The Street Art Museum in Saint Petersburg is a remarkable place in many ways. It’s exactly there where it is needed most. It is making the rights statements. It’s new and it’s exciting. It’s not a museum though. It has the potential to give the word museum a new meaning. It’s a laboratory. A laboratory of… Read More
The first time I entered the Gasholder of Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek must have been around 1990. I had just started to work for the Amsterdam district council of Westerpark and was appointed as manager for public space. One of my projects was going to be the remediation of this former gas factory. Gas production had stopped… 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
Eindhoven was always an industrial place. It was never a real city. More a collection of villages like Strijp, Woensel, Stratum and others. It was Philips (the electronics company) and DAF (cars and trucks) that made the place look big. I was born in Veldhoven which is one of the smaller villages to the south… Read More
Last week I went to Utrecht. Utrecht is the fourth city of the Netherlands, centrally located. A friend, Emilie, asked me to help her start up a project. Emilie finished her studies on the Utrecht School for the Arts (HKU) a year ago. Today she calls herself a location marketeer. Finding new uses for derelict… Read More
What are the possibilities to revitalise an area with sport facilities? How important is sport to attract and connect talent to your city. I try to answer these questions in my newest Amsterdam project. In the Southern part of Amsterdam, between the new business district the ‘ZuidAs’ (South Axis) and the ‘Amsterdamse Bos’ (Amsterdam forest),… Read More
Twente is a metropolitan area in the east of the Netherlands. Metropolitan maybe a big word here, these three cities, Almelo, Hengelo and Enschede have a mainly industrial past of textile and machine building among them while around 650.000 people live there. Twente is on the eastern border of the Netherlands, 200 kilometers from Amsterdam.… Read More
I’m in Locri. This is the south of the south of Italy. It’s hard to get here. My plane came from Rome and late in the evening it arrived in Reggio Calabria. Beautiful view from the air. Sicily and the Etna on one side, lots of boats in the sea below us and the airport… Read More
Creative Cities