Editor: Maurice Specht


Desire Lines

In more and more places people are working on their own initiative and in creative ways to take responsibility for their (living) environment.  They are creating new connections between people and their surroundings; they are making clever use of the means and possibilities that the neighbourhood offers them.  What appears to be a locally-based and unique project, proves, if you have an eye for these things, to be a much wider social phenomenon.  With this collection, we want to make these projects and the stories behind them easily accessible for a wider public.  In addition to sharing these stories, we hope to convince people to abandon their inhibitions and to look at what they themselves might do to improve the quality of their local environment.

In the course of making this book I came into contact with some of the project initiators for the first time, others I had known longer. I visited many of them personally, in the first instance to introduce them to, and hopefully get them excited about, the project. But it quickly became apparent that something else was happening. The conversations hardly touched on it. Far more, they mentioned people's passion, their dreams and how they tried, in their own way, to give them form.

Read more ... in English or in Dutch