The view of Arjan van Timmeren
‘There will be a battle for public space in the decades ahead’, predicts Arjan van Timmeren, Professor of Environmental Technology & Design and Scientific Director of the AMS Institute.
‘Cities mostly sprung up where rivers flow out into the sea or where roads intersected, for example. Cities developed in a gradual, natural way and were optimised at a later stage, but they have hardly ever been properly redesigned. In that regard, the Netherlands are slightly ahead of the game; here, every bit of land has been repurposed multiple times. So I expect that to continue in the future.
There will be a battle for public space in the decades ahead, for every parking space that becomes available and every public park. Energy generation and climate adaptation will also claim more and more space. Privatisation, increased population density and leisure time result in public space being used more intensively. How this public space is ultimately divided up impacts urban liveability. What’s certain is that Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, will have to proceed with care.
Today's major transitions all want to claim the same space. ICT and various technical innovations make it possible to use this space more efficiently or use it for multiple purposes. At the AMS Institute (Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions), we currently have 101 projects concerning traffic, water and energy, adding a layer of information to conventional engineering. This allows us to optimise usage.
But ultimately, we will need fundamentally different solutions. For example, we should take a close look at the organisation of the ‘city as a system’. The city will become less centralised, and we will need to develop decentralised, clustered and connected solutions as part of centralised networks.
In other words, we will have to work towards integrating the existing individual systems for energy, transport and climate adaptation into a single system. That's because on the one hand we have to address the battle for space, while on the other the transitions are simply not feasible: there is just not enough construction capacity. This means that you will have to redesign the ‘city as a system’ with cohesive solutions for energy generation, food production, transport and waste water purification.
Photo Sam Rentmeester
Integrally developed cities have already arrived. Google is building Quayside in Toronto, while completely new urban constructs are under development or have been completed in various Asian countries, such as Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates.
By 2030, I expect to see similar transitions in the Netherlands. We will redesign the urban infrastructures for energy, transport and water into integrated, ‘distributed’ systems. Most of these efforts will be circular: new construction using existing materials and components, potentially using new building methods such as 3D printing.
Incidentally, I think that a time will certainly come when we see a trend of people leaving cities. Apart from the fact that this is always a cyclic process, it is also a logical consequence of the transitions currently underway, with computerisation leading the way’.