Preparing the future
In Bussum, a quiet, leafy commuter town midway between Amsterdam and Utrecht, the Netherlands, the local city council is carefully anticipating an upgrade of its city center. Key to this process is a roadmap for coherent center developments for the years to come. This process is being led by consultant Bureau Stedelijke Planning. Apart from the economic infrastructure of the city center, the roadmap also needs to take the social infrastructure into account. For the latter, we jumped on board the consultancy train and teamed up with Bureau Stedelijke Planning (an agency for strategic consulting, programming and project management of project and area development) to add our focus to this endeavor.
Urban Revitalization
Led by data-driven maps
Our contribution to the journey was to spice up the economic and demographic insights by Bureau Stedelijke Planning with our knowledge on inclusive social places. We created a set of data-driven maps to showcase the city center in a new light.
As we know from our heroes such as William H. Whyte (urbanist, sociologist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher), Paco Underhill (environmental psychologist), Kevin Lynch (urban planner), Ray Oldenburg (sociologist), B. Joe Pine II (the author who coined the term ‘experience economy’) and many others, it’s all about the mix of ingredients that makes a city center tick.
Comprehensive Vision
Social synergy
Armed with this knowledge, we created maps to show where people tend to hang out, how architectural quality is distributed throughout the center, the anticipated average time spent in various facilities and so on. These maps helped to distill a heat map of the social infrastructure – adding extra value to the report of Bureau Stedelijke Planning.
Finding a solution is best done with triangulation, or looking at a problem from as many different perspectives as possible. Adding our view on things allowed for a coherent study together with Bureau Stedelijke Planning. This study enables the city council to develop a road map with the next steps towards a more durable social infrastructure and therefore a more inclusive city center for Bussum’s community.