The Wild City ~ Dutch Urban Animals Film Trailer

Check trailer for De Wilde Stad or The Wild City!

Flood Resiliency ~ Dutch Lessons for World Cities

Rising sea levels generally and ocean storm surges, river floodwaters, and intense rainfalls particularly inspire new kinds of thinking about water management, going beyond higher dikes and barriers towards more defense-in-depth, including flood-friendly construction, making room for the rivers, and building absorbent greener cities. Here are some good surveys of this movement...

Dutch Greenscraper ~ Utrecht's Hawthorn Tower...

Inhabitat spotlights Dutch city Utrecht to have new greenbuilding complex near central train station...

"The Hawthorn Tower will, like its Milanese predecessor, be blanketed in greenery -- and it’s expected to absorb over 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide. The equivalent of one hectare of woods will be installed on the tower to create a real urban ecosystem with over 30 different vegetal species."

R.I.P. Ootje Oxenaar ~ Designed NL Banknotes...

Sad to hear that Ootje Oxenaar, the graphic designer of beautiful Dutch money and RISD instructor, has passed away at 87. I particularly liked his Sunflower design for the 50 Guilder note, which was NL orange plus harkened to Van Gogh and was a complete contrast to monolithic American currency at the time... 24Oranges spotted this self retrospective video by Oxenaar...

R.I.P. Peter Spier ~ Epic Dutch Inspiring Illustrator

Richard Sandomir in the NYTimes shares the sad news that inspirational illustrator Peter Spier has passed away at 89 from congestive heart failure. My very earliest favorite book -- i.e. when I was a toddler and my parents read to me -- was about Hendrika the Cow Who Fell in the Canal but as a teen I really spent endless hours on Of Dikes and Windmills. Amazing stuff about Dutch history, epic civil engineering, and the power of nature!

New Amsterdam ~ US x NL @ NYC...

How the Dutch influenced NYC and USA via New Amsterdam...

Earth's Surface Water ~ Deltares Change Analysis

The BBC's Rebecca Morelle spotlights Surface water shifting around the Earth as discovered by the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands...

"They found that 115,000 sq km (44,000 sq miles) of land is now covered in water and 173,000 sq km (67,000 sq miles) of water has now become land. The largest increase in water has been on the Tibetan Plateau, while the Aral Sea has been the biggest conversion of water to land. The team said many coastal areas have also changed significantly. [...] The researchers said Dubai's coast had been significantly extended, with the creation of new islands to house luxury resorts."

Utrecht Cycling City ~ BicycleDutch on NL's tops!

Mark Wagenbuur finishes up his series of videos on finalist candidates for Cycling City of the Netherlands with this piece on my favorite Dutch city, Utrecht!

Hélo ~ Husmann's Smartbud Concept Design

Nice example smartbud concept -- Hélo...

US in NL ~ Honoring American WWII Liberators...

Ian Shapira writes in the Washington Post how Americans gave their lives to defeat the Nazis. The Dutch have never forgotten...

"The U.S. military needed a place to bury its fallen. The Americans ultimately picked a fruit orchard just outside Margraten. [...] Right from the start, Margraten embraced the Americans. The town’s mayor invited the company’s commanders to sleep in his home, while the enlisted men slept in the schools -- welcome protection against rain and buzz bombs. Later, villagers hosted U.S. troops when the men were given rest-and-recuperation breaks from trying to breach the German frontier defenses, known as the Siegfried Line. "After four dark years of occupation, suddenly [the Dutch] people were free from the Nazis, and they could go back to their normal lives and enjoy all the freedoms they were used to,” explained Frenk Lahaye, an associate at the cemetery. “They knew they had to thank the American allies for that. [...] To the Dutch, the Americans were liberators.”

Liberation is the essence and enduring ethos of the US of A and why we Dutch, both locals and expats, remember those who paid for our freedoms with their lives today on Memorial Day since 1945...

RailRing ~ SuperChannel of NL Train Sites!

The best Dutch train sites band together as RailRing!

Going Dutch ~ Good NL Promo Filmpje;-)

Ok, it's pure promo, but also nice survey of all things Dutch;-)

Winter Cycling ~ Wagenbuur Shares Dutch Ways!

Bicycle Dutch's Mark Wagenbuur shares his talk at the Winter Cycling Congress 2015 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands...

World Cup 2014 ~ The Dutch Soccer Story...

I'm really irrationally nationalistic about only one thing -- Soccer. And then only every four years. So here's retrospective on the best team to never win the World Cup, yet again;-)

"The Dutch hold the record for playing the most World Cup finals without ever winning the tournament. They finished second in the 1974, 1978 and 2010 World Cups, losing to West Germany, Argentina and Spain respectively."

This past Cup in Brazil 2014 was no exception, despite the promising start crushing those arrogant conquistador bastard Spaniards...

Winter Cycling ~ Wagenbuur on NL Seasons...

Mark Wagenbuur at BicycleDutch writes about how cyclists in the Netherlands deal with snowy, wet winter weather... He also spotlights the general state of infrastructure -- especially maintenance and safety conditions -- and compares summer vs winter cycling on the same pathway...

Protected Intersections ~ Key for Urban Bicycling

Pascal van den Noort at VeloMondial spots Nick Falbo's Protected Intersections video... Nick does a good job synthesizing lessons-learned from Dutch designs including those noted by two of my favorite cycle blogs, Mark Wagenbuur's BicycleDutch and David Hembrow's View From the Cycle Path.

7685 Frames of NL ~ He's Tiltshift Timelapse!

24oranges spots 7685 Frames of Netherlands...

A Bridge Too Far ~ WWII's Market-Garden @ 70

Seventy years ago this past week was one of the boldest and yet most disastrous battles of WWII in Europe when the Allies attempted to bypass German defenses by punching through the Netherlands in Operation Market Garden. Alas it was to become infamously known as A Bridge Too Far when bad weather, logistical hurdles, and under-anticipated Nazi resistance prevented capture of Arnhem, the last essential crossing. My own Dad and his family was caught in the cross-fire, which meant they lost almost everything, but at the same time this was understood by us Dutch as a tangible step towards ultimate liberation. That's why Robert Hardman's piece in the DailyMail is right: Seventy years on, Arnhem has never forgotten its debt to the thousands of British and Polish soldiers who gave their lives in ill-fated Allied plan to deliver final blow to Hitler...

"When it comes to commemorating those who made the ultimate sacrifice, there is nowhere quite like Arnhem. This historic Dutch town has never forgotten its debt to the 10,000 British and Polish soldiers who came from the sky in one of the great heroic failures of the Second World War. In September 1944, 70 years ago, with Paris liberated the Allies hatched a new plan -- codenamed Operation Market Garden -- to thrust north through Holland and on into Germany to deliver the final blow. Airborne troops would land by parachute and glider to capture a series of Dutch bridges and then cling on until a vast armoured column could arrive by road and reinforce them. The last bridge straddled the Rhine at Arnhem. But, in the end, the cavalry couldn’t get there in time. Through a combination of poor planning and bad luck -- the Germans had just parked a crack SS unit in the area -- the lightly-armed Allied troops ended up surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces. Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, just under 2,400 would make it out again after a vicious nine-day battle. The rest were killed or taken prisoner. [...] All the veterans were bowled over by the way they were received when they returned after the war. ‘It was a defeat and the Dutch lost everything yet they could not have done more for us,’ Colonel John Waddy, 94, the senior surviving veteran of Arnhem, told me at his Somerset home. ‘But then it was a unique battle because we were fighting alongside them in their own houses. And afterwards, they helped hundreds of us escape.’ [...] The true legacy of Arnhem is [...] a new organisation called the Arnhem Fellowship. Run on a shoestring by Dutch and British volunteers, it seeks to ensure that this precious bond of friendship continues after the last of the veterans have gone. [...] There is a magic about Arnhem. Perhaps it explains why, all these years later, so many veterans have made one last wish. ‘They often ask if they can have their ashes buried here, next to their comrades,’ says Gerrit Pijpers, a retired Dutch air force officer who has helped to organise ceremonies here for years. ‘They were only here for nine days, but they feel that this is home.’ It certainly is."

Amsterdam in Motion ~ Jack Fisher's Hyperlapse!

Kuriositas spots Amsterdam in Motion, Jack Fisher's hyperlapse!

More NL Junctions ~ Showing Before + After...

Mark Wagenbuur at BicycleDutch does a very nice before + after view of a busy intersection in Utrecht which has just been reconstructed and modernized. This is arguably the latest in Dutch cycling infrastructure and this video builds on his earlier illustrations of Dutch Junction and Safe Intersection design...

"There is a whole range of solutions for safer intersections, but for an urban area like this one -- with relatively narrow streets and a lot of traffic -- this design -- with protected cycleways all around the intersection -- is really best."