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 […]
Tag: Amsterdam
Amsterdam, de stad als bedrijf
Uit het archief. Oorspronkelijk in het Engels gepubliceerd als: Oudenampsen, M. (2007). Amsterdam TM, the City as a Business. BAVO architects, ed. Urban Politics Now. Re-imagining Democracy in the Neo-liberal City. Rotterdam: NAi, 110-127. Introductie […]
Een kleine geschiedenis van een Amsterdams zakendristrict
Aan grofweg twaalfhonderd meter van de ringweg A10 in het zuiden van Amsterdam wordt gewerkt aan de Zuidas, naar eigen zeggen dé toekomstige toplocatie van Nederland. Borden van bouwbedrijven met beloftevolle beelden van wat komen […]
On dog shit and open source urbanism
Amsterdam started branding itself in the eighties, through the now largely forgotten Amsterdam Heeft ‘t campaign. It appealed in popular slang to existing residents of Amsterdam, instructing them to become proud ‘sellers of the town’. […]
Aldo van Eyck and the City as Playground
In 1947, the architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam, on the Bertelmanplein. Many hundreds more followed, in a spatial experiment that has (positively) marked the childhood of an entire generation. Though largely disappeared, defunct and forgotten today, these playgrounds represent one of the most emblematic of architectural interventions in a pivotal time: the shift from the top down organization of space by modernist functionalist architects, towards a bottom-up architecture that literally aimed to give space to the imagination.
MO 