Now, that the European cities are overcoming the recent economic challenges, they accelerate the development of major housingschemes to accommodate their growing urban population. Amsterdam for instance, sets out to construct 50,000 new homes by 2025. Parallel to this, the City Council presented a new regeneration and urban optimisationprogram in 2017, to reinforce existingneighbourhoods with relatively weak socio-economic status. If these housing policies are to maximise on opportunities, they need to anticipate the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Climate Agreement, and local socio-environmental challenges, into a single cohesive, sustainable solution. Currently, literature indicates that large scale spatial developments, have a tendency to move away from social and ecological ambitions during the course of the planning process. Moreover, ambitions tend to be short term “fixes” where they could be striving for long-term systemic solutions. What is needed, are practice proven comprehensive development strategies tosecure pathways for inclusive and integrated development. Those strategies are spatial and programmatic governance arrangements. Employing a comparative analysis method, we follow and compare the redevelopment of three deprived boroughs across Amsterdam. In collaboration with communities, we are able to construct a “Design Thinking” approach for urban spatial development, using different types of arrangements. This is in reflection and collaboration with the municipality of Amsterdam and a wide variety of skilled experts. The arrangements are tested in practice, following a plan-do-check-act cycle. The research project takes an in-depth look at the Amsterdam case and presents the first set of arrangements for planning more cohesive, urban spatial development and the preliminary strategies we see emerging.
The European Manifesto for Inclusive Learning is an initiative of the University of Florence to promote adult education for migrants and refugees. The program seeks to provide “a concrete tool for adult educators to promote adult learning in their local context”. In order to achieve this goal, eight European Union partners in different EU countries collaborated intensively for 1 ½ year to exchange experiences, expand opportunities and to seek to promote a more coordinated and integrated approach. Each partner collected case studies of good practices using a common tool for collecting data. The results of the Dutch partner, The Hague University of Applied Sciences are presented here. Seven cases have been studied with very different, mainly informal ways of mutual learning in the Netherlands. First the Manifesto is described in more detail. This is followed by a sketch of refugee flows to the Netherlands and the Dutch asylum system. After these chapters, the different cases are presented, followed by a conclusion and recommendations based on the Dutch good practices.
InclusiveCity aims at expanding strategies to activate public places in the framework of the 15-minute city concept by critically assessing current practices of placemaking and by adding a strong inclusion dimension.
DISCO aims at fast-tracking upscaling to new generation of urban logistics and smart planning unblocking the transition to decarbonised and digital cities, delivering innovative frameworks and tools, Physical Internet (PI) inspired. To this scope, DISCO will deploy and demonstrate innovative and inclusive urban logistics and planning solutions for dynamic space re-allocation integrating urban freight at local level, within efficiently operated network-of-networks (PI) where the nodes and infrastructure are fixed and mobile based on throughput demands. Solutions are co-designed with the urban logistics community – e.g., cities, logistics service providers, retailers, real estate/public and private infrastructure owners, fleet owners, transport operators, research community, civil society - all together moving a paradigm change from sprawl to data driven, zero-emission and nearby-delivery-based models.
In line with the ‘Natuur- en milieubeleidsplan Caribisch Nederland 2020-2030 (NMBP)’ the consortium intends with this research proposal to contribute to a prosperous society with a resilient population and healthy natural environment. The Caribbean Netherlands are dealing with a situation where imported vegetables and fruits are mostly imported and hardly affordable. This leads to consuming unhealthy food and high obesities rates as a consequence. A lack of good agricultural practices with regard to water-smart and nature inclusive agriculture, as well as limited coping capacities to deal with hazards and climate change, results in very limited local production and interest. Initiatives that focused only on agrotechnological solutions for food resilient futures turned out to be ineffective due to a lack of local ownership, which jeopardizes sustainability. Moreover, the ‘green’ and ‘blue’ domains are not seen as attractive career perspectives among youth, hampering a bright future for those domains. The aim of this research is to contribute to water-smart and nature inclusive food resilience embedded in a local participatory perspective in the Caribbean Netherlands. To address the above challenges, a living lab approach is adopted, where youth will be trained as (co)-facilitators (WP1) who will contribute to a participatory envisioning process and an articulation of food resilient futures (WP2). Finally, based on the envisioning process local stakeholders will select and implement experiments for food resilient futures followed by dissemination of results among key stakeholders as well as children and youth at the BES islands (WP3). This project strategy will lead to a network of a living lab where professionals and youth work together on food resilient futures. Training manuals and the results of experiments with regard to water and food system alternatives will be used actively to encourage youth to be involved in sustainable agriculture and consumption.
