By the time most of us awoke this morning, The Merlijn was cruising at full speed from its slip on the Amsterdam Canal across the Markermeer toward Flevoland Polder and Almere. As the site chosen for our studio’s investigation into urban adaptations to climate change, we were eager to finally see and touch the city in person and compliment our bird’s eye level analysis of the past six weeks with some on-the-ground qualitative observations and experiences.
We docked in Almere Haven and set about finding our way to Almere Centrum for a presentation by Adrian Geuze. Being the Netherlands, the world’s greatest cycling nation (sorry Denmark), many of us opted to borrow from The Merlijn’s fleet of bicycles for the 4 km ride to town. I cannot overstate what a joy it was to move through the city on a bicycle. The quality of the infrastructure network of cycling paths was awe-inspiring, from the clarity of the wayfinding signs to the beauty of the paver patterns and the carefully-crafted spatial relationships to car, bus, train and pedestrian traffic. It is a safe, equitable system that car-dominated U.S. cities could learn much from.
At mid-day we met with the charismatic and animated Dutch landscape architect Adrian Geuze, who presented his firm’s preliminary work on the ecological and urbanistic issues surrounding expansion of Almere into the Markermeer. He managed to provoke us with his ideas about the relationship of Dutch towns to water and any number of outrageous claims.
No comments:
Post a Comment