Drs. Ivan Nio (1965) studied social geography and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Since 1999 he has been an independent researcher. In his research and publications he has explored diverse themes on the interface of design and social-scientific disciplines. For six years he was editor of the journal Stedebouw & Ruimtelijke Ordening. He has also taught urban sociology at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design and the University of Amsterdam. In 2008 he published the Atlas Westelijke Tuinsteden (with A. Reijndorp and W. Veldhuis). Since 2010 he is working on a thesis on modernity, new towns and suburbanization (University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behaviourial Sciences).
Research
Modernity, New Towns and Suburbanisation
In the Netherlands, living areas surrounding towns mainly consist of single-family dwellings with garden. It is questionable whether these vast areas can be marshalled as generic suburban landscape, since there are differences between suburbanization and suburban cultures in the Netherlands and other countries. The position of the Netherlands lies somewhere between the more suburban culture of Great-Britain and Belgium and the seemingly more urban culture of France (especially the Paris region). In the Netherlands, the process of suburbanization always was of a distinctively planned nature. The suburban areas around towns are often of a higher density that in other countries. Moreover, there are collective ideals. As a result, since the 1970’s typically Dutch outskirts and suburban culture surfaced. However, there is little understanding of the distinctive characteristics of Dutch suburbanization or the various ways in which the Dutch suburban landscape was shaped.
Up until today, social, cultural and spatial studies had remarkably little attention for the post-war suburbanization and suburban culture. The current PhD-project focuses on the post-war history of suburban culture in the Netherlands against the background of modernity. This complex and ambiguous concept may be the key to understanding the contradictory marks of planning and design of suburbs, as well as suburban culture. Exercising the concept of modernity as an ambivalent experience of the transitory, fleeting and fortuitous, suburbanization will be framed within a broad cultural context. For an adequate understanding of suburban culture in the Netherlands an comparison will be made between suburban New Towns in The Netherlands, Britain (Milton Keynes) and France (Cergy Pontoise). The researcher will study in what way post-war suburbanization has been appreciated as a surging spatial and socio-cultural force, and what its effect was on two separate domains of modernity: planning and design of suburban New Towns on the one hand and daily life and experience on the other.
The study will be a quest for the peculiarity of post-war suburban living culture in Dutch New Towns in an international perspective. It will try to establish to what extent the suburban areas in New Towns have emerged from a certain attitude towards modernity and suburbanity. Moreover, it will discuss how the suburban areas have generated a form of domestic, ordinary or suburban modernity. Another research question is whether daily life in the suburban areas is exemplary for the modern conditions of changeability, diversity, detachment, mobility and as an expression of the promise of progression.
PhD
Phd candidate, University of Amsterdam, faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and the International New Towns Institute (INTI) in Almere. Co-financed by International New Towns Institute
Promotor: A. Reijndorp, University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behaviourial Sciences
co-promotor: R. Boomkens, University of Groningen, Faculty of Philosophy
