Sense of Place, The Atlas of Cultural Ecology of Rotterdam
Type: Research Location: Rotterdam Client: High Rise Team Rotterdam Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers, John van de Water, Jan van Teeffelen, Iris Dudock, Arnold Reijndorp with Frank Hornis Collaborator / associate: Department of Housing and Town Planning (dS+V) Material: Publication, 60 pag. full-color, ISBN 90-72498-18-6 and CD-rom with interactive computer program First design: 2002-11-01
The Atlas of Cultural Ecology of Rotterdam was commissioned by the High-Rise Team and has been drawn up by Arnold Reijndorp, urban sociologist at Rotterdam and member of the High-Rise Team, bureau NEXT Architects from Amsterdam and the Department of Housing and Town Planning (dS+V), working in combination. The High-Rise Team was set up by the city of Rotterdam to further the spatial and programmatic quality of the planned high-rise and other large-scale developments in the city centre. The atlas, being a new instrument, plays an important role in this process.
After more than 50 years of rebuilding, the centre of Rotterdam starts to show the appetites of a real inner city. The cultural dynamics are driven from within, and are no longer the result of planning and project development. This atlas tries to capture the new ‘sense of place’ in Rotterdam, which is the result of spontaneous and informal developments. It shows a series of maps that reveal the city in different formal and informal layers.
The project aims to inspire policy makers, urban designers and developers to become more sensitive to the fact that urban areas are ever-changing organisms; new developments should be finely tuned to suit to their surroundings.
Holland Layer by Layer
Type: Research Client: Bouwfonds Nederland Team: Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk First design: 1999-03-15 Status: Competition, 2nd prize, first prize Archiprix
First Prize Archiprix 2000
Accessibility is a basic condition of urban development. Accessibility as an article of faith has resulted in one-way thinking: the more connections, the merrier. More and more the Netherlands, dominated by fast means of transport, is turning into a thoroughfare. It is dragged along in the wake of acceleration and slowly, the question is arising of whether there is any place left to stand still. We raise spectres: will the Netherlands soon be exactly the same everywhere? The same shops, the same houses, the same people?
As a result of the increased accessibility of the big cities in the Randstad, the relative distances between the centres themselves have dwindled over the years. Now that ever more connections completely invalidate the concept of distance, perhaps the question is if we should discard the geographical notion ‘randstad’ and reintroduce ‘time’ as a spatial element in the cartographic exercise.
The 2030 Tempographic Map of all movements paints a tempting picture of ´Holland – Layer by Layer’. It illustrates the possibility to use both acceleration and deceleration to make progress. If we vary accessibility, we can equip a country of extremes: a land of metro-poles that contrast sharply with rural areas.
