Titles
A-C
A City in the Making: Spatial-religious Principles and Densi...A Comparative Review on Greening and Heating Patterns under ...A Data Visualization Web Application for Planning Sustainabl...A Housing Regression: Relating the Munger Hall Proposal to E...A Methodological Framework for Positioning Residents’ Subj...A Model for Developing a City Climate Action Plan: Engaging ...A Sharing-Based Categorization of Housing Options for Divers...A Welcome to the ConferenceAccessible Cultural Landscape as a means of Enhancing Public...Accessible Rooftops in Dense Cities- A comprehensive review ...Alternative Methodologies in Exploring Program Synergy in Ur...An Exploration of Public Perceptions of Place-character in t...Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Based Predictive Model o...Analysis of Intra-City Mobility: Identifying Indicators of S...Application of Kawagoe Model for Regeneration of Merchant St...Architecture and Migraine: An Inclusive Model for Migraine-s...Are Gateways Communities Facing a New Climate Apartheid? Les...Are We There Yet? Improving Transport Accessibility in South...Art of Place: Art and Culture as Neighbourhood PlacemakingAssessing the Effectiveness and Regulatory Compliance of a M...Assessing the Implementation of Community Driven Development...Becoming City-zens: Community-Inclusive Urban Education for ...Between Care and Emancipation: The Moral Fruitage of Aesthet...Beyond the Stage: Verbatim Theatre’s Potential to Strength...Bike/Pedestrian Path for the University of Louisiana at Lafa...Building inclusive communities: The meaning of (non-)discrim...Buildings as Multilayered Membranes in Porous CitiesCan Protracted Refugee Camps be Livable? Self-Adaptation Pat...Case Study: Transformation of a Failing Lawn Bowls Club to a...Challenging the Domestic QuotidianCivic Ecologies in Green Square (Australia): Beyond urban re...Collaboration in the Management of Public SpaceComplicated Problems, Digital Solutions: Investigating Gende...Contemporary Measures of 'e-food deserts' in British CitiesContested Spaces: Lone Mothers, Neo-Liberal Citizenship and ...Control and Laissez Faire, Between the Universal and the Loc...Creative Cites and Active Citizenship in ASEAN(Shift)ing Grounds
Presenters
Schedule

IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

A Conference on Issues Affecting Life in Cities
Livable to Sustainable: Amsterdam Eastern Docklands in Transit
S. Monteiro
11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Abstract

The Amsterdam Eastern Docklands is an internationally acclaimed harbor regeneration project that includes realizations by West 8, Diener and Diener, Jo Coenen, Sjoerd Soeters, and Neutelings Riedijk. Its urban design reflects various sustainable considerations, integrating not only environmental but also social and economic concerns. Although the success of this redevelopment is commonly attributed to these designers, this paper will highlight the important (and overlooked) role that the area’s residents played in putting sustainability on the agenda of urban politics and design. Operating amidst three socio-political forcefields that in the 1970s and 1980s were closely interwoven – namely an energy-economic crisis, a social crisis, and a raised environmental awareness – Amsterdam residents brought forward concerns of energy conservation, urban conservation and regeneration, environmental stewardship, participation, and the right to housing; together often referred to in Dutch as leefbaarheid (livability). Only from the 1990s onwards the Dutch term for sustainability, duurzaamheid, would become used more frequently, usually to indicate ecological preservation and energy conservation. This paper examines the effects that the ideas about leefbaarheid held by these civic society actors had on the early design phases of Amsterdam’s Eastern Docklands. In doing so, it will provide an account of a site in transit: from urban fringe occupied by marginalized communities to a completely developed new district mostly for the (upper) middle classes and highlight the shifts that occurred in the approach to urban design in the Netherlands, from livable (leefbaar) to sustainable (duurzaam), that may contribute to current understanding of the global sustainability debate and its evolution.

Biography

Soscha Monteiro is a PhD researcher at Delft University of Technology. Previously she worked with the archives of the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning on several exhibitions, research projects, publications, and conferences. She has been involved in research, curatorial, and design projects that interweave urban design and architecture with sustainability. Soscha also holds a Master of Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences from TU Delft.