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The Urbanism Week 2011 brought together students, practitioners and academics to

discuss and exchange ideas about the role of the Urbanist.

Atlantis continues where the Urbanism Week left off and talked more in-depth with

some of the key figures to understand their propositions and personal motives. This

section covers the first part of this whirlwind week.

This Urbanism Week 2011 was one in a

series of recurring annual events, organized

by Polis since 1992. Every single one of them

in a different configuration, expressing

the dynamics of time, students and the

association. But this one was rather special,

since it marked the final re-establishment of

Polis as an active study association. Not only

for Master students Urbanism and Landscape

Architecture, but also for others interested in

the urban environment. The Urbanism Week

could only have been organized by students.

The past years have shown us that the

established institutions almost never succeed

in bringing up a substantial discussion on

the meaning of the discipline. They enclose

a too small, but even more a too restricted

fragment of the professional world. Since

the founding in 1989 Polis has been the

platform for knowledge exchange between

students, researchers and professionals and

this Urbanism Week proved that it still is!

Introduction by Jorick Beijer

Chairman of the organizing committee

Urbanismweek 2011

My contribution should set a small framework for this section of this Atlantis, regarding the strong link with the Urbanism Week Polis organized September 26th – 30th 2011. I will give a brief explanation of why we felt it was necessary to host such an event, and will set the stage for the further content of this section about the role of the urbanist within the theme: “crisis and beyond, the continuous state of change’’.

Our fascination started with linguistics: Urban – Urbanism – Urbanist. What does the suffix ‘ist’ in urbanist mean? Is the urbanist a specialist, like a dentist? Or is the urbanist more a novelist, a storyteller? This is how the dentist works: analysis – a diagnosis – developing a strategy – and then an intervention. Every urbanist, at least when they visits the dentist, will recognize a part of this sequence. But when the urbanist doesn’t intervene, is he or she then just a

storyteller, only putting up utopian ideas?

The Urbanism Week arose as a result of a certain dissatisfaction with the degree of attention to critical thinking within the curriculum and with the decreasing significance of the public debate amongst students and staff in our faculty. The French philosopher Michel Foucault stated that:

“We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.” 1

The Urbanism Week definitely manifested the force of ideas, now this magazine brings the discussion to a next level.

1 Eribon, D. (1991) Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy

Wing. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, p. 282 18

urbanism week

So you are an Urbanist!?

Urbanismweek

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The theme of Thursday September 29: “Crisis and beyond, the continuous state of change”, covered the current state of affairs in a global economical crisis and the impact of such on the profession of the urbanist. This review provides a short overview, dealing with crisis, urban design and education.

This crisis is definitely not the first one we have to deal with, argued economic geographer Ronald Wall. He stressed the importance of mapping in understanding the cyclic character of economical crisis and prosperity over time. Ronald Wall related the economic crises to visible tendencies of social awareness in the history of urban planning, for instance those of Ebenezer Howard and Christopher Alexander. “In the uncertainty you have to go back to your roots, back to the community and you have to self reflect and win trust in your community”. Pro-fessor Maurits de Hoog emphasized the necessity of change. “I think we should change radi-cally. It’s no longer about housing and that’s the major change we have to take. It’s about schools, about health, about public space. And that’s a major shift”.

According to Professor Han Meyer, the market is not a leading criterium. “Urbanism is essen-tial for society, including the market. That’s not something on its own”. Markus Appenzeller agreed on this perspective of the embedded market, but urged young professionals to inter-act and play the game. “You have to understand the logic of the market, then you can achieve almost everything you want”. Urbanists should constantly consider for whom they make cities profitable, and stay in the discussion. Something that Alfredo Brillembourg calls activ-ist architecture. “I am in-between the arguments of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, we have to

negotiate the planning dilemma within each city where we work. That’s the activism”. The current state of globalization is herein key accord-ing to Alfredo Brillembourg, who argued that the availability of new resources will lead to empowerment and new connections.

The education of the new urbanists gained a substantial role in this debate. Professor Han Meyer argued that every understanding of the future starts with the understanding of history and theory, knowing your own body of knowledge. Collectively the debaters stressed the importance of travelling during studies. “Knowledge is one thing, the other thing is that there is something you can’t generate from what other people have done, and that is simply exposing yourself to condition”, Markus Appenzeller stated. Where Alfredo Brillembourg convincingly plead for students to discover the global south, Han Meyer pointed out the Dutch context and the important things that still have to be done here, both in practice as in academia.

With the statement that “the best urban designer is time” Hubert Habib took position in the awareness of society and societal processes: “Don’t underestimate the human intuition. It’s our duty to make it tangible and explain what they don’t understand”. A great conclusion of a discussion on crisis through all scales and the call for a new view towards society and the local space of everyday live.

The continuous state of change

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“It is clear that urbanism of major urban area development projects in the Netherlands is over. Many developers, investors and housing corporations recalibrate their activities. This inherently means less urbanists. This is not only something we see in the design firms who had been working on this kind of projects, but also in the planning departments of the large Dutch cities. Remarkable is the fact that employment in smaller municipalities and provinces seems to stabilize and even grow in some places. Do we see here more dedication to quality? Many design offices and engineering firms still have a good amount of work due to projects abroad. The Dutch urban design seems to be a pretty good export product. Looking to the new assignment of the transformation of existing buildings, ensembles and urban areas the question is which qualities and skills do new urbanists exactly need. Shouldn’t we anticipate to the further blurring of the boundaries of planning and landscape architecture; heading to the profession ‘environmental design’?”

“To my opinion the Urbanism-week of Polis was a great success, and I hope the start of a tradition which will be continued next years. The professional and academic world of urbanism needs the active involvement of students. They will define the content and role of the discipline in the future, and should be critical to the past and present performance of the discipline. The urbanism-week showed that the present-day generation IS involved and critical.

One of the statements of the panel-debates was ‘Urbanism only exists in Academia’. I think the Urbanism-week as a whole showed the contrary of this statement. The range of invited speakers, most of them from professional practice, showed that urbanism is fully alive in the world outside academia. The role of academia is to reflect on this practice and to stimulate innovations. The urbanism-week itself was a wonderful example of this role of academia.”

“The thing we are learning from this crisis is that new information technology and media are enabling people in the smallest places and communities to actually form social groups and take on the formal systems. I think that’s a fascinating difference with previous reces-sions. What we saw in the work of Alfredo is that when you start to engage the masses - the vast masses of the world - with a few good ideas and you mobilize it, then you don’t have to do very much else.

If you know where to intervene, at the strategic points in the city, and you inject it with good program you can actually mobi-lize the people and their skills. They will take care of the rest.”

urbanism week

Reflections

Maurits de Hoog Han Meyer

Ronald Wall