This will be the final post for the Landscape Architecture Tour de Force.......stay tuned for final final words this weekend. We leave Monday for home. Fun fact: we leave Amsterdam at 11am Monday and arrive Boston at 1pm Monday.....a 2 hour flight! go Delta!
Wednesday was modern or post-modern [take your pick] urban development day. Met up with the students at the Bulldog hostel and hiked 2 miles to the Eastern Docklands (a good name for a novel or film), a sprawling development on former industrial/dockland "islands" with names like Sumatra and Borneo. We came in thru the Purple and mostly hung out in the Green which I believe is Borneo (see map below).
[from good ole' Wikipedia] "The Eastern Docklands (Oostelijk Havengebied) is a neighborhood of Amsterdam, Netherlands, located between the IJ and the Amsterdam–Rhine Canal. The harbor area was constructed in the late nineteenth century to allow for increasing trade with the Dutch East Indies; The area, about 2/3 water and 1/3 land, consists of an extension of
the Oostelijke Handelskade, east of the center of town, and four
artificial "islands" (peninsulas), all of which were former industrial
and harbor locations. In the 1980s, the city decided to change the by now derelict area into
space for residences, and even proposed to fill in the harbors. In the
end, the harbors and islands remained intact, to create relatively quiet
enclaves of residential neighborhoods. In the early 2000s, after a large-scale
reorganization, the Eastern Docklands was home to some 17,000 people
living in some the highest population densities in the Netherlands." 
On Thursday we took a short train ride down to Alphen aan dem Rijn, a small city known for its planning including Ecolonia, a sustainable community started in the 1990's.
The sustainable town planning project at Alphen aan den Rijn was commissioned by the Dutch national Environmental Agency in order to gain experience in the field of ecological town planning as well as in the area of ecological architecture. The project at Ecolonia developed several areas of sustainability including rainwater utilization; use of passive and active solar energy; reduction of water consumption; special attention to the aspects of healthy living, etc.
This was a well planned and relatively peaceful place. We met a couple out admiring the swans and they really liked living in the new development. They had returned to Alphen a/d Rijn after living in Germany.
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