Topics

Our mission is to look for the soul of the city. Many topics are relevant in that search. Here you find our most important
fields of interest. Just browse and enjoy the stories. Feel free to send us yours!

At Least Partially Homemade: New York’s Industrial Decline

01 Old Industries New York

A popular assumption that resonates in much that is said or written about the conversion of industrial urban spaces to new, post-industrial functions, is the idea that contemporary cities in the advanced capitalist world have become almost completely devoid of…

Battersea And Bankside: A Tale Of Two Power Stations

01 Power Station

This surrealist journey seals the fame of an urban landmark, which had been making regular cinematic appearances since 1936 (including Hitchcock, the Beatles’ ‘Help’ and Monty Python) and was voted second most popular modern building by a score of celebrities…

Inspiring Cities and the Urban Soundscape

The highlights of an Inspiring Cities salon in Rotterdam, June 3rd 2009.
There’s a growing interest in the opportunities of using sound in city development. In general sound is treated as a problem. Cars, public transport, events, pubs, schools –…

Past events

Would you like to participate in one of our soul searches in a city somewhere on the world? Besides sharing inspiration on the internet, we organise interaction with a range of tools: international exchanges, live interviews, the 8 Questions project, urban sound hunts, open space meetings, evenings of co-creation, urban theme weeks, and the Salons, to name a few of our activities.

Would you like to share your own event? We are happy to do so, please use the contact function in the 'about' menu.

12 November 2012City Think Lab: Arrival City

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Many cities try to fight migration by harnessing slums, ghetto’s. favelas and other ‘ bad neighborhoods’.  Most of the time cities see them as negative and as a problem for the economic development of the city as a whole.  BUT,…

25 April 2012Arrival City: an Urban Anthropological Quest to Rotterdam

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On the 25th, 26th and 27th of April 2012 an international group of urban planners, sociologists, architects en other interested professionals met to explore the Arrival City Rotterdam. This was the third in a series of Inspiring Cities international exchanges…

16 April 2012CTL 3 : (in)Formal City

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The formal and informal city appear to clash more frequently, now residents are getting easier organised. People organize themselves into informal networks for care, park maintenance, and other local services. Technologies give people tools to organize themselves through informal networks,…

Media

To share our inspiration we use this website, new media such as the Inspiring Cities Facebook page where you can ‘like us’ to stay up to date, or the LinkedIn group of which you can become a member. Other methodologies we use are book reviews, interviews and films.

Ferran Mascarell on the civic dimension of cities

Here Ferran Mascarell proves himself an optimist: not afraid to mention the city’s weaknesses or to criticize failures in recent urban politics, but in the end he shows confidence in the urban potential of Barcelona.
Ferran Mascarell has been responsible…

Eight Questions for Ino Paap, Mediamatic Amsterdam

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Ino Paap is one of the founders of Mediamatic. We interviewed him about the 8 EPC questions.

Which city do you see as the nicest/best city that you know? What are its most important aspects that make it so good?…

Adriana Barbosa on cities and culture

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The cities are the targets for the climate change and Brazil seems not to be prepared to deal with it.
Adriana Barbosa is a 36 years old architect and Urban Designer. She took her graduate studies  at Universidade Mackenzie where…