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people will balance their financial and social re
sources is a personal and individual choice that everybody needs to answer for himself. – Is MONU a labour of love? How does it feed into your other work? To what extent does it rely upon advertising, subscriptions, additional support for its survival? MONU is certainly a labour of love and we constantly have to be careful not to spend too much of our time on it, which is very tempting, but which would very quickly lead to the end of the magazine. This is because since the beginning it has been very difficult for a niche magazine such as MONU to attract advertising, subscriptions, or additional support, and thus a certain number of copies of every issue must be sold to cover the most basic expenses of the magazine, such as printing costs, etc. Thus, every reader, and every copy sold, contributes to the survival of the magazine. Accordingly, for the survival of the magazine, we have to be very well-organised and work as efficiently as possible and make time for other projects that I do with my office BOARD in Rotterdam, where I work, for example, on architectural and urban projects, but also produce research studies, such as the project we have been working on for the city of Paris, as part of the Atelier International Grand Paris (AIGP), a project that was initiated by the former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. In that way a lot of knowledge that I gain through the work with MONU also feeds into my work at BOARD (Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design), not always directly, but many times indirectly, but a lot of the experiences that I collect with the work at BOARD feed into the magazine too, especially when it comes to the creation of new topics. – Have you any encounters or experiences with urbanism and how it applies to Dublin? In 2007 I was in Dublin to deliver a competition entry for the design of the New Headquarters for Wexford County Council, in which we reached the last round, together with five other competitors that were selected out of 100 entries. That was, so far, my only encounter and experience with the city of Dublin. I had to spend a night there and stayed in a small hotel in the centre of the city surrounded by many bars that made the streets incredibly lively, something that you might encounter in Rotterdam only in some particular streets and mainly on Friday nights. The centre of Dublin, in general, I experienced as unbelievably full of life, both in the evening and during the day and especially in the morning, where I encountered more people with coffees-togo in their hands than anywhere else before. – We have recently had a new coalition government formed in Ireland with the Green Party being the glue between two establishment parties. What, in your opinion, are the mistakes Greens make when approaching urbanism and what advise should they heed? Many countries, especially in the Western World, are trying increasingly to make their cities more environmentally sustainable, which is certainly a great thing. However, more environmentally sustainable buildings or neighbourhoods are usually more expensive to build than less sustainable ones, which challenges the creation of more affordable cities in the future. So, being too idealistic in relation to environmental sustainability can easily lead to a conflict of objectives, a challenge that Jörn Walter, the former Chief Planning Officer of the city of Hamburg, pointed out in an interview entitled “Redefining a Radical Social Market Economy” that was published in our current MONU issue #32 on “Affordable Urbanism”. He stressed the fact that cities need to create comprehensive sustainability concepts that take ecological objectives just as seriously as social and economic ones. In one of my urban design projects for the city of Quakenbrück (located close to the Dutch border in Germany) on which I have been working with my office BOARD for over a year, the Greens in the local government demanded, for example, an energy-plus standard for the new neighbourhood, producing more energy from renewable energy sources, over the course of a year, than it imports from external sources. But as this would have endangered the other ideal of the city, namely the creation of an affordable new neighbourhood, we advised to create a flexible energy strategy and to begin the project as a low-energy settlement that can, over time, and step by step, develop flexibly into a passive house settlement, or even, if affordable, partly and selectively into an energy-plus neighbourhood in the future. – Are there any cities that are nailing ‘urbanism’ in your opinion? Any initiatives which have impressed you of late? I am always impressed when cities or parts of cities manage to reinvent themselves turning problematic, abandoned, or post-industrial neighbourhoods into beautiful and lively places to live and work with a mix of functions and diverse housing typologies for different kinds of people with different available budgets and ways of life. Especially when it comes to the renewal of post-industrial neighbourhoods, although they might not cover all the aforementioned aspects, I appreciate places such as the “HafenCity” in Hamburg – one of the largest recent urban redevelopment projects in Europe by landmass – but also the “Eastern Docklands” in Amsterdam, and Rotterdam’s “Kop van Zuid” and “Katendrecht”, a neighbourhood, famous in the 20th century as Rotterdam’s red light district with many – shall we say – entertainment options for sailors. monu-magazine.com b-o-a-r-d.nl 49