When I started to do research on urban incubator projects in 2002, in Berlin and Amsterdam, many municipal projects were already underway and several research programs, such as Urban Catalyst (Philipp Oswalt e.a.) were already studying them. Since then, there has been an explosion of academic research and real estate strategies, pointing out and using [...]
Ryan Gravel is one of the few urban designers who is actually seeing his graduation project come true. In 1999 he presented a plan for re-use of the obsolete Amtrak rail tracks around Atlanta. With help of local communities and public partnerships the plan turned into a grassroots movement. Today, Gravel still works on the [...]
The municipality of Rotterdam doesn’t have a specific portal for incubator projects, the way Amsterdam does. However, several industrial buildings in the former port areas are being used by creative industries. The artist collective De Fabriek occupied abandoned spaces in Delfshaven, Crooswijk and Spaanse Polder. Some, like Poortgebouw, are the result of squatting. Others, like [...]
Vacant NL is the theme of the Dutch pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. The blue urban landscape consists of styrofoam models of empty buildings in the Netherlands. Quite a lot altogether… Read more: Designboom
Click here to open interactive map The city of Amsterdam has quite some experience in organizing incubator projects, due to the local incubator policy (Broedplaatsenbeleid). Incubator projects are basically contracts of temporary use of vacant buildings, between the owner (private, municipality, housing corporations etc.) and a cultural end-user (individual or group). Subsidies for these projects [...]
