The New Urban Normal: publication out
Our new publication *The New Urban Normal: Urban Sustainability and Resilience Post-COVID-19* is out and available for download from this LINK. This is the result of the online Urban Thinkers Campus with the same title organised by the Global Urban Laband the group of TU Delft Spatial Planning and Strategy in June 2020. This book was...
No Fraud, a text by Andreas Faludi
The night from 6 to 7 January, 2021 we saw over and over again the surge up the steps of the Capitol sweeping away security guards. Fit for the occasion, amongst the flags I spotted a banner: AMERICANPOPULISTPARTY.COM. I googled it and found a website in what seemed Polish with a link to a private...
I May Have Betted on the Wrong Horse, a text by Andreas Faludi
My infatuation with planning at EU level may have been at the expense of due attention to cross-border cooperation. It could have gone the other way. One of my first interviews has been with Viktor Freiherr von Malchus, German pioneer of cross-border cooperation largely through the Council of Europe. But I grasped the opportunity instead...
Europe Day: Myth and Reality, a text by Andreas Faludi
Europe Day is little known. At least I have been invited once to speak at the occasion in would-be EU candidate member state Albania. (See my blog ’Europe Day in Tirana’) On that day – 9 May 1950 – on advice of Jean Monnet, ‘First Statesman of Interdependence’ (Duchêne, 1994) French foreign minister Robert Schuman...
Territoriality and COVID-19, a text by Andreas Faludi
In March James Meek (2000) has pointed out the news prioritising ‘our’ casualties and ‘our’ people stranded overseas and travellers ‘here’ being infected by a traveller from ‘there’. This encourages suspicion, hostility, racism, tighter borders, even violence. ‘Sometimes the coverage becomes the vehicle for a criticism, implicit or explicit, of something “their” society does that “our”...
A ‘hopelessly simple-minded take on sovereignty’*, a text by Andreas Faludi
Whilst I write, there is much to do about (British) sovereignty, and well in planning, too. For instance, in the 1990, the Dutch national planning director thought it unthinkable for ‘Brussels’ to have say over the extension of the Port of Rotterdam. Of ‘territorial trap’ fame (for the first mention see: Agnew 1994) Agnew (2020, 44)...
UfM Action Plan for Sustainable Urbanisation greenlighted by UfM working groups and European Commission
This is the exact moment in which Commissioner Wallis Goelen from the European Commission Directorate General on Regional and Urban Policy announced the recommendation to adopt the Union for the Mediterranean Action Plan on Sustainable and Inclusive Urbanisation. The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) is the intergovernmental Euro-Mediterranean organisation which brings together all countries of the...
The Deconstruction – and Reconstruction? -of Hungary, a text by Andreas Faludi
It’s not so much that I am a born Hungarian. My purpose is to fathom Hungary’s dealing with the 1920 Treaty of Trianon taking two-thirds of the “Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen” from it and leaving millions of compatriots in the diaspora. ’Nem-nem-soha’ (no-no-never) will some accept this! Margaret MacMillan (2001) writes on...
The Construction of Poland, a text by Andreas Faludi
No, this is not against Poland. Norman Davies (2004) has shown me its heroism. But Margaret MacMillan (2001) writing on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference ending the Great War vouches to Poland having been the product of nationalism-cum-territorialism. US President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ were meant to guide the proceedings. Point 13 promised a Poland...
Territorialism in the Cross Hairs, a text by Andreas Faludi
Contending with state borders and their divisive effects, those in cross-border cooperation are with me in having territorialism in the cross hairs. They after all have first hand experience of the divisive effects of borders and the advantages of working with their neighbours in overcoming them. The EU helps, not only financially but also with...
The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization, edited by Roberto Rocco and Jan van Ballegooijen has been finally published in paperback. This book was originally published in 2018 in hardcover but is now also available in paperback and digital form, making it accessible to a much wider audience. This book investigates the mutual relationship between the struggle...
Territorialism, Populism and the Third Reich, a text by Andreas Faludi
Planning in the Third Reich would have been my preferred PhD topic. Presently, Germans, including the ‘Academy for Territorial Development’, deal with their history (1), but then it was too early. Here I discuss international literature on the ‘infamous crown jurist’ (Smeltzer, 2018, 591) of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, an apostle also of territorialism...
