Perspectives and insights on why we should invest in public space from diverse backgrounds and continents, yet all sharing a profound interest, love and support for public space.@en

Urbanizing river deltas are highly susceptible to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Water-related disasters are already happening more often due to climate change, rapid urbanization, unsustainable land use and aging infrastructure threatening a large fraction of human and natural environments in these low lying and sinking areas around the globe. As stress levels of climate change are accelerating, societal and physical transformations are essential for adapting our deltas to climate change. In the Netherlands, imagination and evidence by design in the form of a long-term spatial vision, played a pivotal role in the past century to set, share and accomplish a new direction to overcome flood disasters by altering the coastlines and riverbeds of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. The unprecedented rainfall in July 2021 and the storm in December 2021 which hit Western Europe revealed the effectiveness of this new direction. We therefore plea for a prominent role of design in climate science and delta management to imagine, analyse and communicate future perspectives for climate adaptation in urbanizing deltas.@en

This year’s Urban Archipelago graduate design course focuses on water and public space in Moroccan cities. We are building on and advancing the methods that we developed during last year’s exploration of the Italian city of Trieste on the Adriatic coast, including, among others, biographies of place, micro-narratives, and guided imagery of water within urban landscapes. Once again we challenge students to rethink the spatial, societal, and cultural practices of today by learning from the past and envisioning sustainable futures by design. The effects of urbanization and climate change are also increasing in Morocco; however, here in particular, the lack of water will have a long-term effect on public areas and urban life. After visiting Trieste, we concluded that personal experience is key to understanding the role that water plays in our lives. This insight remains valid. It promised to be an immersive exploration into the multifaceted dimensions of water in the Moroccan cities of Rabat, Salé, Fes, and Tetouan. [...]@en

The extent to which the built environment encourages people to walk in public spaces, hence the quality of being walkable or ‘walkability’ has long been associated with positive outcomes on people’s health. While various studies have developed indices to assess walkability, limited attention has been given to indices that reflect the influence of specific city characteristics on walkability. This study showcases the development of a city-specific walkability index through a participatory approach using Amsterdam as a case study. It explores the viewpoints of urban designers and policy-makers who work or reside in Amsterdam on what constitutes a walkable street and identifies the most significant walkability factors for Amsterdam. These factors are then quantified based on open-access datasets and integrated into a street-level weighted walkability index. The resulting walkability index underscores the importance of factors such as traffic and crime safety, quality of the pedestrian infrastructure, and proximity to public amenities in shaping residents’ decisions to walk in specific public spaces. Finally, this research underscores the importance of involving individuals through participatory methods, considering subjective perspectives, and acknowledging shared experiences within particular groups and spaces when assessing walkability.@en

Al decennia staren beleidsmakers en stedebouwkundigen zich blind op hoogbouwbeleid door middel van hoogteregulering. Ook al blijft dit vanuit gezondheid en welstand verstandig, dit is een eenzijdige benadering. Zeker nu er steeds meer openbare ruimtes binnen de hoogbouwprojecten ontworpen en gerealiseerd worden, rijst de vraag hoe we voorbij de gevel stedebouwkundig kunnen sturen. Interieurstedebouw kan antwoord geven op deze vraag door de verticale netwerken van openbare ruimtes in hoogbouwprojecten als fysiek en sociaal in verschillende vormen onderdeel van de stad te benaderen. For decades, policymakers and urban planners have been obsessed with high-rise policy by means of height regulation. Even though this remains sensible from a health and welfare point of view, this is a one-sided approach. Especially now that more and more public spaces are being designed and realized within high-rise projects, the question arises of how we can steer beyond the facade in terms of urban design. Interior urbanism can answer this question by approaching the vertical networks of public spaces in high-rise projects as physically and socially part of the city in various forms.@en

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened with the work of Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ) on 13 May 2023. @en

Port cities exist at the intersection between water and land. They are currently under pressure due to global changes and climate, economic and social transitions. As they face the urgent need to respond to contemporary urgencies, port and city authorities tend to ignore port cities’ long history of integration and resilience. Instead, they continue the process that emerged since industrialization and that was reinforced by containerization, a process of disconnected development, divergent tools and visions. Such an approach, however, is no longer viable when port, city and territory face shared water challenges. To address this challenge, the course “Designing Public Spaces for Maritime Mindsets” challenged students to explore the future of port-city relations by rethinking public spaces as hubs where port and city actors can come together to share conversations and visions, engage in dialogues with citizens to develop a common agenda and maritime mindsets. Such gatherings are much needed to stimulate new approaches for future port territories that are no longer characterized by obsolete energy use or polluting industries. This article argues that design education can play an important role in generating new theoretical and practical planning approaches by combining historical analysis and spatial mapping and by developing provocative scenarios.@en

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’.@en

Na meer dan vijfhonderd dagen vanuit huis te hebben gewerkt, zijn onze levens en dagelijkse rituelen door de COVID-19 pandemie ingrijpend veranderd. Het afstand houden tot elkaar en de overige maatregelen hebben bovendien ieders toegang tot de openbare ruimte aangetast en een reeks uitdagingen blootgelegd op verschillende niveaus. Onderzoekers van meer dan twintig universiteiten verkennen die gevolgen in de nieuwe open-access publicatie ‘2020: A Year without Public Space under the COVID-19 Pandemic’.@en

This paper focuses on public spaces for community resilience in their ‘response-related abilities’ and which can be improved. Comparative studies of communities, places, and/or disasters after the unforeseen impactful events are indicators to quantify the level of resilience. Within the broad scope of literature, in this line, 'community networks', 'people-place connections', and 'community infrastructure' are consequentially attributes that come out strongly in studying the resilience of community during change events. In other words, people, and spaces, in their social and physical interconnectivity, contribute to the level of community resilience. In this context, the aim of this paper is to take a closer look into the relation between community resilience and public spaces and specify those public spaces which enhance resilience by means of its design. Based upon reviewing literature and identifying similarities in reasoning community resilience as well as adherence in the discussed spaces as support for community resilience, these public spaces have been specified and some examples from Rotterdam are given to make an accurate image of them.@en

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? International interdisciplinary students from Delft University of Technology have outlined various design solutions by tackling this question. Manifest in all cases are the spatial bottlenecks on the level of public space. The hybridization of the urban and architectural program requires a cross-section thinking. The six real-life cases the students studied on are the result of a Flemish-Dutch collaboration of the project Stad × Ruimte: Leuven, Amsterdam, Oostende, Maastricht, Mechelen en Rotterdam.@en

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 laid at dislocation of production activities in favor of logistic-productive dynamics. At the same time, professional focus was on the urban areas where most citizens are. While this practice has led to redevelopment of abandoned harbor areas too, foremost the approach stimulated stronger physical boundaries between lived city and the remaining and new harbor areas. This article describes the application of the dominant model in Rotterdam over the recent decades, on the base of literature review, and, it confronts this with the concepts of Rotterdam which are in the minds of professionals-in-training, through method of ‘mental mapping’. On the one hand, mainly harbor areas are memorized 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 harbors 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 memorized; 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.@en

This commentary aims to provide a window on the future by studying actions, taken to control the spreading of the corona virus, while obviously affecting public space over a year. What has been the effects on public space directly linked to these actions during the pandemic; what values play a role, and what can we expect for the future? We have seen how immediate responses induced by the COVID-19 crisis influences traveling, gathering, and public live in general. Now, it is time to look further. Having a base-point in Rotterdam and taking The Netherlands as an example, the commentary argues that some shifts in using, appropriating and experiencing public space will remain. Yet, mainly those not just being immediate responses to sudden societal change, rather those which are embedded in long-term change.@en

Today, the resilience of communities is increasingly highlighted in cases of returning hazards affecting everyday life next to those in cases of exceptionally devastating natural and man-made global disasters. Urban analyses on community resilience and translations of theory in actionable strategies are consequently informing everyday public spaces inside and outside buildings. We, designers of public spaces are thus challenged to design for resilience. Designing for resilience counterbalances designing for control, making vital and vulnerable places rigidly robust. Outcomes contrast designs like the enormous Venetian flood protection system MOSE, built on age-old ways to keep water out and secure cities alike the tiny temporary flood barriers for doors. As a relatively new moral value, designing for resilience is not innate to our professions and lacks such tradition. Luckily, examples emerge.@en

This article aims to extent the notion of port-cities and counter the mainstream narrative that port and city, in cases like Rotterdam, have become disunited by reviewing its public spaces in their unique port-city characteristics. These characteristics can be found by systematic approaching and describing public spaces as biographies of place, along the lines of geosemiotical methods, including topological and typological dimensions. The article underlines that port-cities have unique spatial networks of public spaces, including unique kinds of public spaces, each having unique properties, and physical settings and attributes, activities and concepts or meanings affirming differences in the experienced. Following the multi-scalar approach and by introducing micro-narratives, this article introduces an integrated perspective on port-cities, thus stipulating the union of port and city. The emphasis lies at the observation that the port-city is one in everyday space, which is omnipresent.@en

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.@en

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.@en

Port cities are a particular type of territory and are often long-standing examples of resilience, bringing opportunities, wealth, and innovation to their nations and their citizens. They have developed at the crossroads of international trade and commerce and the intersection of sea and land. Flows of people through trade and migration have played a key role in their spatial, social and cultural development. Their strong local identities share legacies of diversity and cosmopolitanism, but also of colonialism and segregation. The Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, Fujian speaks of the exchange between Arabia and China along the maritime silk road. Hanseatic cities stand as an example of far-flung networks with districts for foreign traders—think of the German merchants who established Bryggen, the German dock, in Bergen, now a UNESCO world heritage site.@en