How can Hong Kong's housing development escape its unrelenting uniformity? How might architects and developers bypass strict planning and building regulations? How might they add more value by creative design? How might they realize innovative and attractive housing towers, towers that would radically change Hong Kong?Hong Kong's notoriously strict building regulations impose a relentless uniformity on the city. This book aims to propose new indicators to achieve a proper balance between popu...

As one of the greatest pioneers of international conceptual art, Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) maintained strong ties with the Netherlands. The unlocking of his intensive correspondence with Rotterdam gallery owner Hans Sonnenberg has revealed the extent of Manzoni's influence on the post-war avant-garde in the Netherlands.

During his short artistic career Piero Manzoni produced more than a thousand canvases, sculptures and other objects. He radically rejected the conventional cont...

Recent deregulation of laws on hospital real estate in the Netherlands implies that healthcare institutions have more opportunities to make independent accommodation choices, but at the same time have themselves become responsible for the risks associated with the investment. In addition, accommodation costs have become an integral part of the costs of healthcare. This sheds new light on the alignment between the organisation of healthcare and accommodation: care institutions themselves bear ...

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region, bordering on Belgium, is part of northern Europe’s historical centre of heavy industry, which extends as far as the Ruhr area in Germany. With the end of coal mining in the 1980s, the Lille region transitioned to new economic activities, particularly within the cultural and creative industries, taking advantage of its strategic location midway between Paris, London and Brussels. After de-industrialisation and the 1984 opening of the Lewarde Mining Museu...

In our current society, governments face complex societal issues that cannot be tackled through traditional governance arrangements. Therefore, governments increasingly come up with smart hybrid arrangements that transcend the boundaries of policy domains and jurisdictions, combine governance mechanisms (state, market, networks and self-governance), and foster new forms of collaboration. This book provides an overview of what smart hybridity entails and of its potentials and challenges. It in...

The largest maps in the world are to be found in the floor of the Citizens’ Hall, in the heart of the Royal Palace Amsterdam. The three circular mosaics, each measuring over six metres in diameter, together depict the known world and the night sky. They remain to this day an iconic and beloved part of the majestic palace, which was originally built in the mid-seventeenth century to serve as Amsterdam’s town hall. At that time, the city was the world’s leading cartography centre. The pro...

A Masterpiece Examined.

Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which he completed in the southern French town of Arles in 1888 and 1889, are among his most famous paintings. In radiant shades of yellow, he created five large still lifes featuring vases of sunflowers, which now hang in museums all over the world. This book focuses on the version of Sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum’s collection – a masterpiece that has been studied in recent years by an international team of more than thirty sc...