Lecture at the opening of the exhibition Compromiso Político, at BAK, Utrecht, 10 February. I am honoured to speak at the opening of the exhibition Compromiso Político. Of interest perhaps, is that Matthijs de Bruijne […]
Category: English
The sharpening of contradictions
Presentation at De Balie, Freedom of Speech and Islam, February 25 2015. (Photo: Assassination of Sadat by Islamic Jihad, 1981) If we look at the gruesome assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo primarily as […]
Why the EU is not a superstate
Introduction at Battle of Ideas, at De Buren, Brussels, 12 november 2014. Two important misconceptions plague the discussion on the European Union. The claim of its propononents that they are the party of cosmopolitanism and […]
Lost in Translation: On the Intelligibility of Art Discourse
Published on Open!, July 2014 Animosity and mutual miscomprehension have come to characterise the relationship between journalists and the modern art world in the Netherlands. At the core of this discord is a recurring discussion […]
From social engineering to spatial engineering
As must be clear to anyone crossing the IJ, if only with the gaze of the eye, the North of Amsterdam is an area undergoing rapid transformation. It was a longtime container of everything unwanted […]
Gentrification in Amsterdam
Here my response on questions from an Italian journalist on gentrification in Amsterdam. 1) Amsterdam is currently one of the capitals in Europe with the largest social housing stock. How is gentrification reshaping its human […]
The artist as a ‘baron in the trees’
Speech given at the opening of Casco, 1 May 2014. These last years, the cutbacks in the cultural sector have led to a reconsideration of the place of art in Dutch society. There are those […]
Revisiting ‘Policing the Crisis’
On the 17th of August 1972, a British newspaper reported on a violent robbery as ‘a mugging gone wrong’. The article was accompanied by the following headline: ‘As crimes of violence escalate, a word common […]
Political populism: speaking to the imagination
On August 28 2010, a startling spectacle took place in Washington, DC. The day is engrained in the collective memory of Americans as that of Martin Luther King. On 28 August 1963, he gave his […]
Open Source Urbanism
In recent years, creative city policy has increasingly come under attack. The field of creativity policy has brought into existence it’s own academic subdiscipline of creativity studies. At the same time, an entire substratum of […]
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