During the time that I wrote ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ and in the years after that I never would have thought that we would get into a crisis like this. I was never into geography and urbanism. I am a student of capitalism, of Marx and Schumpeter. What I started to do was add Jane Jacobs to that.

The crisis that we are now in is also a crisis on our way of life. We can see this creative and knowledge based economy emerging and this old industrial economy receding. That causes big changes in the way we live. That is what ‘The great Reset’ is about.

Yes I agree the crisis is the opportunity. When it started I knew that it would be generational. That it was going to be big. That it is not just going away. And yes, it will be resolved. It will be resolved, like the last big crisis, by many new technological inventions, but also by changing the way we live.

We have to completely break with the old geographic model: the model of suburbanisation. You here in this audience start to understand that. But it will be a big challenge to make presidents, bankers and other politicians understand it as well.

When I look at the world I can see that it is spikey. It’s not flat at all. The mega regions will grow bigger and they are linked by mass transit.

But the present geographic model is promoting sub urbanism; it’s promoting the use of the car. And in the new model we will have to intensify in the core. That’s what we already see happening. The city itself is the main container of the new economy and we will have to densify and intensify there.

Americans during the last century have seen the European spatial structure as anachronistic. For American planners, the European spatial structure was not something to follow. They were completely into sub urbanism, into building another Silicon Valley, into building the nerdistans as I call them. The high tech technological parks that everyone wanted to force through your throat during the last twenty years or so.

But the European spatial structure, with concentrated cores, with better connections, if you can manipulate that in the right way it is much better in tune with what we need today. This fibre is very well capable to build this creative and knowledge based economy on. It is the city itself that will challenge Silicon Valley.

This city has to be a place with real density. And it has to be a place with many big stories: new ideas require old buildings.

As I said the world is not flat it is spikey. We see a massive concentration of assets; we see an increasingly spikey world. One of my students told me he is 27 and can live very rich in Shanghai. He told me that he has a much better way of life there than I have in Toronto.

But what he also told me and what is the other side to that is that the people who live on the outskirts of Shanghai have to live in a world that is pre civilised….

So the question of our age is how to melt down this socio economic and spatial inequality. That inequality is not only reflected in the income levels but also in the cost of housing.

We did build the working class; it was not given to us. Now we have to reform how our cities operate. We have to reform our service jobs. The vacancies in our real estate are the result of the change of the old economic order. It is like what Rudy Stroink said yesterday: stop building at the periphery. Stop giving incentives for new peripheral growth. Just stop it.

And you can say the reuse of old buildings is nice, it’s sustainable, it’s a moral thing, and it’s ethical, it’s green. But I tell you no: this is also an economic necessity, the more you go to the periphery the less connected you are, the less interaction you have, the less productivity you will have. If we want to build more competitive regions and cities, we will have to densify. Density in the urban form is what now grows economies.

You ask me where the weakest link is. The weakest link is: us. We accept this stuff. Political leaders will take a long time to adjust. The mood that they are in is that they say the new order is too scary let’s bring back the old one. Lets bring back the old housing market, the old banks, lets reinvest in the companies that are dead. It’s us:

We will have to wake up and say no, this is a new time, it’s a new era and we need something different.

I do not see a massive political movement ready to fix these problems. We are in the earliest phase of this shift. It may take a lot of pain for many people to learn from this. What makes me optimistic is that it looks as if there is enough international cooperation in the world that we don’t have to suffer through a mayor meltdown.

The question is how fast can we accelerate the shift? For my father the crisis started when he was an eight-year-old boy and it took until he was forty until he could truly participate in the American Dream in the fifties and sixties. So how fast will it go now and what will have to happen first? We can only hope it will go faster.

So, how can we create a new economic demand? We love our historic buildings and at the same moment we are producing a surplus. What kind of program do you see for these buildings?

The key component of the socio economic and spatial structure of the old world is the housing, automobile, and energy complex. For every country in the world the same laws could be used: if you wanted to grow you had to build up an industrial sector and you had to create a demand. Not by militarisation, although it was sometimes an important factor, but by creating a market demand. We stimulated demand for cars, for steel, for metal, for houses, for washing machines. And the flip side was the mass production Fordism structure

Before the industrial age arrived we spent most of our money on food, clothes and shelter. During the transition into the industrial age we had to shrink the amount of money we did spend on food and started to spend it on houses, cars and energy. So the next step will be that we have to shrink the demand for housing, energy and cars and expand spending on new products.

The average American and Canadian household today spends 75% of their income on car, housing and energy. If we want our new economy to grow we have to shrink that back the same way as we did that with agriculture: we have to make it sustainable and efficient, so we can open new demand for new jobs. That’s the shift that we are in.

So your final question is how do we get rid of the crisis. What would I like to see happening the next years? I am hopeful that national leaders and mayors will start to articulate these things that we have learned in all the great cities of the world. These things have to be better heard all over the world. The other thing is that we should invest much more in adaptive reuse. Reusing our heritage in a new way. Not put these historic buildings in amber. But really use them. It’s about the adaptive reuse of technology and modernism and combining this. I would like to see that as a new development model. For me urban planning as we know it is Fordism. It is Henry Ford applied to the use of urban space. We have to rethink all these zoning and building codes. In order to create spaces that are sustainable and human.

And the final but maybe the most important thing is the jobs agenda. We will have to look at the 40 to 45 % of people that are in the service industry and make their jobs better. That is the obligation we have.

I went to the meeting in Amsterdam as a speaker and wanted to go to the meeting in Maastricht as a member of the audience.  It is a long train ride, two and a half hours from Amsterdam to Maastricht. The main reason for me to travel there was to listen to and catch up with Richard Florida. But Maastricht also hosts several very interesting new projects and it gave me a chance to see at least one of them on Friday.

I arrived in Maastricht Thursday evening. This was announced as a dinner meeting where we would be able to discuss with others. The speeches that were held were very good. Lots of what was said was inspiring. Florida is a wonderful speaker, he is able to drag the audience into his story and deliver his arguments in a very clear way. It is not that he told many new things. For those who follow him and have read his books we know most of the arguments. But the way he delivers his message and the anecdotes that he chooses make it a real treat every time again to sit in the audience and listen to that message.  I taped his speech. In the next weeks I want to try to analyze his arguments a bit more and see what we here in the Netherlands can learn from it.

So, even though the Thursday evening was quite interesting, I felt more doubt during Friday. The thing is, we can sit together at events and listen to others many times but it is a very linear thing to do. The way we meet is almost always traditional. The speakers take too much time, the schedule is always tight, and there is almost no possibility for the audience to participate. It is very challenging to have a truly creative meeting where the audience can participate and where there can be a real exchange of ideas. Isn’t that what it should be all about? In our emerging new economy exchanging ideas will again be the driving force. The venue, the program, the other guests, the possibility to exchange ideas, it all adds up to the quality of an event like this. In Maastricht the possibilities to discuss with the other members of the audience were limited at least in the parts that I attended.

Friday morning the event started relatively late, which made it possible to explore a bit of Maastricht during the night. We went to the lounge bar of the Kruisheren hotel, a new design hotel in the centre of Maastricht, a nice example of beautiful adaptive reuse: a perfect place to talk till late at night about the future of redevelopment.

Friday started with an interview between Richard Florida and Ester Agricola. That was a perfect choice; her questions were to the point. Florida was articulating something that sounded like a program for a non-existing political movement.

After that we came to what should have been the core of the Maastricht conference, four presentations on transformation projects. After hearing that I felt depressed. There is this enormous mistake that the architect should be in the centre of a redevelopment project. Here we were listening to three architects and one developer who talked about architecture. And although architects are nice people and know a lot, they always need a client. We here in the Netherlands have some of the best architects and city planners in the world. They plan and build everywhere. But what we miss is the good clients, the new developers, the new building corporations, and the new builders. It is always very interesting to see that an architect has built a wall around a farm or created a public space on a big street, what I am interested in is who was the client, what was the program, which questions had to be answered and how did the architect help to resolve them.

The four presentations were interesting but not interesting enough. It never became clear why we were looking at these plans. And they all had too many slides.

I joined the visit to the new A2 project that Maastricht is working on. A 2,5 kilometre stretch of motorway will be put underground in order to create new connections between very separated parts of the city. The project is needed to create a much more liveable and sustainable city. But it has partly to be paid form development that will probably never occur. So it will be very interesting to see how the city and the building consortium are going to handle that question during the next fifteen years.

Maastricht was the first in what should be a series of biennales on redevelopment. I have my doubts if this is the best way to stimulate redevelopment.  The number of visitors showed that there is a big need to learn and to discuss. I am very curious about the results of the different workshops but didn’t see them presented yet.

What we are looking for is a new development model to rebuild our cities as Richard Florida put it.  We no longer need master plans that will never be built. We urgently need expeditions, strategies, program and processes. The Maastricht biennale certainly was an important step. We certainly cannot wait another two years to make the next step. We will have to act a bit faster!

This is why I’m always looking for the things that are comparable. The lessons that can be learned from other projects and can be used in other places in the world.  Of course it’s true. Things are different everywhere. Many presentations on projects focus on the physical aspects like architecture, remediation and infrastructure.

What interests me much more is the approach, the process, the software, or if you want the smartware.

Who is the owner, what was his role? What about the project manager, how are things organised. What kind of programme do they focus on, how do they know they can het that. How are things organised on site, do you feel welcome when you are there? And even though there is a lot to say about hardware these organisational aspects are more important.

So what makes a successful project? Sometimes the answers come from a corner that you never expected. Some years ago the British National Audit Office did a research. They wanted to find out what cities do to achieve success in their regeneration projects. The cities they visited were Rotterdam, Lille, Essen, Malmö, Barcelona, Manchester and London. They say:

“We do not seek to evaluate each of the approaches to regeneration or identify any particular individual approach as an exemplar. Even the most successful of programmes will have its critics. The different constitutional and administrative contexts and problems to be solved in each of the cities and regions prevent simplistic read across.”

So what do you think the accountants of the Audit Office came up with? Rules? Subsidies, money, tax benefits? Good architects? No, it’s nothing of that. This is their list:

• A clear shared vision
• Clear and strong leadership
• A clear implementation plan
• A network of partners eager to deliver
• Marshalling the resources needed
• Central support for partners
• Monitoring of progress and assessment of impact.

Wauw.

There are two stories on why Jaques Brel wrote his song ‘The port of Amsterdam’. The first one is that he was sitting in his apartment in Antibes overlooking the Mediterranean and wrote this song. He only choose Amsterdam because it was the best word to sing. It could have been Marseille or Antwerp as well. But that didn’t sound as nice.
The other story is that he came to Amsterdam to meet Liesbeth List the Dutch singer who sang many of Brel’s songs. In a cafe in the Jordaan, run by Manke Nelis, he wrote his song on the backside of a beer carton. It is a fantastic song. We Amsterdammers of course hope the last story is true.

The song gives the exact reason why I wanted to do the harboursafari. In the song Jaques Brel mentions the sailors that come to the city and drink in the bars and meet the prostitutes and dance. That was what happened in Amsterdam from the first days of the city (around 1200) to let’s say 30 years ago. Amsterdam has always been a harbour city. The harbour and the city were the same thing. The water and the warehouses were everywhere. The harbour activities defined the citys layout. But that changed dramatically in the last decades. Because of safety, rules, efficiency, the harbour moved to the west and left the city behind. In a city like Antwerp or Hamburg you can still see and feel the harbour. In Amsterdam it is invisible. Everything that once was harbour is now regenerated into something new. And I think that is a very sad and bad thing. For the harbour and for the city.

In Brel’s song the sailors went from their ship directly into the red light district. Today you will find a Russian sailor waiting for a bus in the rain somewhere on a twenty kilometre distance from the city. Not a bar, not a bus, not even a taxi. He can hum Brel’s song inside his head but he will never get there. The harbour and the city are completely disconnected. And it is even worse. The harbour and the city are in a conflict. The city needs houses and is constantly looking for new land. The planners make plans to move the harbour even further west. But they forget that the Amsterdam harbour is the fifth harbour of Europe and an enormous economic asset. Together with Schiphol it is the economic lifeline of the metropole Amsterdam. But if you don’t see it and if you don’t know it, it’s impossible to like it. This is why we started to take people in. Not only on the Noordzee kanaal  but really into the harbour. To see the ships that bring the cars and the cacao and the coal. To smell the soja and the potassium. To see all the derelict land that is polluted and will never be regenerated because the rules do not allow other economic activities.

So what is the objective: the best thing would be to get a harbour like Hamburg or Kaohsiung (in Taiwan, it is in the top ten of harbours in the world): a mix of economic activities, housing, working, recreation and harbour all together in a nice patchwork. Lets start with other economic activities and see if housing can get there later. Lets make the harbour attractive. Lets put the harbour back on our mental map.

Yesterday we arrived at lunchtime. With the group from Hengelo we biked from Oberhausen along the Emscher into the landscape park. There we had barbecued meat and sausages in the ‘Giesshalle’ the space where fresh melted iron was captured form the smelter during at least fifty years. This whole environment with the gasholder in use as a diving centre, the ore bunkers that are used as a climbing centre, the smelters that you can climb on top of to have a fascinating view of the transformed Ruhr area. It all was as impressive as the first time I went there, almost twenty years ago.

Hengelo and the cities in the Ruhr area can learn a lot form each other. Only 80 minutes on the German Autobahn separate these places that both saw their growth during the last century of industrialisation an that are now looking for a new economic basis. The members of the city council, the mayor and the alderman were all impressed by the enormous investments that had been made during the last decades. And of course they were interested to hear where all the money comes from and why these investments are made. Is economic growth really stimulated by the reuse of industrial heritage and by making parks and bicycle paths?

Michael Schwartze Rodrian did a presentation for the group and tried to answer these questions. Michael has a long history in working in the Emscher area. April this year he was the one who hosted the Dutch Royal family during their official visit to the Emscher area.

All the investments in the park, in the water system, in restoring industrial heritage, in creating new connections, is done to create the right circumstances for a new economy to emerge. And although this is always difficult and doesn’t work for everybody, the results are impressive.

Later during the day we visited Zollverein, the world heritage site in Essen. The new Ruhr museum is impressive. The area is lively and what struck me most was the amount of visitors that they have: more than a million last year when they were the cultural capital of Europe. We had a fantastic dinner in the Casino restaurant. The politicians were having lively discussions among each other, trying to figure out what they had seen during the day. I am sure that during the next year or so there will be new initiatives in Hengelo.