schrijft en werkt als stedenbouwkundige – writes and works as an urban planner
Mutating the genius loci in Birobidzhan, Kaliningrad and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
…The development of these cities shows that all three of them have been subjected to a developmental tool that goes beyond the phenomenon of tabula rasa, and that offers a far-reaching solution for the inconvenience that is history: Birobidzhan, Kaliningrad en Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk have all had interventions that touch their history; the different urban plans for these cities show that the Soviet regime didn’t wipe the genius loci as such, but resculpted it to make it fit into the ideological mould of a socialist city.