How can you create identity and security in Europe’s vast 1970's urban peripheries? What is the relationship of public, private, and collective urban spaces? What are the critical group sizes? How can you stimulate the inhabitant to appropriate urban space and to take care of his or her living environment?
In an era of experience economy and the leisure industry, cities (or city fragments) face increasing pressure to distinguish themselves. Ever since Frank Gehry put the city of Bilbao into the international spotlight with his design for the Guggenheim museum, architecture has played a more and more important role within this competition. City Branding, the planned image or brand of a city (or city fragment), now forms a challenge for architects and urban planners. How do you position a city in a culture dominated by globalization? What are the priorities for inhabitants, companies and investors?
Within this quest for the individual architectural highlight, public space as the open and unifying urban domain - with all its positive and negative implications - often disappears into the channels of communication and transportation, leaving an empty shell where community participation once was: the modernist's empty plaza or parking lot sprawling at the feet of great towers.
This project for the city of Amsterdam proposes a sustainable redevelopment for the socially segregated and spatially fragmented Westelijke Tuinsteden (WTA or Western Garden Cities), a modernist city fragment that now resembles the above definition of a contemporary edge city. The goal is to integrate its mostly foreign migrant population, to stimulate a sense of community, emotional security and social equity. A series of topic based modification proposals for the existing high rise buildings are explored, paired with low rise development models for better use and control of the urban residual and in between spaces. Artgineering’s "Best of Both (B.O.B.)" model is applied to develop this urban space in denial. The current configuration with 80% of the surface inside the urban block structures being public spaces - that can neither be controlled nor secured - is transformed into 100% private or collective spaces. The idea is to promote an appropriation of these problematic areas through the inhabitants, to define new public private partnerships or alliances and urban collectives who are willing to take responsibility, and to have the municipality reinvest ground sale gains into the compressed and optimized local public infrastructure.
Urban monotony is replaced by social diversity and autonomy in order to stimulate a successful coexistence of the different urban life worlds right next to each other. A new scale of the city is defined.
Credit
Oliver Schütte with Stephan Bendix / Artgineering (Rotterdam) and Erik Schotte / LIAG Architects (The Hague).
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2003.