Inventing Europe

Inventing Europe is a pioneering collaborative project in which historians and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe together tell a new kind of history of Europe. Following the paths of technology from the transport and communication revolutions of the Nineteenth Century through to the present day, in the course of half a year the project will realize an online exhibition that shows to a wide range of users the ways technology has shaped Europe – and the ways Europe has shaped technology.
Based on research from the six-part book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations 1850-2000 the virtual exhibit explores the broad themes of globalization, consumption, communication, infrastructures, knowledge societies, and governance. It seeks to make its results available to a wider audience by drawing on the rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe and beyond.”

The exhibit, developed at Imperial College, London, will allow participating museums to share relevant content from their online collections quickly and easily. These appear as related content next to the objects within the exhibit, and serve as a portal for further exploration on the web. Click here to access the prototype exhibit: “Europe, Interrupted”.

‘New’ space for the city

The discussion continues on whether Amsterdam can realize urban growth within existing urban areas or whether the city needs the proposed big-scale expansion locations at the artifical island of IJburg and near the 1970’s satellite-town Almere. Architects Tom Bergevoet and Maarten van Tuijl, of Temp Architecture, did a basic survey using Google Earth and found about 450 ha of vacant lots (red stains on the map) in Amsterdam, comparable to the IJburg project. Temporary use of vacant urban space for recreation, gardening and cultural events could make urban life more pleasant and prepare new sites like IJburg for urban occupation (phased development scheme below, in three steps). Politicians agree that a certain amount of vacant land and buildings is always needed to keep a city flexible and dynamic. However, a surplus of vacancy is thought to be unpleasant and unsafe.

ARCAM organizes debates with politicians, investors and entrepreneurs, on vacant buildings (May 18th 2011), and on vacant urban land (May 25th 2011). From May 11th, ARCAM hosts an exhibition by Temp, called New Space for the City.

Read More:
Urban Change – Amsterdam: densification or expansion (English)
Het Parool – In de stad ligt een IJburg braak (Dutch)

Merged cities

Designer Leonard de Vogel produced a couple of intriguing fusions of Amsterdam with other waterfront cities. Imagine the canals of central Amsterdam with, on the horizon, the skyline of Manhattan. Or the central part of Rotterdam – north of the river Maas, combined with the central part of Amsterdam  – south of Het IJ.


Merge of New York and Amsterdam


Merge of Rotterdam and Amsterdam

SprintCity – spring 2011

SprintCity (SprintStad in Dutch) is a project by the DeltaMetropolis Association, which investigates possibilities for urbanization around public transport nodes in the Randstad region (The Netherlands). The ultimate goal is to create attractive and sustainable environments for living, leisure and working, by optimizing the use of already existing rail infrastructure. For more information on this project, click here (English).


Station on railway corridor in SprintCity

In the first semester of 2011, SprintCity has been busy:
– A new version of serious game SprintStad was launched (version 1.1); the game simulates spatial developments around trains stations until the year 2030, and was played with several stakeholders
– Presentations were given at KEI VRJRS-party, Ruimteconferentie (PBL) and soon at InfraTrends and Hogeschool Rotterdam
– An article was published in Agora Magazine (Dutch-Flemish magazine for spatial planning), describing the use of serious game SprintStad in practice
– A FactSheet was published, demonstrating potential of smaller railway stations along rail corridors included in the national plan for high-frequency train service, to be implemented until 2030
– New project partners and investors were found
Update SprintStad #3 was published, featuring news, research results and international context; the Update can be downloaded here


Simulation game session, in Amersfoort


Urban density survey of international station areas

Read more: SprintCity goes China

Spatial impact of roads

April 2011, researcher Henar Salas Olmedo obtained her PhD title in Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Cantabria, Santander (Spain). Her thesis – THE SPATIAL IMPACT OF ROADS – discusses land use changes around heavy road infrastructure and was supervised by Dra. Soledad Nogués. Merten Nefs was asked to review and comment the thesis as external expert.

“Nowadays, transport has become an essential activity is our society. The role transport plays has such an importance that it is frequently named as a basic factor to generate
development. This document deals specifically with the effects of highways on the spatial pattern of population, firms and the hierarchy of settlements in relatively peripheral areas in the EU context, that is, not large metropolitan areas but subregional areas with some transport infrastructures with a low level of dynamism. […]
Two study areas are compared: Doncaster Metropolitan Borough, which contains two motorway crossings, and the Lincoln Policy Area, which is a crossroads for several trunk  roads. The comparative analysis and diagnosis of these areas led to some significant conclusions: the motorway-connected area shows a greater dispersion of industrial and service than residential land uses; the dispersion of residential areas in the trunk-road area starts later but with a similar, or even more intense, trend; the primate city is more and more dominant in the trunk-road area, whereas in the motorway-connected area intermediate towns are increasing their functions; and commuting flows are relatively more numerous, although shorter and spatially more concentrated, in the trunk-road area.”