This publication presents a selection of design proposals submitted for the 14th session of Europan, the Netherlands. Europan is an urban-architectural competition for design professionals (architects, urban planners, landscape architects, artists, ecologists, and social geographers) under the age of 40. The competition is organized every two years in several European countries, around a common theme, and involving sites provided by cities and/or developers. Europan NL has partnered with the ...

Spring 1934. In a boggy clay polder south of Amsterdam, the first sods are cut for what would become the largest urban forest in the world: Amsterdamse Bos. Over the next decades, the so-called Boschplan expanded into a unique project. Creating woodland in the polder was a technological tour de force, and Cornelis van Eesteren and Jakoba Mulder’s modern design caused a sensation at home and abroad. Equally unique were the conditions that surrounded the Bos’ birth. Amidst the hardships of ...

Migration is one of the most pressing and complex spatial urban challenges in Europe today. Observing how newcomers, such as labour migrants, refugees, border crossers sans papiers, and asylum seekers are accommodated, we must conclude that at present not a single urban strategy convincingly enables us to receive new arrivals at the heart of our societies and cities. People are being stored in overcrowded refugee settlements on Greek islands, in squalid basement apartments in central Athens, ...

The celebrated Dutch architect and urban planner Cornelis van Eesteren is most famous for his work on the Amsterdam General Extension Plan (AUP), dating from 1934 and implemented after the Second World War, and for his role as the chairman of the International Congress for Modern Architecture (CIAM) from 1930 to 1947. He was a pioneer, and a highly influential figure of modernist urbanism. During his less known 'coming-of-age' years in the 1920s, an exceptionally exciting period in the cultur...