Martijn de Waal

In June 2010, the new issue of OPEN was launched at the Berlin Biennial. “Privacy” is the main theme, and the focus is “not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon [...]

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For the Catalog of he exhibition Cities of Desire ‘An Urban Culture Exchange between Vienna and Hong Kong‘ I contributed an article on the Urban Ideals of Location-based Media. The volume was edited by Hilary Tsui.

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Michiel de Lange and I were invited to give a keynote lecture at the Day of the Young Architect organized by the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects. We addressed the question how Architects should relate to new media developments. Below is an extended version of our talk. See also The [...]

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Mark Shepard, curator of the Toward the Sentient City Exhibition held at the Architectural League in New York invited me to write a ‘reponse’ to the exhibition. Here is the full text: —- At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the [...]

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As part of my current research project into New Media, Urban Culture and the Public Sphere I have published two articles in which I – somewhat playfully – investigate some concepts to theorize the experience of the current day media metropolis. The term Myspace urbanism refers both to social networking sites, as to the idea [...]

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After years of research, The Chinese Dream – a society under construction edited by Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby is finally published! In the summer of 2004 I took part in a field trip with the research team of the DCF, and that resulted in a chapter titled Too much joy and Pleasure in this [...]

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‘New Cultural Networks’ is a book published by the Sandberg Institute and the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Foundation. It describes all the projects that took part in the yearly masterclass Stifo@Sandberg that aims to bring together old media professionals and new media designers. I was invited to write an introduction on the role of the author [...]

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For Open #13 The rise of the Informal Media I wrote a contribution about some of the cultural implications of web 2.0. I am mainly interested in processes of ‘validation’ – in a networked media culture, who or what decides what is important? Are the hierarchic authority structures of the cultural elite being replaced by [...]

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I was invited by the editorial team of the 3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam to write a contribution to the catalogue of the Visionary Power Exhibition, published by NAI Publishers. In particular, I was asked to write an essay in the format of a glossary that would bring the main themes and insights of the [...]

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In february 2007 Het Spinhuis published De Nieuwe Reporter – Jaarboek 2007, a review of the discussions we hosted on De Nieuwe Reporter, a professional weblog on journalism and technology that I have set up with Theo van Stegeren en Frank van Vree. This book features a number of analytic chapters in which we explain [...]

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For the French filmmagazine Tausend Augen I wrote this article on the representation of the Chinese city in the cinema of the directors of the so-called 6th generation. In the past decade, China, a country of farmers, has become a nation dominated by megacities. Rural villages have turned into regional city centres. Where once farmers [...]

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In the spring of 2004, TimeZone8 published this book on Factory 798, an artist enclave in an old Bauhaus-industrial complex near Beijings 4th ringroad. I contributed an article about the symbolic status of the Chinese Cities and its art districts. Not long after the revolution of 1949, partyleader Mao and then mayor of Beijing Peng [...]

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In this edited volume on the impact of the digitalization of the medialandscape, I wrote an article about the media use, production of meaning and construction of identity by young Moroccans who are growing up in Holland. Their identity, I suggest, is not a question of either-or (to be either Dutch or Moroccan), but a [...]

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In the yearly review of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation I wrote a chapter on utopian planning in Arizona. I compared two geographically close but ideologically very different interpretations of utopian city building. The first is Arcosanti, set up decades ago by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri. An old student of Frank Lloyd Wright [...]

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In the spring of 2002 Podium published my travelogue Amerika: toets 1 voor het paradijs. (English translation: America: Dial P for Paradise). This book describes the year that I was working in Silicon Valley as a journalist covering the Dotcomboom of these days for the Dutch media. During the year I make a small number [...]

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