Aim and Format
of the Course

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Landscaping the city and citifying the landscape; An international tour

The enlargement of scale and scope of urban activities in the network society has generated a completely new interdependency between the cities and their surrounding areas. The familiar contrast between compact urban containment on the one hand and open green and blue water spaces on the other has made space for intensive mutual interactions between the different spheres of activity. The urban areas strongly expanded in the last two decades (Europe wide) but within the new metropolitan spaces there is a very strong tendency of decentralisation. Urban activities penetrate more and more in the surrounding rural environment, and also - vice versa ? green spaces or water areas at once see them selves surrounded by urban expansion. The tendency of metropolitan growth is largely unplanned and rather it is the outcome of more or less autonomous social and economic dynamics. The emerging metropolitan spaces are often still disintegrated and highly disruptive. Although the emergence of metropolitan urbanisation is steady going on, the urban population still does not identify with the new regional configurations and it appears to be extremely difficult to make political sense at these intermediate levels of scale. Against this background we will explore and discuss:

How coherent social and environmental qualities and the recognisable identity of new urban regions might be strengthened and institutionalised by enlarging the symbolic meaning of the landscaping and cultural buttresses.

The emerging metropolitan spaces are not yet crystallised in the mental maps of the urban population. We will explore how far the combined cultural strategies of deliberately landscaping the urban areas and - simultaneously - urbanising the rural surroundings can give meaning to the new metropolitan spaces, that makes sense to its population. How get new territorial spaces institutionalised, which cultural strategies can support these processes and how can the use of symbolic means enlarge the embryonic processes of metropolitan cohesion, liveability and identity.

The purpose of the lecture series is to learn from international experiences, both successful and failing relations between the urban area and it?s environment. The profiles of the international city-landscapes vary from the role of the Bay Area in San Francisco, to creating a new urban heart via the Olympic Games in London, and from changes in the Mumbai suburbs, to the new exhibition center in Milan, and to landscaping the Zwischenstadt in Germany.

sLIM: Annual lecture series on multiple and intensive land use

Founded by the Dutch Council on Tall Buildings and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, the Foundation for Lectures on Intensive and Multiple Land Use (sLIM) was established in 2002. Beginning in 2003, this foundation has organized two lecture series annually, at the University of Amsterdam and at the Delft University of Technology. In 2005, an additional lecture series was organized at Utrecht University. This eighth lecture series will again be organized at the University of Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Province of North Holland and the municipalities in the North Wing of the Randstad.

Well-known experts from different parts of the world are invited to give a presentation in combination with Dutch co-speakers for an audience of professionals and advanced Dutch students. The professionals work in development and consultancy firms, the building industry, design studios, universities or planning departments at different governmental levels. Master?s level students in planning from different universities in the Netherlands will follow a special course at the University of Amsterdam with extra reading, writing and group discussions around the theme of the lecture series.

The expert lecturers from abroad are requested to provide their presentations on cd-rom, so that output from the series can be distributed afterwards to participants. If possible, these lecturers would also hold a group discussion session with the students and/or young PhD-researchers at the University on the afternoon after their lecture. In this way, the scientific and practical benefit of inviting foreign speakers to travel to the Netherlands would be maximized, taking full advantage of their expertise and experience.

Themes

The following themes for the different lectures have been identified, but fine-tuning would be done in co-operation with the main speakers:

  • Institutionalizing the Symbolic Meaning of New Metropolitan Spaces: Concepts and Experiences in the political and cultural Geography, Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Using the Water Landscapes: Blue Heart Metropolis, Jim Chappell, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association
  • Landscaping the City-region: Experiments in the Frankfurt region, Ursula Stein, Universit?t Kassel
  • London: creating a new urban Heart via Events, the Case of the Olympics in Statford London, Andy Thornley, London School of Economics
  • # Citifying the Landscape: Navi Mumbai, Prof. Isabelle Milbert, Institut Universitaire d'?tudes du d?veloppement, Gen?ve, Switzerland & Prof. Annapurna Shaw, Regional Development Group Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India
  • Milanese challenges: the new Exhibition System, Alessandro Balducci, Politecnico di Milano
  • Landscaping the World Expo 2010 Shanghai, Professor Siegfried Zhiqiang Wu, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University

Program Committee

Prof. Willem Salet (chair), Drs. Dick Schuiling, Dr. Leonie B. Janssen-Jansen

Coordination

Dr. Leonie Janssen-Jansen
Amsterdam, March 2007