always worth it in the establishment of productive landscapes, which bring increased activity in public space, increased social cohesion, an increase in biodiversity and, lots of delicious food!

Farming the City effectively takes a diversity of concepts and case studies around the world and distills them into clear recommendations as to how food could be used as a tool for urban development. Emphasizing a diversity of urban agricultures, Farming the City goes on to define the importance of establishing a ‘local food field’, something akin to the creative field that was all the rage with urban planners in the early 2000s. A spatially clustered food field, with its own set of urban demands, spatial articulations and social interdependencies is capable of filling voids in the city, and would encourage the emergence of new urban networks and communities.

Farming the City’s strength lies in its ability to shift between technical descriptions of best urban gardening practice on one hand, to broad ranging social theory on the other. By ‘joining the dots’ between both theory and practice, and international urban agriculture projects, the book firmly establishes an otherwise fragmented scene of city-gardeners as a broad social movement, capable of collaboration, support and inspiration.

The folks behind Farming the City have also created a website that acts as a natural extension of the book’s recommendations, translating them from prescription into action, and empowering and supporting local food projects. Launched in 2011, the Farming the City website is a platform for all things urban agriculture and includes an interactive map of urban agriculture initiatives around the world, a section for volunteers availabilities, tips on best gardening practices and negotiating bureaucracy, and listings highlighting available space for urban farming in cities around the world (including empty roofs, lots, parks). It is an accessible resource, that if widely adopted — perhaps becoming the Facebook of urban agriculture  – has the potential to meaningfully link international efforts to farm the city toward a unified global urban agriculture movement.

Farming the City: Food as a Tool for Today’s Urbanisation
Published and edited by Cities Magazine and Trancity
17 x 23 cm, paperback
240 pages, English
ISBN 978-90-78088-63-9
EUR 27.50

ruigoord

On Sunday, I will be taking a friend’s broomer to Ruigoord, a small village west of Amsterdam’s centre.

Ruigoord is a special place. Rumour has it the town was first established by social outcasts — deviants that were physically removed from the functions of the rest of society in nearby Amsterdam, and forced to make their own life outside of a wider sense of ‘normalcy’. After being evacuated, Ruigoord was later squatted to be an artist village, and has since become a town of aging hippies, hosting parties and festivals open to the public during the summer months.

The old church at the centre of Ruigoord

What fascinates me most about Ruigoord is that it used to be an island, surrounded by marshes and water of the IJ. As the port of Amsterdam moved west and expanded, Ruigoord was in the way. The land around Ruigoord was filled in with sand and concrete, and the town’s inhabitants were forced to vacate. Later squatted, Ruigoord remains an island — in the metaphorical sense —  of rich creativity surrounded by dreary industrial port lands. (This story never ceases to amaze me — there is something about the Netherlands, and its constantly shifting land and sea borders, that though coming from a place of human dominance over the Earth, feels somewhat magical; nothing here is what it seems).

I am excited to explore Ruigoord and learn more about its history, and what it’s like today. I am excited to experience what it feels like to be on a piece of land that used to be an island. Will I be able to feel it? Will it be obvious? Will the ghosts, traces of its geography be present?

Stay tuned to the Urban Geographer for dispatches from my Sunday broomer trip to Ruigoord, the town that used to be (and still is) an island.

the clocks project

// Negotiating space and time in London and Amsterdam :::::

 

 

holland motion

I know it may be hard to conceptualize, but try and imagine the provinces of North and South Holland — the Randstad specifically — as one big city.

The complex dotted-and-linked towns and cities of the Randstad

I know it’s hard to conceptualize when looking at a map: a highly complex and widely spread system of independent-seeming towns, cities, farms and transportation in between – the Randstad alone has an area of 8 287 square kilometres (about 4000 of which are urban).

But functionally North and South Holland is one big city. And with that comes a lot of motion:

A first example of Holland-mobility is that many people from the Netherlands that I’ve encountered have personal geographies that consist of a lot of movement between the cities of North and South Holland (the sort of movement you associate with the United States and the American Dream).

Of those I’ve spoken with, many of their grandparents are from one city, their parents grew up in another, they were born in that town, but now live elsewhere.

These common stories of intra-provincial migration contribute to a blurry sense of place-based identity, and soft declarations of one-point-of-origin as where they’re “from”: a confusion that ultimately leads to a Holland-wide identity, and the allegiance to the Randstad as a whole as the basis for identity, rather than an individual town or city.

Another point of Holland motion: people travel from in between cities near and farther away, to live, work and socialize on a daily basis. My fellow interns at Golfstromen themselves live in Utrecht and Zandvoort. A friend’s colleagues similarly travel from major regional cities — cities with their own employment — to work in Amsterdam.

And a final meditation on Holland Motion –
Lining the bike paths of Amsterdam are the constant appearance of way-finding signs directing you to far-flung Haarlem, Almere, Den Haag, and Utrecht — cities that are relatively quite far away. But these cities, appearing on the streets, inhabit your consciousness as you negotiate the local geography of Amsterdam. Being constantly reminded that they and are within biking distance — indeed that they exist! — wraps their being into the being of Amsterdam, tightly weaving Holland together as a series of neighbourhood-cities within a greater regional metropolis.

This May, I look forward to “following the signs”, that is, choosing a city that I see a  bike way-finding sign for, and biking there without consulting a map — to experience Amsterdam, the city I choose to bike to, and the spaces and tight relations in between.

multiple land use

I can describe urban planning in the Netherlands with one term: Multiple Land Use.

Multiple Land Use in the Netherlands has a much deeper meaning than what I’ve come to know of the same concept in Canada.

In my understanding, Multiple Land Use in Canada is a fairly simple mixing of residential, commercial and industrial activities. Also known as Mixed-Use Zoning, this practice has come into vogue in the last 20 years, in direct response to the negative consequences of the Modernist practice of isolating functions which characterized urban planning in the mid to late 20th century.

In the Netherlands, Multiple Land Use means so much more than having commercial and residential beside each other, and refers to a deeper mixing of land use functions — indeed, Multiple Land Use refers to the literal stacking of functions on top of each other!

Some of my fave examples:

◈ Along the Prince Hendrikade, which lines Amsterdam’s historical Eastern harbour, there are bike, car, bus and pedestrian lanes. There is a boardwalk style green space lining the water. Where Valkenburgerstraat intersects Prince Hendrikade sits the NEMO – a  science museum with a very distinct, contemporary architectural style. On top of the NEMO is a cafe, and terrace with expansive view of the city. Under the NEMO runs the IJtunnel – a bus and car link that runs under the science museum, under the IJ and into Amsterdam Noord.

Green space beside an institution which is under leisure space and over transportation space: classic Netherlands Multiple Land Use.

Another example:

◈ Westerpark, in Amsterdam’s west. In a small strecth of land, you can find residential, commercial, leisure, agricultural, cemetarial, transportation and gardenal uses. Standing in the middle of Westerpark, you get a strange floating feeling. Runners and bikers whip by you. Inter-city trains passing mark the minutes. You get whiffs of  hearty compost and manure of gardens and farms. You hear the clattering of dishes in nearby restaurants and cafes. You smell coffee, burnt tires, marijuana. You see tall buildings in the distance, squat residential blocks nearby, smoke stacks in the horizon. You see it all, the multiple uses of land, from one vantage point.

And just one more:

◈ Along Leidsestraat and Utrechtsestraat, bi-directional tram lines run. The streets, however, are only wide enough at certain points for one set of tram-tracks. To resolve this, the Trams wait for each other to pass at the stops which are located on the canal bridges — wide enough to support both directions of the tram. The multiple-land use kicks in beautifully on Leidsestraat, a pedestrian-only street, where people freely walk along the tram tracks until one needs to pass by. The street is both a tram track and a pedestrian walk way. It works beautifully.

A tram patiently wait for another to pass, in typically Amsterdam flexible use of space.
The diagram of this above, is an arrangement that can be found on Leidsestraat and Utrechtsetraat.

You can also see this along Rembrandtplein. It is a pedestrian only street, save for the trams that periodically pass. When the trams pass, they create a wake through the crowd, and their path leaves a temporarily empty corridor in the middle of the walkway. Slowly the corridor fades as pedestrians feel safe again to use the whole space, but soon another tram comes and the corridor reappears. A beautiful ebb and flow of multiple land use.

three inspring urban parasites

This post originally appeared on the Pop Up City

Urbanism and sustainability undeniably go hand in hand. What first comes to mind is the prototypical ‘Green City’ — a cityscape rich with parks, trees and productive vertical farms draped over high rises.

As cities are incredibly complex, so must be any sort of urban sustainability, which can come in many more forms than a ‘Green City’. With so much going on in an urban environment, there’s bound to be some excess energy flows. So why waste that energy, if you can turn it into something that’s better, fun, and productive? That’s what we call Parasite Urbanism — strategies and urban interventions that creatively make use of spaces or energies that otherwise would be neglected or would go to waste, contributing to a wider concept of urban sustainability. Let’s take a look at three of the best examples of urban parasites that we’ve highlighted on the Pop Up City. They all make use of a variety of otherwise neglected spaces or energy, launching them into places that are more useful, more productive and more fun!

1. New York City’s Softwalks

In New York City, over 6000 ‘scaffolding sheds’ cover the city’s sidewalks at any given point in time. Taking advantage of the shelter they provide, Softwalks is an initiative dedicated to improving the pedestrian experience in New York City, transforming these sheds from passing through spaces to pleasant places to relax, sit, and eat. Softwalks are a DIY urban parasite: packaged in a convenient kit to let people turn local scaffolding into their own temporary hangout spaces. Have a seat, hang around a counter table or enjoy the planters that’ve been attached to metal beams. All Softwalk elements are easily attached and removed when you want to continue your walk. Now that’s what we call pop-up!

2. Auckland’s Parasite Cinema

In Auckland, New Zealand, a small movie theater was constructed over an exterior stairwell as an extension to the rest of the building. This small parasite cinema was made by the architects of OH.NO.SUMO and uses the steps of a staircase as seats. Right on the side of a busy street, the theater has place for approximately seven people. This clever construction is made out of a timber frame covered with three layers of fabric that provide a waterproof exterior, and a real cinema-like experience. OH.NO.SUMO designed the cinema in response to the lack of social interaction happening at bus stops and launderettes on the corner, with people increasingly absorbed in their own world within their mobile phones. The program of the Stairway Cinema is curated online by the audience itself, making the project embedded in both the physical and digital worlds. The great thing about this parasite is that it sheds a different light on a common urban space, transforming an everyday spot into a place that can be used completely differently.

3. New York City’s Pay-Phone Libraries

Making use New York City’s ever present pay phones — a dying breed in the streets of of cities around the world, the Department of Urban Betterment took the parasite strategy to transform this a ‘problem’ into an opportunity. New York City has 13,659 pay phones spread throughout its streets — most of them are hardly used. This parasitic urban intervention is repurposing phone booths into communal libraries or book drops. Although we’ve seen several efforts to transform old phone booths into book shops, this project is interesting as it is a parasite that uses the existing construction while leaving the phone itself untouched and fully operable. Furthermore, the installation is easy to remove. The meaning of a pay phone might be lost to the new generation of smart phone users. Pay phones can be considered relics of a time in which shared public facilities were characterizing public spaces. With this miniature library, The Department of Urban Betterment uses a parasite strategy effectively to imagine a new public use for these intriguing artifacts.

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In a series of six articles we’re exploring new forms of urbanism where bottom-up, DIY and spontaneity are key. Become a new-style city-maker with the Stadsklas (City Class), an action-driven summer course in the Netherlands organized by Stroom, that gets you ready to tackle urban issues in the 21st century.