“...we are not going to solve our environmental problems without solving our urban problems...” design decisions. Are participatory movements still possible in the design process?'
extremes, because often by doing something extremely wrong you get really good ideas about how to do it right.'
Han Meyer Professor. Urban Composition, Urbanism
'Well, it has to do with specialists and laymen, but also with the large and the small scale. Relatively specialist issues like mobility and the water defense system are the most important fields within the DIMI, so in short; dykes and roads. And actually these wet and dry infrastructures are the field of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, so the important decisions are made on a very high level. You can’t just make a good coastal defense system for The Hague alone, because if the system fails 300 meters down the road, the whole Randstad will still flood. You will need a concept for the whole coast, and the same goes for the rivers and for highways. However, it should fit in and be of some value to local communities that live next to these highways, or on the coast. That is a very big task; in the end it is about how to make things in such a way that locals can also see the benefit of it. That means that your initial plans must always have some space left for parts of the plan to change, so there’s a high level of flexibility demanded from these specialisms. This in turn means that specialisms shouldn’t hold on to the way of working that has become common over the last century. Rather they should be open to other influences, which are required for working with other disciplines, and in order to bridge this scale difference.' Dirk Sijmons
'Surely people have a right to their say. And honestly, I think in a lot of cases it won’t even work without public participation. Take the energy issue we’re working on for example. There you see that the willingness is directly related to the stake people hold in placing those wind turbines. You see enormous differences in success in deploying wind parks between Nord Rhein Westfalen and the Netherlands. In Nord Rhein Westfalen local communities were brought in from the very beginning, which gave them a kind of ‘we-feeling’ about these turbines. Here in the Netherlands we’ve seen more of a top down policy, which led to an atmosphere of ‘they’re putting these mills here’ and ‘we have to live with it.'
'If the city of the future is a combination of urban planning, mobility and climate resilience, what then is the landscape of the future?' Maurits de Hoog
'The delta city region is a very specific case. Those regions are spread out systems combined with these large scale programs. There’s a complex assignment in that, with Schiphol, the port, but also things like tourism. And because this system is so spread out the large scales, which are less self-evident, are quickly eaten up. Those contrasts that are important for the quality of the city are disappearing rapidly. That’s a very specific task, this crumbling up of open spaces. These spaces need to be connected, that’s the success of the London model in Amsterdam for instance. In ten minutes you’re out of the landscape and into the city; that’s a real quality. This contrast with the landscape that the city then offers, that’s a basic quality we should maintain.' Han Meyer
'If from now on we continue with a more compact form of urban planning, rather than expanding, then this whole Dutch landscape is still a very constructed landscape, directly linked to urban use. This can be seen through people recreating there that live in cities, or in the fact that food is produced there which is consumed in cities. Also it has to be maintained in such a way that if our landscapes aren’t kept dry, neither are our cities, so water management is directly linked to both city and landscape. The term resilience is quite fundamental. The Dutch landscape is currently highly fixed, with little flexibility. Now there’s this movement that started with the rivers to create a more resilient water system, which in turn can create new and interesting landscapes. For it to be more resilient and thus flexible it will have to make use of some of the strong points that are still left in the landscape, historically, but that have been covered up during land consolidation projects and such. This resilient landscape is something different than this almost industrially organized landscape that we have now.'
Han Vrijling
'I think the only possibility is that we as a collective of engineers provide a number of choices. So as a group of designers you make a number of alternatives and then you let the citizens choose. Maybe they want something in the middle and you’ll need to make a hybrid. I think that’s a good way of cooperating, because discussing these matters in detail will be very difficult I believe. It’s very important, especially for the TU, to show the extremes in these alternatives. For instance with traffic, you can maximize the usage of the roads, so you need less space. But then when one fly lands on your car window in this perfectly regulated system, then the whole system crashes and there’s traffic jam from Maastricht to Amsterdam, because all the reserves have been squeezed out. On the other hand you can build more roads, which will cost a lot more space, but which will probably be more robust. That might not be what you want to hear or do, but that’s a political standpoint, which is fine by me. At the University you have to ensure that the whole range is explored. Also, as a thought experiment I think it’s valuable to work out these
Dirk Sijmons
'I think that urbanization has become an aspect on such a large scale, and is spread out globally in such special places, that you could say that almost all environmental problems on this planet have become urban problems, or at least carry urban components. You could also turn this around and say; we are not going to solve our environmental problems without solving our urban problems. That shows how important I think this primarily urban view is and that’s also how I see the landscape, especially how we study it here in Delft. You can see that in urbanized space we will also need to solve the world food problem because cities happen to expand most rapidly in our deltas, which also contain our best arable soil. For the most part, and for most of humanity, the landscape of the future will be a hybrid, sometimes new, repaired or sometimes defragmented, but which will need to play a role in this gigantic urban fabric that we have developed.' JAN WILBERS 11