6"51'
© iabr/UP, 2014
"That’s the great thing about Project Atelier Planet Texel: It does not catalogue the problems we have or state how our ambitions clash. No, it explored the connections. How to create added value by researching how our different ambitions can coexist?", says Eric Hercules, Texel's alderman for Tourism, Environment and Spatial Planning, in the film Planet Texel.
IABR and Texel
Since the Spring of 2013 the IABR and the Municipality of Texel have collaborated in the IABR–Project Atelier Planet Texel. The challenge was to find a way to balance the different ambitions the island has. On the one hand Texel wants to protect its beautiful landscape, be energy neutral by 2020, and attain water self-sufficiency. But it also has the ambition to make tourism grow qualitatively. Not an easy task for 15.000 inhabitants who welcome a million tourists every year.
By bringing research by design in play the Atelier worked on concrete project proposals linked to a “toolbox for governance”: instruments that the municipality of Texel can employ when implementing its new spatial policies.
The results of the Atelier are on show from 29 May until 24 August, taking front stage in A PLANET CULTIVATED–, one of the exhibitions that make URBAN BY NATURE– in the Kunsthal Rotterdam.
How is the municipality going to continue with what the Atelier has achieved when the biennale is over? What really are the results of the Atelier, and which strategies have been developed? How can the challenges Texel faces – environment, water, energy, tourism, agriculture– become opportunities for spatial and economic development?
In the film Planet Texel alderman Eric Hercules responds to these and other questions.
PLANET TEXEL is one in a series of short videos commissioned by the IABR for its sixth edition, IABR–2014–URBAN BY NATURE–
director: Alexander Oey
producer: George Brugmans
