Main applicant: prof.dr Koos Bosma; co-applicants dr Heidi de Mare and prof.dr Karel Davids.
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.