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
Just south of Leblon, not so very far away from the center of Rio de Janeiro, on a mountain side overlooking the Atlantic Ocean lies a spectacular park. Mauro Quintanilha started to clean the site near the favela of Vidigal around 2006 when he became extremely frustrated with the smell, the sight and the whole… Read More
It’s a song that brings you in a certain mood. It was made in the time that video clips were not common at all. Michael Nesmith made a clip, experimenting a new medium and wrote a song to it. You can feel the breeze, you can hear the ocean, it gives you a longing to go there.… Read More
Back to Moscow. I had some romantic ideas about what was going to be outside this city. In that transition area between the metropole and that enormous land. Finally I had the chance to see it. Moscow Regional Government invited me to discuss the future of their parks with the park managers in a conference. I felt it was important to visit some of these parks… Read More
Travel with me to a city in Brazil. A city that might as well represent hundreds of other cities elsewhere in the world. A city with an interesting history. But also a city that encounters real problems. I had the pleasure to be there again the last week of May 2014. Let me tell you more about it… 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
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
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
Creative Cities