Best Western City Hotel, Groningen, 13th May 2004
Here with Planning Department colleagues on a study tour to look at urban planning and design. Getting around on shocking pink bicycles with back-pedal brakes – impressions of Dutch gables and chestnut trees in flower
Many similarities here with planning issues in Cambridge –traffic, conservation, sustainability, urban design and pressure for growth. Quotes of the day from a presentation by Dutch planners: ‘Marry difference in cohesion’; ‘A city has to invent things, you need to explore the future’; ‘You have to develop and change – time flows’; and ‘Attempt the impossible’. And an unresolved question: ‘What is a compact city?’
Ended the day in a Koffee Shop – quiet, rather dull. Pink bicycles, contemplation of the impossible and a Koffee Shop that’s not a coffee shop. Felt rather surreal, or perhaps Boschesque, as this was the Netherlands.