Design and Politics. The Next Phase
with Henk Ovink, The Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment
2011 - 2013
Design and Politics. The Next Phase was a collaboration between ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory and Henk Ovink, Director for Spatial Planning, Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment of the Netherlands. Running from January 2011 to January 2013, Design and Politics took the form of nine very well-received public debates and a design studio with the TU Delft.
OBJECTIVE
The subjects of Design and Politics: The Next Phase were twofold: the future city and a re-thought and re-energised relationship between political spatial planning and the design disciplines of architecture and urban design. The key argument was that a political agenda in design has the potential to address the complex challenges facing cities in a more effective manner than is currently being achieved. More than 80 participants – mainly from the Netherlands and Germany and in the fields of urban design, architecture, urban planning and politics - raised significant insights, ideas and positions about the intentions and scope of the processes, professions and politics of making the urban environment.
A number of ideas developed in the course of the first eight debates were investigated in a follow-up project entitled Resilience and Democracy: Urban Regions Under Stress comprising a design studio with the TU Delft and a public debate. These ideas, set out below, demonstrate clear potential to influence a shift in planning and urban paradigms, not only in the Netherlands and Germany, but throughout Europe and internationally.
- Resilience, as an ideology and approach, can generate the measures, benchmarks and stress tests for projecting the sustainable city into the future.
- The wellbeing of future urban communities and societies must be grounded in a fairer reconfiguration of the public realm.
- City and cityness occur at the scale of the region. Urban does not just refer to the traditional compact city.
- The German concept 'Baukultur' - a political discourse on ‘building’ the physical environment – can play a lead role in making a new paradigm for the human relationship with the built environment.
THE SERIES
D&P 9. Resilient and Democratic Futures: The Power of Design
Video recording
18 January 2013
D&P 9. Resilience and Democracy: Urban Regions Under Stress. Design Studio with The Why Factory and Design as Politics, TU Delft
Video recording
9 - 18 November 2012
D&P 8. Making Design and Politics. The Concluding Debate in Rotterdam
Video recording
Debate summary
25 April 2012
D&P 7. Re-City, the 'Total Makeover' - Agents of Urban Action
Video recording
Debate summary
17 February 2012
D&P 6. Moving Cities, Meaning and Mobility - Mobility
Video recording
Debate summary
20 January 2012
D&P 5. 75-90-3: Who is Our City? - Migration
Video recording
Debate summary
25 November 2011
D&P 4. Learning to Provoke - Agendas in Design Education
Video recording
Debate summary
21 October 2011
D&P 3. Climate-changing our Cities: Cool, or Wet and Warm? - Climate Change
Video recording
Debate summary
9 September 2011
D&P 2. On the Surface of Architecture? - Technologies & Materials
Video recording
Debate summary
28 July 2011
D&P 1. Cradle to Cradle (C2C) - Creative and Effective Urban Practice
Video recording
Debate summary
27 January 2011
