2018-2019
How can planners rethink the idea of urban prosperity beyond a paradigm of growth?
What role does land use policy, urban design, land governance, neighbourhood participation and strategic planning play in enabling a radical transition to a new paradigm of urban change?
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Spatial planners hardly question the idea that a city needs to grow in order to be healthy, happy, prosperous, diverse and social. Cities seem dependent on growth. This dependency is rooted in the key instruments that planners use to redistribute wealth, to finance social housing, to promote renewable sources of energy or to protect green areas, that are all dependent to the increase of land values and the ‘capturing’ of these values for public purposes. The 2019 studio addressed this challenge in order to enable participants to imagine a radically different planning paradigm for urban change. We engaged with this goal in the peculiar context of the city of Amsterdam, a city that is experiencing a momentum of sky-high growth but it is also aware of the socio-environmental challenges of it.