Categorie: policies
The other day I was thinking, I’m going to invest some money in land, since it has a stable value, or at least, has lasting ‘value’. But then I realized that this has mainly (for the time being) financial value, because the land itself is completely exhausted, exhausted by farmers…
The newspaper article on Saturday on the front page of the economics section of the NRC national newspaper , opens with the headline: “believing in growth or shrinkage.” With that, I was immediately on the fence. Because it’s not about believing. It’s physics. You can calculate how much energy and…
It is popular at the moment, to speak of shame, like for example flight shame. All that CO2 and so on, and yes, that is a consequence and we will have to bear the consequences. It is then misused to suggest to people that they can redeem this, because ,…
Calculating in CO2 remains a challenge, especially when it comes to the remaining budget. There is in the Netherlands a small action group that is trying to define how we should deal with the remaining CO2 budget for the built environment. How much CO2 may be emitted (invested) per new…
During my time as a professor I was regularly at odds with the Academy of Architecture’. I feel affiliated with ’the art of building’, but not with architecture or construction as art. That was more or less the reason for the quarrels. Not surprising, because in my guidance I start…
There are actually only two options (‘scenario’s’): Either we go into CO2 lockdown, or we party on until the whole thing collapses…. The latest IPCC report makes that perfectly clear again. What we are doing now is a case of “soft nurses make bad wounds”, with our decades-long unbridled optimism…
Time for yet another ‘episode’ in my series on ‘money’. I am trying to ‘understand’ things, that’s how this episode regarding money should be read. A rediscovered old research sheds some light in the darkness. Virtually everything today is expressed in money, and everything is also measured in money: even…
For a new book, I explore the space-time relationship of many human activities, as a measure of our system impact, and to see if there are alternatives that can do with less. Space time in the sense that the conversion of solar energy is the basis of life here on…
It’s about time to face the hard truth here in the Netherlands: building below sea level isn’t handy, to say the least, to say modestly it’s destroying capital, and to say it hard: it’s endangering people. The soil is sinking, the sea level is rising, the rivers are overflowing, the…
Just recently, in May, Jaime Lerner passed away. He more or less invented sustainable urban development. A little tribute. Everything has to be sustainable or circular these days, including the cities. Now, is there a city that has already applied many of these principles, where there is something to learn?…
