Tag: usa
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Immigrant city
Seen at the IDFA, Amsterdam, on 29 November 2015: ‘In Jackson Heighs’, the new documentary of Frederic Wiseman, opens with muslims praying in mosques, garages, sheds. Welcome to Queens, New York. On the last day of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2015 I went to see the three-hour movie in a cinema at the…
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The future
Read in ‘Future City’ (1973) of Roger Elwood (editor): Today I will give a lecture at the conference for teachers in geography of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (KNAG) in Ede, the Netherlands. Subject: the future. Some 800 teachers will be there. Where to begin? How to end my story? For inspiration, I reread ‘Future…
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Out of control
Heard in Boston City Hall on 22 October 2015: Leaving Penn Station early in the morning, I took de Amtrack train from New York City to Boston, Massachusetts. There I would meet some people at City Hall, to discuss the planning of the city-region. Boston – a city of some 640.000 inhabitants – is preparing…
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Powering forward
Read in ‘The Metropolitan Revolution’ (2013) of Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley: The US economy is broken. How to repair it? Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley wrote a book about ‘how cities and metros are fixing our broken politics and fragile economy’. It is similar to Benjamin Barber’s ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’, only…
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The enemy is noise
Read in ‘There is simply too much to think about’ of Saul Bellow (2015): The first essay in the bulk of nonfiction of the great American novelist Saul Bellow, assembled in ‘There is simply too much to think about’, is called ‘Starting out in Chicago’. It’s about how the young man started writing novels…
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Dark Sky City
Seen in De Pont in Tilburg, the Netherlands, on 6 August 2015: The exhibition on the American artist James Turrell in De Pont, Tilburg, was exciting. Thursday two weeks ago we visited the museum, but I have to admit I didn’t know his work when I entered the place. There were some four installations.…
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The creative gap
Read in The Atlantic of 28 May 2015: In 2003, at the opening of Westergasfabriek, Richard Florida visited Amsterdam for the first time. That was only one year after his ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ (2002) first was published. I remember. All Dutch cities wanted to become creative after that great performance. More than…
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It’s hard just to live
Gelezen in The Washington Post van 28 april 2015: “It was only a matter of time before Baltimore exploded,“ schreef afgelopen week Michael Fletcher in The Washington Post. Fletcher is niet alleen economisch correspondent, maar ook inwoner van Baltimore. De rellen na de dood van Freddie Gray verbazen hem achteraf niet. Met ras of discriminatie…
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Unequal geography
Gelezen op CityLab (The Atlantic) van 20 oktober 2014: “Are big successful cities the new normal?” Dat vraagt de Canadees-Amerikaanse economisch geograaf Richard Florida zich af naar aanleiding van nieuw onderzoek van Josh Lehner naar werkgelegenheidsgroei tussen 2007 en 2013 in Amerikaanse steden. Een artikel van zijn hand stond onlangs te lezen op CityLab. De…
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Einde suburbanisatie
Gelezen op Streetblog.org op 13 februari 2014: Opmerkelijk bericht van Angie Schmitt op Streetblog. In ‘The Sprawl Machine Started Winding Down 20 Years Ago’ stelt ze vast dat de suburbanisatie in de Verenigde Staten niet pas tijdens de financiële crisis, na 2008, omsloeg van groei naar krimp. Het begon al veel eerder. Uit nieuwe data…