Categorie: smartcities
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?…
Last time, I even forgot one goal: Sustainable development Goal 11, Sustainable cities. Again, the question: what is sustainable? So much has been brought together under that heading, all nice things for people, that it does not really help us very much, when it comes to energy and resources. On…
( a short version has been published on Linkedin) . Whats happening now, with the corona crises, shows how the world / human beings have become vulnerable to disruptions of “business as usual’ , or better: current ‘life as usual’ . Only think of global connections when suddenly all countries…
Urban heating, or at least the increase thereof, has been in the spotlight for some time. And the basic effects were known to me. But after hearing a lecture by Math Santamouris during a recent Conference, a whole new world opened up for me. He gave a good overview of…
Amsterdam needs around 50,000 charging points for electric cars. 50,000? Really? Have we gone completely nuts or what? Doesn’t alarm bells start ringing: “What the hell are we doing?” Where do all these raw materials come from, and the energy to supply those charging stations? The electricity grid has already…
Architects love to be able to design and build an iconic tower. And a city counselor can leave his signature with it. Well, it happens that the world is urbanizing, and that we see a lot of high-rises in planning, framed as ’there is no other way’: we have to…
Since it looks as if we are going to introduce the climate measures for buildings mainly via municipalities or cities, I have recovered some of my older research material about urban sustainability, developed when I worked at Wageningen University. The urban approach makes sense, buildings are not isolated functions, they…
The national organization for road works in the Netherlands, RWS, has a slogan: from A to Better. It has not brought us much so far: The roads are widened, more traffic lanes , so now we are not in a two lane traffic jam but in a 5 lane traffic…
There are some strange excesses in the need for more sustainability, and especially with regard to the undefined “greening” of things. One of these, and you notice it more and more, is the tendency to plant trees on buildings. Not on the roof, as you might expect, but especially around…
