DELTA. 30 03-11-2011
science
05
short news science Peak pollution
Coast guard
Crime watch
How does smoke and dust from highways move around in the city? That’s what the research project DisTUrbe (dispersion by turbulence in urban environment) is all about. Project manager Dr Gerrit Elsinga (3mE) says the project aims to produce better forecasts for air pollution in the city by determining how air moves around at a scale of 10 to 1000 metres. The 900,000 euros STW-funded project will incorporate two PhD students and a postdoc.
The Dutch coast is a dynamic one. Sand and sea are involved in an eternal interplay of erosion and sedimentation. To obtain a better understanding of this process and its effects on the coast, Professor Marcel Stive (CEG) will start a 5-year research project: ‘Near-shore Monitoring and Modeling’. The project, funded by an ERC grant of 2.9 million euros, should produce reliable, longterm predictions of changes along the coast near The Hague, which are current missing.
3D glasses that allow police investigators to record a crime scene and annotate specifics for later use. Professor Pieter Jonker (EECS) demonstrated his invention on the late night TV show, Pauw & Witteman, with his sister playing the role of a dead body. The glasses are an augmented reality application developed for use in forensic science. A dozen articles, radio and TV shows reported on the virtual crime scene, developed together with the Dutch forensic institute in what is called the CSI-lab.
3D Campus
What happens when torrential rains pour down on a city? Which streets are the first to be flooded? One needs a 3D map of the area to find out. Six students of the interfaculty master geomatics programme have created such a map for (a part of) the campus in their synthesis project. They combined a number of datasets, aerial photographs and basemaps to arrive at a 3D representation of the area. When they unleashed their virtual cloud bursts, the run-off looked realistic. The students hope HydroCampus may be used as a tool in assessing the urban climate. www.geomagics.nl
How the Dutch created Holland It’s often said that God created the Earth, and the Dutch made Holland. Now a study has been published on how they did it: very pragmatically.
created featureless districts. In the 1970s there was a turning point, says Hooimeijer. The oil crisis, the Club of Rome report on limits to growth, and a few near-inundations prompted developers to refer more to the existing landscape and water sys-
Jos Wassink
The power to manipulate the landscape has grown enormously
Canals are important ingredients in the Fine Dutch Tradition. (Photo Maarten Laupman)
that created the famous Amsterdam ring of canals, which were simultaneously the underlying structure for the urban design as well as the new waterway system. In her book, Hooimeijer primarily used Rotterdam as her area of study and described its emergence and expansion. She shows that, especially since the industrial revolution, the power to manipulate the landscape has grown enormously. This enabled city builders to develop bigger areas with less reference to the original landscape - they just covered it with loads of sand and
tems. It’s often better to make use of what’s already there than to start from scratch – that’s the latest chapter in the Fine Dutch Tradition. In the 21st century, Hooimeijer expects the Tradition to develop new solutions for water in the city. Extensive building into the surrounding polders will have to make a place for renewal within. Erik Kieskamp: “Real target groups don’t exist anymore.” (Photo: Tomas van Dijk)
‘Cars for the free people’ Fransje Hooimeijer, 'The Tradition of Making Polder Cities', 18 October 2011, PhD supervisor Professor Han Meyer (Architecture).
proposition
Dr Fransje Hooimeijer wrote a book that most people assumed already existed: ‘The Tradition of Making Polder Cities’. It describes how civil engineering and urbanism developed hand in hand by building cities on the weak, wet and flood-prone soils of the Netherlands ever since the time of first settlements. “It’s mostly on making the soil construction ready,” says Hooimeijer. “But people never thought it useful to document what they did, because they assumed everyone knew it all. I’ve found only one book one the topic.” Once you start thinking about it, making the soil construction ready has many different aspects, such as water, groundwater, bearing capacity, driving in piles, and permeability of the soil. Urban design on the other hand also has numerous aspects: public green, public functions, infrastructure and integrating conflicting interests. Now imagine putting these together into the Fine Dutch Tradition, the culture
The argument that human beings are so complex that a higher power must have created them reveals the level of arrogance that human beings can portray. ‘Typically the Best?, PhD-thesis by Janneke Blijlevens, Industrial Design Enigineering. (Illustration: Auke Herrema)
the graduate
In the European metropolises of 2025, the concept of cars will have changed drastically, according to Erik Kieskamp (26). Cars of the future will travel through cities picking up and dropping off people. “They’ll be the red blood cells of our cities.” You just pulled over in a neighborhood that is new to you and are wondering where to find a nice café. You glance at your windshield and sigh with relief: thanks to augmented reality, you know that you can get a good cafe latte just around the corner. Where would you be without your intelligent windscreen? This is the kind of daily life situation described by Erik Kieskamp in his Master's thesis, ‘The design of a people transporter for the European metropolis of 2025’, which he defended last week at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. The thesis was part his internship at the prestigious Italian design firm, Pininfarina. Cities will become more congested, making personal vehicle possession more difficult, the young designer believes. Instead of owning a car, many more people than nowadays will pay subscriptions to an organization and share vehicles. These cars will be driving computers with augmented reality functions, informing you of your surroundings, but they will also act as meeting platforms for bringing together people who have the same interests or are simply heading in the same direction. Kieskamp: “The target group is the kind of people with a ‘free mindset’, who want to meet new people, don’t want to possess a car personally, and want transport on demand.” Kieskamp can’t be any more specific about his users. “Real target groups don’t exist anymore,” he asserts. “Steve Jobs understood this well. Take the iPad for instance. You can’t tell whether someone who owns one likes classical music or not, or is a football fan. What’s happening is that people are sampling. They use products that can help them accentuate their own identity. The shared vehicles will do just that.” The shared vehicle’s bodywork looks a lot like a Smartcar. “I hear that a lot,” Kieskamp says. “This is basically the shape you get when you make a small car consisting of two rows of seats.” (TvD)