Also, we just got the keys to this concrete bunker next to our PoPPo department store and offices in the busy heart of North Amsterdam. Two floors and 700 m² full of imagination, perfect for galleries, events, maker spaces, or your next wild idea. Get in touch if you’re interested, we’re happy to show you around.

Elsewhere

Stockholm launched a street furniture collection made from leftover construction waste. Most recycling projects hide their origins. This one doesn’t, and that’s exactly what makes it inspiring. More on Designboom.

The Marginalian writes about ma (間), the Japanese concept of the interval: the emptiness between things, the pause between moments. Not absence, but space where something new can emerge. Architect Kengo Kuma calls it the most important space in Japanese architecture. What if we applied that to cities? Streets and squares designed with deliberate gaps. Emptiness and silence as structural elements, not leftover space. More in our Urban calm series.

Space is increasingly scarce. So why build a new café when there are already hundreds of perfectly good restaurants sitting empty for half the day? That’s the simple idea behind Asano, founded by Kate Kaneko in New York City. Instead of opening a conventional café, Kaneko operates as a ‘barista in residence’, taking over existing restaurants during their quieter hours. The tables, kitchen infrastructure and other facilities are already there. Asano simply puts them to work at a different time of day. More ideas on hybrid space here.

Ma and mottainai sit in an interesting tension: one values emptiness, the other calls it waste. Two Japanese concepts, two opposite answers to the empty city. Have a nice weekend.

The sports complex is a fossil of the industrial age. While our cities are densifying and the demand for space is exploding, sports clubs are still hijacking thousands of square metres of precious land behind closed fences. It’s time to liberate sport from its reserve.

Tactical stadium infrastructure

Nike recently sent a powerful signal with the ACG All Conditions Cup System. This is a modular stadium kit consisting of 1,600 parts that allows you to transform any inhospitable location — from a beach to a desert — into an arena. That this is more than a marketing gimmick is proven by the collaboration with football club Internazionale, with whom a complete competition has been set up on uncharted territory. Today a match, tomorrow an empty plain again.

This project touches upon a fundamental shift in our urban logic: space no longer adapts to the sport. The sport must adapt to the city.

Geometric hacking: ditches as rule-breakers

When we dare to radically merge sport and landscape, new forms of usage emerge. We call this geometric hacking. An iconic example is the Poldercup by artist Maider López. She asked the right question: why do we need standardised football pitches when we already have miles of meadow? In her experiment, the Dutch ditches (“sloten”) were not obstacles, but an essential, tactical part of the game.

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Recently, we came across a graph with a clear message: by the end of 2025, spending on building data centres in the US overtook that on office buildings for the first time in history. The need for desks is going down, while the hunger for server racks is endless.

The reason is no mystery: AI. We’re getting used to nervous headlines about waves of layoffs — most recently with Block, which showed a massive chunk of its workforce the door. Expenditure on human capital (desks, coffee machines, meeting rooms) is plummeting, while spending on API tokens and cloud capacity continues to soar. We’re witnessing the rapid rackification of our commercial landscape.

The death of the desk

According to Anthropic, we’re only at the beginning of this shift. Many of the roles under pressure are knowledge-intensive: legal, financial, analytical. Perhaps Anthropic is exaggerating, but the trend is clear.

Data centres are gradually taking over the role of office buildings, just as bots are taking over the tasks of knowledge workers. So, where does that leave our shiny Central Business Districts? Is this necessarily bad news for our cities? Not really.

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Beware of the mothballs

Forget the sterile dreams of the smart city, or the cookie-cutter flagship stores of fast-fashion giants. The real revolution on our high streets smells faintly of mothballs and looks like a 1990s ski jacket. We are witnessing the rise of vintagefication, a trend where vintage has stepped out of the shadows of dusty peripheral thrift shops to colonise prime retail real estate.

Not so long ago, second-hand shops were the exclusive domain of the budget-conscious or the eccentric collector. They were charmingly messy places tucked away in the city’s fringes. That image has been flipped on its head.

Last year, we noticed the first signs of vintagefication on Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, the city’s most commercial shopping street and long-time capital of retail blandness. Suddenly, three vintage stores were sitting side-by-side, holding their own against the polished windows of the fast-fashion giants. In an era in which everything becomes the same everywhere, these businesses bring back a bit of soul and specificity that makes a district worth visiting.

The resale explosion in numbers

Resale is outpacing fashion. The second-hand market is growing 2.7× faster than the regular apparel market, according to ThredUp’s Resale Report 2025.

Second-hand is mainstream. By 2024, 58% of all consumers were shopping second-hand. Among younger generations, that figure was as high as 68%. Today’s consumers no longer see “new” as the standard, but as a lack of creativity.

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The bankruptcy of the Dutch Blokker household store chain in 2024 was more than just the loss of a place to buy vacuum cleaner bags and drying racks. It was a symbolic end to the era of the Big Box retailer — the generic, one-size-fits-all model that dominated our shopping centres for decades. But in the vacuum left by these retail dinosaurs, something interesting is growing.

This Sunday, PoPPo opens its doors in Amsterdam-Noord. Occupying the 600 m² carcass of a former Blokker store, our first pop-up department store is a live experiment in urban regeneration. It replaces the monolithic retailer with a chaotic, curated mix of hyper-local entrepreneurs, education, and culture.

It’s an example of the micro-space revolution we have been tracking. And it might just be the blueprint for saving our shopping centres. For us, PoPPo is our first actual project dealing with micro-space.

The rise of the micro-mall

We’ve written before about small being the new big, and how rising rents make large commercial spaces a gamble that few can afford. When a giant like Blokker falls, it leaves behind square footage that is too large and too expensive for almost anyone else. The solution? Compartmentalisation.

PoPPo creates a micro-mall within the shell of the old store. By breaking the space down, it allows entry for those who actually bring flavour to a city:

• Vintage fashion: curated second-hand collections from POP18 and VUNK.

• The service economy: a beauty court featuring The Living Groom and Nail’d By.

• Local hospitality: Keuken van de Markt provides a test kitchen for local chefs.

• Education as anchor: interestingly, Hogeschool Inholland is moving in to provide on-site education, turning a shop floor into a classroom.

• On the same floor, Papaver Amsterdam’s hidden speakeasy offers space for events and workshops.

This aligns perfectly with the trend seen in other global cities, where subdividing commercial space reduces financial risk for landlords and creates a vibrant, resilient ecosystem for tenants.

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When cities become beauty machines

The ground floors of the newly completed residential towers in Amsterdam-Noord speak volumes. Large window stickers promise a new lifestyle: a transformation not just of the neighbourhood, but of the body. Names like Infinity Lifters, Brazilian Body Wax, RoForm, TrainMore, and Beauty by Sumaya are just a sample of the recent arrivals on a single street corner.

On the spot where cheap furniture stores and car garages once dominated, a true beauty district is emerging. Services related to fitness, health, and beauty treatments are clustering and defining the streetscape. This concentration of boutique health and beauty concepts is no accident: it reflects the zeitgeist, driven by the individualist lifestyle and health cult among urbanites on one hand, and the patterns of urban development in emerging districts on the other.

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Last week, following our work on a new exciting space in Amsterdam, Poppo (more on that later) I had a chat with one of the founders of the nightclub Garage Noord. We were talking about the future of nightlife in big cities, especially Amsterdam, and the challenges facing hospitality, entertainment, and clubs. Our conversation prompted me to share some thoughts and trends on the future of the night.

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Ten years was once the lower limit for a temporary initiative, partly for legal reasons. Today, that’s unthinkable. Now that pop-up has become established and the chance of success has increased, competition in the temporary segment is intensifying. Simply put, more parties are willing to pay for a space.

This dynamic has a twofold effect. Commercial ventures are pushing more experimental projects into even shorter time slots, while the very concept of temporary is compressing: from ten years to a few months, and sometimes just a matter of days.

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Pioneering in the interspace

On a sunny morning in April 2008, we found ourselves in the Berlin office of landscape architect Klaus Overmeyer. We had just launched a blog called Pop-Up City and were visiting the German capital, one of the few places where the temporary and flexible dimension of urban planning was already tangible. At the time, exactly two books existed on the subject, one of which was Overmeyer’s Urban Pioneers.

In his book, Overmeyer highlighted dozens of Berlin initiatives in “spaces currently unsuitable or undesirable in mainstream economic cycles.” Berlin, as a broke, half-bankrupt city, had an abundance of such spaces back then. Pop-up was an almost subversive domain of squatters and neighbourhood initiatives, flying far below the radar of government authorities and commercial developers. Overmeyer saw its potential and argued for the formal integration of temporary use into urban policy.

Long live transition hysteria

Nearly two decades later, his wish has been granted, but in a way few could have foreseen. Temporality and flexibility have become crucial, simply because the future can no longer be cast in concrete. The world is hyper-connected, changing too quickly and chaotically. Policy has to adapt to the whims of the day. Add to that the pace of technological acceleration — a start-up founded in Silicon Valley today can cause policy headaches for a European government tomorrow — and you understand why rigid, cumbersome structures no longer work.

This has led to what one might call transition hysteria: a permanent state of renovation for our institutions, our systems, and the city itself. In this context, pop-up is no longer an interim solution. It has become a core strategy.

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In many newly built urban neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, 40% of the houses are social rented. The aim is clear: to keep cities liveable and accessible for people on lower incomes. Yet the shops, cafés and restaurants in these same neighbourhoods are completely left to the whims of the free market. The result? Life in these areas becomes unaffordable for exactly those residents social housing is meant to support. Shouldn’t we also be thinking about social retail — local amenities that help make daily life affordable?

The case for social retail

For decades, housing associations have played a vital role in ensuring that low-income urban residents have a place to live. Increasingly, they’re also a key mechanism for keeping those people in the city. While debates around gentrification often focus on rising housing costs, the soaring cost of living is discussed far less — even though it’s spiralling out of control. The social housing model provides a clear blueprint for adapting this logic to the retail landscape.

New inner-city neighbourhoods could benefit from a structure that ensures not only affordable housing but also affordable living. It’s time to start building social retail.

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Forget Uber, here comes the Banne Hopper

In the northern neighbourhood of De Banne in Amsterdam, a small electric vehicle quietly makes its rounds. Known as the Banne Hopper, this compact shuttle navigates bike paths and pavements, offering rides to locals heading to the hairdresser, the supermarket, the doctor, or even a local card game. Unlike a flashy start-up, this is a grassroots mobility initiative — entirely set up and run by the neighbourhood itself.

The Banne Hopper is a response to a problem faced by many urban areas: the lack of accessible, fine-grained public transport for those with limited mobility — often older adults or people with disabilities. Since the opening of Amsterdam’s North-South metro line in 2018, many local bus routes have disappeared. For some, this has made even the nearest supermarket or GP difficult to reach. When the last supermarket in De Banne closed, locals took action, launching the Banne Hopper to fill the gap. A round trip costs just €2.50.

Now operating as a foundation, the Banne Hopper is entirely run by volunteers, funded by local housing associations, a nearby hospital, and the City of Amsterdam. From drivers to phone operators and planners, everything is managed by residents.

What are the key ingredients to its success, and what valuable insights can it offer urban planners, designers, and authorities?

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For centuries, humans have tried to tame nature. The result: neatly trimmed parks, orderly gardens, and manicured green spaces. But a shift is underway. Across the world, a new approach to landscape design is gaining ground — one that places nature in control. This emerging design ethos champions wildness, inviting ecosystems to flourish on their own terms. Are we entering the age of rewilding?

The war on wildness

We all know the type: immaculate city parks, boxed-in hedges, pristine lawns, and the eternal battle against weeds, moss, and slugs. Municipal green services invest heavily in keeping nature at bay, using robot lawnmowers, pesticides, and paved-over public spaces.

But what exactly are we fighting? More and more ecologists, landscape designers, and urban planners are recognising the potential of wilderness — not only in vast nature reserves, but also in roadside verges, vacant lots, and residential neighbourhoods.

The Wild Mile

Opened in 2024, The Wild Mile in Chicago is the world’s first floating eco-park. Built on modular floating platforms, the project embraces a wildlife-first philosophy, allowing natural processes to take the lead. More than 60 species of native aquatic plants dangle their roots into the water, creating a natural filtration system that absorbs metals and pollutants. The result: a self-sustaining habitat for fish, birds, and insects — and a new kind of urban public space.

To be fair, this wildness was kick-started by the planting of native species like marsh marigold, buttonbush, and willow herb. But the long-term vision is clear: nature is in charge. The Wild Mile cleans up a formerly industrial canal and fits into a broader agenda for urban ecological regeneration.

The Pioneer Park

In Amsterdam-West, we’ve explored similar ideas ourselves with the Pioneer Park, a one-hectare experimental site on a vacant plot. The concept is simple: let nature take over. Besides paths, seating areas, and a bit of signage, nothing has been planted or maintained. On the barren sandy soil, pioneer species appeared within months — poppies, cornflowers, and rapeseed. By year two, the area was home to willows, birch, hares, foxes, and nesting birds.

The park offers local residents a space to escape the city buzz, go for a walk, or have lunch. The cost? A fraction of what a traditional city park would require. The Pioneer Park serves as a blueprint for temporary wild parks on unused land — green oases initiated by nature, maintained by communities.

Pioneer Park

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Pioneer Parks transform unused urban spaces into community-driven public parks, where spontaneous nature takes centre stage.

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