Stichting Kerkelijk Kunstbezit in Nederland (SKKN), 1977
Federatie Industrieel Erfgoed Nederland (FIEN), 1984
Monumentenwet, 1988
Nationaal Groenfonds, 1994
Boerderij en Landschap, 2008
Infrastructureel Erfgoed, 2015

For decades the Bundesgartenschau is a tool for programming empty sites and is prototypical for post-event-use.

Maastricht is a city where the skyline doesn’t symbolize the profile of progress, but the conflict of urban evolution. It is an ironic chorus line of vacant icons. Sterile chimneys of has-been factories, steeples of silenced faith and extinguished electronic industrial signage weigh on our spirit. Thanks to daylight-saving night kicks in soon, so we are not constantly reminded of this petrified legacy.

The city has lost its saints and captains of industry. If one does rise to greater heights, population takes them down. Society equalizes. Power and knowledge spreads, widens, dilutes. Though our large heritage remains, soon no organization is left to deal with it.

But promise can come in small portions. The former Sphinx signage is lit once again. Lets hope this beacon lures at least three wise men from the east, or any direction for that matter, to share their power, knowledge and treasure.
NOVEMBER 5, 2012

 A café in Istanbul, Amedeo Preziosi, 1850 - 1882
"Not that this idea of the public was actually realised in earnest in coffee houses, the salons and the societies, but as an idea it had become institutionalised and thereby stated as an objective claim."

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas, 1962, p. 36

The documentary begins with a menacing cameraview promising a profound plea on urban planning, but after 20 minutes I get frustrated: what about relevant the problems of gigacities? When will the Gehl’s mention the increase of not-haves instead of walkways and bicycle lanes? Let mayors respond to the social shifts between suburb and center instead of blaming the concepts of a ninety year old modern movement. Do they still bear a grudge against their predecessors? Please move on, we have.

The earnest cliché of The Human Scale is a testimonial commercial. Effortless the critical view of the documentary is transformed into a egalitarian consensus. Unlike urbanists think, we the people unsurprisingly have a natural understanding of what a city should be. We all share the same single perspective on the good city life. Es gibt nur gute Menschen in Sezuan.
The most disturbing feature of this citybranding-movie is the conceited use of comparative advertising. The Human scale judges cities on simplified merits of urbanity and burns competitive cities as bad. Even Donald Draper would have disapproved.

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

Definition:
noun [IN SINGULAR]
1. Physics The minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction.

2. The minimum size or amount of resources required to start or maintain a venture:
some of our new industries are now reaching critical mass

>> Though for physics it’s the minimum amount to start or maintain a reaction, in a spatial context of demographic decline, critical mass is the maximum of retrievable quality in the process of sustainable urban design.

In times of ignorance man tries to map its flaws. Mapping is a tool to confirm the lack of insight. And when a map is made, it is proof of that existence (even rocks along a coastline).

But there is not one map and there is not one existence. So if we were to choose our maps, we might choose our realities. Therefor one could suggest, that in times of ignorance, we should not just choose maps delineating our failure -for example a quantitive lack of inhabitants fuelling our tax system-, but also maps that focus on qualities present, which actually do represent us on a map of the world.

image: chemicals export

Thesis 1: Berlin’s population drop
The following evaluations predict a drop in the population of Berlin during the 1980s equal to more than ten per cent of the present figure which is between 2 and 1.7 million inhabitants.
 
Comment
If we start from the assumption that these estimates are fairly exact, then it must be borne in mind that the real figures may exceed the estimated reduction because when the decrease is in progress it ends up by causing a bigger effect. A certain percentage of anxiety-prone inhabitants in fact allow themselves to be caught up in the end by an exodus psychoses with the result that the population slips below the estimated figure. Experience, however, has shown that this figure will subsequently tend to swing back upwards on the assumption that a simultaneous improvement in the quality of life occurs and that the city becomes a more congenial place to live in after a reorganization of the urban environment. In fact, without a radically improved offer no one will want to stay of his own accord in a decommercialized city, or still less, to go back there.
 
Conclusions
Any future planning for Berlin must therefore come to grips with the problem of a city in the process of depopulation. Since Berlin occupies a limited territory and political reality is such that it can be neither reduced nor increased, future strategies have got to be devised that will take into account a controlled decrease in the population density, without jeopardizing the general quality of the urban environment.
 
(Taking part in the rough drafting and elaboration of the city in the city theme where: O.M. Ungers (Berlin, Köln, Ithaca N.Y.), Rem Koolhaas (London), Peter Riemann (Ithaca N.Y., Berlin), Hans Kollhoff (Ithaca N.Y., Karlsruhe), Arthur Ovaska (Köln, Boston).
L’isolato urbano/ The Urban Block, Lotus 19 [1978])

Central Park, NYC, USA

Tussen 1821 en 1855 nam het aantal inwoners van New York City toe tot bijna het viervoudige. Naarmate de stad uitbreidde, werden de mensen aangetrokken door de weinige open ruimten, voornamelijk kerkhoven, om even weg te zijn uit het lawaai en het chaotische stadsleven. Central Park is als leegte in de stad mee gepland.

“This month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild, a fantastic solitaire pastime he calls “life”. Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alternations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called “simulation games”–games that resemble real-life processes. To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors. (Small checkers or poker chips do nicely.) An Oriental “go” board can be used if you can find flat counters that are small enough to fit within its cells. (Go stones are unusable because they are not flat.) It is possible to work with pencil and graph paper but it is much easier, particularly for beginners, to use counters and a board.

The basic idea is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata:
1. There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.
2. There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.
3. There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.” (Martin Gardner, Scientific American 223 [October 1970] p. 120-123)

image: Oscillator, The Game of Life, John Horton Conway (26 December 1937-)

“In 1986 I made a computer model of coordinated animal motion such as bird flocks and fish schools. It was based on three dimensional computational geometry of the sort normally used in computer animation or computer aided design. I called the generic simulated flocking creatures boids.”
Boids by Craig Reynolds

The basic flocking model consists of three simple steering behaviors which describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities its nearby flockmates:
Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates:
Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

Each boid has direct access to the whole scene’s geometric description, but flocking requires that it reacts only to flockmates within a certain small neighborhood around itself. The neighborhood is characterized by a distance (measured from the center of the boid) and an angle, measured from the boid’s direction of flight. Flockmates outside this local neighborhood are ignored. The neighborhood could be considered a model of limited perception (as by fish in murky water) but it is probably more correct to think of it as defining the region in which flockmates influence a boids steering.