Matteo is a second-year Urban Studies student and joined a the ‘Collaborative Urbanism’ challenge. The challenge focused on development of the Social Innovation District, the triangle between The Hague Central Station, Holland Spoor and Laan van Nieuw-Oost Indie. Matteo and his group formulated recommendations that foster an inclusive, healthy and pro-social design of the Central Innovation District. We had a chat with him!

Matteo, what is your preferred Urban Studies Theme?
I thought that I would be more interested in the connection between crime and safety but now Sustainability is a big issue and has caught my interest as well.

Why did you join the challenge?
It was a great opportunity to talk with municipality officials. I got a good grasp of what they think and want and how re-development projects work in practice. What struck me was the complexity of such a project. I was also interested to get in touch with other students from other courses.

Tell me more!?
Urban Studies helped me a lot, it made me very comfortable discussing issues such as health management and sustainability in the context of a real urban development project. To me it seemed that compared to other students, the Urban Studies students were more comfortable giving suggestions to the issues and are pretty creative in ways that foster innovation. One of the ideas our group put forward was for example to create colored lines on the pavement that guide non-native speakers and kids to their destination (a park, social service). This is something used in airports but never has been implemented yet in an Urban Environment!

What is the main thing you take away from this project?
For sure one thing that struck me and stayed in my mind is that I could talk with developers from the municipality. This helped me to understand how complex a broad project like this is. It is a great masterplan, but every detail is discussed with different stakeholders and single companies involved in it. You need to go little by little to actually make a difference. I would be interested in sitting on one of the meetings and get a deeper understanding of how it works. I liked our sessions and we sticked to the challenge, which was to come up with an additional perspective on development of the area. I would have loved though to be involved in the execution of the plan as prescribed by the masterplan, to get even closer to reality.

Would you recommend other students to be part of such a project?
Definitely. I hope it will be organized next year again and hopefully it can be in person, which allows for a better conversation. In any case, the participation of the municipality is a big plus.