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THE CHALLENGE OF THE CENTURY : Maarten Hajer

6"53'

^{© iabr/UP, 2014}

"We don't need smart cities, we need smart urbanism", says Maarten Hajer, Director-General of PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, and professor of Public Policy, University of Amsterdam, in the film 'The Challenge of the Century".

Hajer feels that we need to get rid of the modernist paradigm and reinvent urbanism for the 21st century. "We need a new form of global urbanism that strategically connects city experiments all over the world to speed up learning, so that many more urban citizens may participate in rethinking our cities for a sustainable future. The required complete overhaul of urban planning may very well be the challenge of the century."

PBL and IABR–2014–
How much water do we need each day? How many trucks delivering how many goods? How much waste is recycled? What does the infrastructure that allows this look like? How is the Netherlands connected to the rest of the world? Do improvements in the Netherlands affect global problems?
Improving our understanding of urban metabolism is a way to get a handle on the new urban planning agenda.
That's why the IABR asked the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency to investigate what key issues and bottlenecks with regard to each separate flow there actually are, both on a global and national level.
Each flow is deconstructed by a five-way analysis: the size of the flow; its import and export; the organization of its infrastructure on a national level; its international context; and the main challenge connected to the flow.
Graphic designers Catalogtree have designed infographics that represent the results and that are presented in THE URBAN METABOLISM–, one of the exhibitions of URBAN BY NATURE–.

Book
During IABR–2014–, the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency launched the book Smart About Cities – Visualizing Challenges for 21st Century Urbanism, which also contains the entire series of infographics.

PBL
PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency is the national institute for strategic policy analysis in the fields of environment, nature and spatial planning. It contributes to improving the quality of political and administrative decision making by conducting outlook studies, analyses and evaluations in which an integrated approach is considered paramount. Policy relevance is the prime concern in its studies. It conducts solicited and unsolicited research that is always independent and scientifically sound.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE CENTURY 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

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The Vernon City Project

7"24'

^{@iabr/UP, 2014}

"This city is a car city. Los Angeles is cars. From the urbanist's point of view, in order to understand the city, you have to drive", says the architect Orhan Ayyüce in the film The Vernon City Project.

Forty years after "Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles" another architect with the gaze of the foreigner takes us on a ride through the City of Angels, or as the Turkish architect Orhan Ayyüce likes to refer to it: "La Citta Capitalista".
Ayyüce takes us to Vernon City, just south of down town LA.
Vernon is an atypical Los Angeles town, perhaps the most atypical town in the entire USA. It has only 100 inhabitants and most of them work for the town council. The majority of buildings in Vernon are big boxes: commercial or industrial buildings. Every day over 50,000 people come to Vernon to work – it’s one of LA’s most important food distribution centers and thus a key logistics hub in the metropolitan region.
An ‘exclusive industrial town,’ Vernon borders on the cosmopolitan downtown of Los Angeles. What opportunities are there in this unique city on the banks of the Los Angeles River? Are alternative forms of housing, agriculture, and nature imaginable in a town that relies solely on industry and transport?

IABR–2014–project #69: The Vernon Project (LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design) - Los Angeles, USA

The Vernon City Project, submitted by the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and run by Orhan Ayyüce, was selected for THE URBAN METABOLISM– section of the main exhibition of IABR–2014–URBAN BY NATURE–

directors: Eline Jongsma & Kel O'Neill
editor: Harm van den Berg
producer: Jos de Putter
commissioned by IABR
@iabr/UP, 2014

IABR–2014–project #69: The Vernon Project (LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design) - Los Angeles, USA

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Metropolitan Agriculture

IABR–2014–Project #49: Metropolitan Agriculture (Foundation Metropolitan Agriculture)

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We need to rethink the way in which we organize the spatial division between urban living environments and rural production environments. The current development will push agriculture away from our cities, eventually destroying nature.
But there is an alternative: Metropolitan Agriculture. Combining urban development with agricultural production enables a mix of functions to co-exist next to each other. And by doing that, we prevent the rest of the face of the earth to be sacrificed for food production. Feeding our metropoles without destroying nature!