Urban political overrepresentation and access to public funding for municipalities in the Netherlands

Advantageous positions for politically overrepresented groups and rural political discontent are widely debated in academia. However, the role urban political overrepresentation may have in benefiting urban citizens and as an explanation for rural political discontent has hitherto received little attention. This paper addresses urban...

Application of an empirical multi-agent model for urban goods transport to analyze impacts of zero emission zones in The Netherlands

Reducing emissions caused by urban freight transportation is an increasingly important policy objective for transportation planners around the world. New and innovative ways of data collection provide new possibilities to analyze these issues. In this paper we present MASS-GT, a new multi-agent simulation system for urban goods transport. The...

Developing a locally balanced energy system for an existing neighbourhood, using the ‘Smart Urban Isle’ approach

This paper describes a step-by-step approach for generating various energy concepts for neighbourhoods, based on local renewable resources. The approach is developed within the European research project ‘Smart Urban Isle’ (SUI). While much literature is focussed on comparison or optimization of predefined configurations, the SUI approach adds...

Planning for Urban Social Sustainability: Towards a Human-Centred Operational Approach

In Europe, growing concerns about social segregation and social stability have pushed calls to make cities ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ higher on policy agendas. However, how to approach such generic policy objectives and operationalise them for planning practices is still largely unclear. This article makes a conceptual...

Impacts of progressive urban expansion on subsurface temperatures in the city of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Subsurface temperatures are substantially higher in urban areas than in surrounding rural environments; the result is a subsurface urban heat island (SUHI). SUHIs and their drivers have received attention in studies world-wide. In this study, a well-constrained data set of subsurface temperatures from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, is presented....

The Support Paradox in Community Enterprise Experiments in the Netherlands

In many European countries, community-based entrepreneurship is increasingly considered as a means to initiate small-scale urban regeneration. However, residents in deprived neighbourhoods are often viewed to lack key entrepreneurial skills. Most research on community entrepreneurship support is based on cross-sectional studies and overly...

The Support Paradox in Community Enterprise Experiments in The Netherlands (discussion paper)

In many European countries, community entrepreneurship is increasingly considered as a means to initiate small-scale urban regeneration. However, residents in deprived communities are often viewed to lack key entrepreneurial attributes and skills. This paper reports a unique experiment in the Netherlands with nascent community enterprises which...

The conservation of modernist urban ensembles: Case studies from Amsterdam

Urban conservation, notably in Western Europe, grew from a reaction to the large Modernist monofunctional sub-urban expansion projects and programmes aimed at rationalising messy multifunctional historic cities. Conservationists responded reactively by celebrating the diversity and multi-layered character of the historic city. In the Netherlands...

Fighting a losing battle? Neighbourhood-based social mobility in times of retrenching social interventions

Social mobility is a key concept in neighbourhood-based policies in Europe and the US. The Dutch neighbourhood approach often implies physical restructuring combined with a range of economic and social mobility strategies such as counselling, citizenship courses, debt relief, work training / placement programs and language courses. However, the...

Deadlocks and breakthroughs in urban renewal: A network analysis in Amsterdam

Urban renewal in the Netherlands has become a matter of ‘networking’. Housing associations, Dutch social landlords, became financially independent in the 1990s and have a responsibility in urban renewal. It is a joint responsibility in which local authority, social landlord and tenants are dependent on each other. This situation is rather new...