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The main themes of this research, which is part of the Core Research of the VU Faculty of Arts Transformation of City and Country: A Comparative Perspective of City-Country Relations, are as follows:
1. History of architecture, public housing, urban design and infrastructure in the 19th and 20th centuries (supervised by Prof.Dr. J.E. (Koos) Bosma)
This study focuses on a search for insight into the origins, institutionalization, fundamentals and ideologies of public housing, urban design and infrastructural planning in the 20th century, and into the way design disciplines have attempted to lend structure to the transformation of city and countryside.
Project a. (October 2004-2008) mr.drs. M.A. Geertse:
The international platform for urban planning: the International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP) (1913-2000).
Client: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
In this survey of the IFHP tries to get new knowledge about the birth, the institutionalising, the basic notions and the ideologies of 20th century urban planning, as well about the way this discipline tried to manage the mechanisms - the cultural context included - of the transformation from town and countrye van stad en land into a networks city. To display the deep structure of 20th century urban planning in Europe and display it in a panoramic manner an extensive study of the literature, archives and knowledge exchange in different countries is necessary: Congresses, exhibitions, excursions, publications; shaping of urban space: theory, urban concepts and the body of forms.
Project b. (September 2006-2011)
Urban nebula: metamorphosis of the Schiphol region in the twentieth century
Client: The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research programme “Urbanisation and Urban Culture”
Main applicant: prof.dr Koos Bosma; co-applicants dr Heidi de Mare and prof.dr Karel Davids. N.B. Project a. has been incorporated in this project.
This research project aims to analyze and explain the origins and course of a sweeping metamorphosis in Dutch urban landscapes in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, viz. a change from compact, relatively sharply delineated areas into a kind of urban `nebula’, where town and country are to a large extent intertwined. This urban nebula is a layered phenomenon which comprises spatial, infrastructural, economic, socio-political as well as cultural features. It is physical, social as well as symbolic by nature. The Schiphol region, with the airport as its core, is seen as one of the prototypical nebula cities in Europe, connected to almost all international networks and at the same time shaped with very Dutch local and regional features. A certain amount of coherence in this nebula structure is organized by collective arrangements for the use and interpretation of urban space (ranging from policy interventions and designs, investments and conventions in urban representation, to everyday and ritual use of public space). Core issues will be, on the one hand the changing town-country relations, caused by the spatial, infrastructural and cultural factors, that
developed in the nineteenth and twentieth century, elaborating current knowledge and on the other hand the rise of the nebula. Shifts in collective arrangements of the urban space will be studied from four interrelated points of view: planning concepts, infrastructural networks, physical structures and urban culture.
The project was started in Fall 2006 and is implemented by Iris Burgers and Abdel El Makhloufi.
Project c: Landscaping with the biography of the Sandy City. The reconstruction of the Sandy soils in the province of Noord-Brabant (2005-2008)
Client: The Netherlands Architecture Fund
This knowledge project aims at the translation of recent scientific insights in the creation of the historical image of the sandy soils in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. In a practical experiment those insights in some areas of agricultural reconstruction, areas where the agrarian fundament of the countryside is gone, will be implemented. The collection images are structured in a website that can be used as a toolbox (www.zandstad.nl).
The experiment concentrates on the relations between (im)materiaal images that are collected by historians - the deep history of the turbulent area - and presented in such a manner that landscape designers an durban planners might use them in there planning for present day and future design issues. The main question is: how can in processes of change in such turbulents environments local and regional history contribute to the managing of the future?
The final results of this projects will be collected in a book.
Conceptual manager: prof.dr. Koos Bosma
Management execution: De Lijn (dr. Guido Wallagh)
Team: LUST (interactive digitale presentation), Iris Burgers MA, drs. Sarah van der Pijl, ir. Berno Strootman
Local consultant: Dr. Cor van der Heijden
2. The Dutch architectonic culture in the ‘long 18th century’ (supervised by Dr. F.H. (Freek) Schmidt)
This study is associated in part with a programme subsidized by the NWO, ‘Passion and Control: Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Architecture’, which is being carried out in collaboration with the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) of the University of Utrecht (Professor Dr K.A. Ottenheym). The project began on March 1, 2002. Research covers the Dutch architectonic culture from circa 1680-1830, based on changes that occurred in the institutional and administrative organization of architecture. The study includes research on ‘architecture and the public’ during the same period.
The following people are involved in this study:
Dr. F.H. (Freek) Schmidt
E. Starkenburg
3. History of Dutch garden and landscape architecture from 1650 to the present (supervised by Drs. E.M. (Imke) van Hellemondt)
Architecture-historical research into the history of garden and landscape architecture is aimed at the design of landscape on a number of planning levels. The objects of study, interpreted as spatial constructions, include a wide variety of outdoor spaces — garden, city park, holiday park, country estate, polder landscape — and the physical planning of city square, urban neighbourhood, and motorway; as well as large-scale land consolidation and the (re)organization of the countryside into parks, nature reserves and wooded areas. At the heart of the study are historical design interventions into and with nature and the landscape as acts of culture embedded in a social context.
The following people are involved in this study:
Drs. E.M. (Imke) van Hellemondt
Prof.dr J.C. Bierens de Haan
4. Dutch architecture from the late 18th century to circa 1900 (supervised by )
This study is based on a programme subsidized by the NWO, ‘Identity and Tradition: Dutch Architecture 1770-1914’, which began in 1996.
The research is completed. Prof.dr A. van der Woud left the VU for the Rijksuniversiteit at Groningen. In 2007 the dissertation of Petra Brouwer will be published.
The following people are involved in this study:
Drs. P.A. (Petra) Brouwer
Dr Hetty Berens (received her doctorate in 1999)
Christian Bertram, MA
Dr Caroline van Eck (postdoc until 2003)
Dr Lex Hermans (postdoc until 2003)
Dr Ida Jager (received her doctorate in 2002)
Dr Coert Peter Krabbe (received his doctorate in 1998)
Barbara Laan, MA
Dr Geert Palmaerts (received his doctorate in 2005)
Dr Ineke Pey (postdoc until 2003)
External doctoral students
Dr Paul Meurs, BSc (received his doctorate in 2000)
Marinke Steenhuis, MA