December 2010
3 posts
Reinventing Port Cities: the case of waterfront...
Few urban areas possess such unique amenities as waterfront areas. Planners and architects are increasingly rediscovering the asset that the waterfront can be. Across Northwestern Europe, for instance, port cities are reinventing themselves. As the requirements of the shipping industry changed, old inner-city seaports were no longer functional. As new docks and harbors were constructed just...
The Orgins of the Woonerf
In the 1960s, the small city of Emmen in the eastern Netherlands drew attention to itself because of its newly built expansion areas. Characterized by human-scaled development, and a good balance between public spaces and privacy, between openness and secludedness, and (in the new neigbhorhood’s building stock) between unity and variety. The residential areas of the town had to be of...
Neighborhood-based Planning: from NYC to Rotterdam
In the 1950s, two very different trends took hold in North America and in The Netherlands. In North America, city planning was synonymous with suburbanization, as dozens of thousands of G.I.s returned home from World War two to move to the suburbs and start a family. Though these first post-war suburbs were still far more compact and walkable than their more recent counterparts, they set the trend...
