MVRDV

Date: 14 Februari
Time: 18.00-20.00 h
Location: Orange Tribune, Oostserre, Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Delft
Program: Book presentations followed by a debate
Debate Theme: Branding Cities - and Bottom-Up Urbanism
Invited Guests: Leendert Bikker (EDBR), Rob Docter (Berlage-Instituut), Wout Hagen (VolkerInfra), Arnold Reijndorp (UvA), Paul Schnabel (SCP), Wouter Vanstiphout (TUDelft, Crimson), Martijn de Waal (social cities of tomorrow/digital media)

Synopsis: Hong Kong Fantasies - Challenging World Class City Standards
What does it take for a city to become world-class? And who decides?
It’s not enough to look at a city’s economic performance. Great cities have always offered a more fundamental, abstract quality – a quality that no single ranking system has yet been able to measure.
This book tries to define that quality, and to introduce a universal standard for its evaluation: The World-Class City Framework – WCCF.
Using this framework as a guide, The Why Factory fantasizes that Hong Kong, a city struggling to hold on to its reputation, makes a spectacular comeback as an exemplary world-class city. This fictional urban resuscitation reveals not only the shortcomings of Hong Kong, but also the flaws in the tools with which we assess all cities. In order to improve our cities, we may also have to refine our standards of judgement.
Hong Kong Fantasies is based on a workshop and studio organized by The Why Factory in collaboration with the International Forum on Urbanism, the Berlage Institute, the Delft University of Technology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University in Hong Kong.

Synopsis: Vertical Village - Individual, Informal, Intense
For centuries, the fabric of East Asian cities has been formed by urban villages that are built up of small scale, informal, often ‘light’ architecture: the hutongs in Beijing, the small – mostly wooden – houses in Tokyo, the villages in Singapore, the kampungs in Jakarta, as well the individual houses and rooftop-extensions in Taipei. These urban villages form intense, socially connected communities where strong individual identities and differences are maintained. Driven by demographic and economic forces since the start of the second millennium, these cities are rapidly changing. In a relentless ‘Block Attack’, massive towers, slabs and blocks with repetitive housing units, floor plans and façades are invading – scraping away the urban villages that have evolved over hundreds of years.
The Vertical Village proposes an alternative to this growing monotonous sea of blocks: dense vertical structures, which grow evolutionary and provide the informality, freedom and social coherence, which make the life in a village attractive. This approach could enable housing types with terraces and roof gardens that accommodate leisure activities. This comfortable lifestyle might even attract the middle and upper classes, leading to a more mixed and less segregated society.
Such a development would require a framework and a set of principles to regulate and support the individuality of its elements, while guaranteeing safety, sunlight, sanitation and the wishes of its inhabitants. In the Vertical Village, a planning software is proposed which supports the evolutionary bottom-up grow of the villages in a dynamic way as no masterplan could provide it – a three-dimensional community that brings personal freedom, diversity, flexibility and neighbourhood life back into Asian – and maybe even Western – cities.