Many years ago, I think it was around 1983, my friend Paul Mijksenaar, himself one of the worlds leading experts on signing, made a calendar. It was a very special calendar, starting in april and ending in october the following year. This calendar could be used in 1983, but than again in 1988, 1994 and… Read More
It easy to see that every city in fact is two cities: one for the lucky and one for the less fortunate. One with the nice restaurants and attractive sidewalks and the other with the pawn shops and the liquor stores. And just like there is the difference between the attractive cities and the less… Read More
Jacques Brel sings about the Port of Amsterdam and indeed, Amsterdam has for a very long time been a port. But most people in Amsterdam today seem to have forgotten. Since the start of its existence my city was a port. It was her reason of being. When a ship comes in today and the… Read More
http://youtu.be/n2kkr0e_dTQ This is a wonderful song by Jacques Brel. Watch it and enjoy. Also have a good look at the audience, they really seem to enjoy it! There are some stories on why Jacques Brel wrote this song. One story is that he wrote the song in the early sixties sitting in his friends house… Read More
Wherever I go I like to talk to young people. The waitress, the guide, a person on a terrace, in a conference, in the evening in the bar. Not so much the student, but better still the young boy or girl in – his or her – first or second job. Especially when you can… Read More
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” ― Mark Twain Last week I was invited to take part in a conference, a conference about fear. Usually I’m invited to go to conferences here or there on subjects that I am more or less used to: regeneration, creativity, remediation, that kind… Read More
The monument and IKEA The city of Moscow never interested me much. But when I went back to Moscow early November 2012 it was my fifth visit that year. Arriving in Moscow is mostly by night. When I take the evening plane it lands more than three hours later on Sheremetyevo where local time is… Read More
Went to Taiwan last week to speak on a conference. It’s really great to be invited to do a thing like this. Since I’m not an academic and I don’t have a research department behind me it’s great to do these kinds of lectures, to be able to communicate my views on creativity, on talent… Read More
Here is the story they told me at Strijp-R last week. We went there with a group of project managers from Amsterdam. Eindhoven is not that far and we were really interested on how they do things there. We went to see the redevelopment of the former Philips Electronics factories. In the afternoon we visited… Read More
Talked to Astrid and Boudewijn earlier this week. We were sitting in their office of the Vechtclub XL. I was asking them how things had grown like this. Having been there two weeks earlier I had really gotten inspired. This is why I decided to go back. Everywhere else these places are built with subsidies… Read More
Creative Cities