Jonathan Hankins – On Friday 22 March I met up with Marco Innocenti, an Industrial PhD candidate in the Philosophy of Responsible Innovation at Milan University. Our shared interests are much broader than just responsibility in innovation, stretching through art and poiesis to questions surrounding the relationship between aesthetics and functionality, topics that are closely tied to those of the Bassetti Foundation itself.

We arranged to meet in Lunetten, the newest of the post-war expansion developments in the South East of Utrecht. Designed through the 1960’s and 70’s, Lunetten was a structural experiment that included input from landscape architects, city planners, students from the local University (planning, biology and architecture) and future residents. The ecologically inspired vision was that of a village attached to the city but surrounded by green, and rather than following a regular grid design it was built around (and to reflect) the already existing infrastructure (4 Lunet shaped defensive structures protected under UNESCO), their innundation canal and local historical paths. In the photo below (taken from the Utrecht City Council website) the innundation canal can be seen as it cuts through the West of Lunetten from the fortification (top centre), while the old tree-lined Houten path winds through its centre.

Close by is the 1950’s development of Nieuwe Hoograven. The vision at this time was driven by functionality. Gerrit Thomas Rietveld designed two estates (each with 388 units built in symmetrical ‘family’ blocks) that are also UNESCO listed. The design consists of courtyards (with paddling pools and play areas) surrounded by residential units. The units vary in size, some are blocks of apartments, others single houses, offering accommodation for all types and sizes of family and income. Rietveld created variation in living possibility but unity in external aesthetics. All homes have floor to ceiling glass facades with coloured panels.

Where the first photo of Lunetten exudes green and natural form this area seems to exude practicality. Where lunetten is full of curves, here the edges are sharp.

   

Marco Innocenti – Whereas the USA has its Silicon Valley, the Netherlands has its own ‘Food Valley’, a region where international companies and research institutes meet to unravel the dilemma of how to feed a growing population while reducing resource consumption. At the centre of this network stands the Wageningen University and Research (WUR), one the world’s most important universities in the field of agriculture and environmental studies, where thousands of students are trained in courses such as “Plant, Vegetation and Systems Ecology”, “Feed Evaluation Science”, or “Introduction in Philosophy”. Yes, ‘philosophy’, since WUR, as many other technical universities in the Netherlands, is committed to providing future scientists and engineers with a broad understanding of the questions their works may raise, first and foremost in ethical terms.

Among the leading thinkers of the Philosophy Group, we find Vincent Blok, professor of Philosophy of Technology and Responsible Innovation, whose name should not be unfamiliar to the readers, as he is also an editor and active contributor to the Journal of Responsible Innovation. For two and a half months, Professor Blok has welcomed me as a Visiting PhD Student to continue, under his tutorship, his research on the challenges of innovating responsibly with AI-enabled biotechnologies for agriculture. He is pursuing these studies, merging philosophy of technology and applied ethics for innovation, at the University of Milan and at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, through an Industrial PhD founded by a Franco-Norwegian company developing technological beehives.

Since Wageningen and Utrecht, where Bassetti Foundation Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Hankins lives, are not far away from each other, we planned a lunch to meet and share our projects, getting together in Lunetten (a suburb to Utrecht) on a cloudy Dutch day. First, we explored the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie, an ingenious defensive system, which was able to exploit controlled flooding by harnessing the waters of the Rhine and to target any enemy who ventured onto the un-submerged strip of land from various fronts. Today that territory once threatened by cannons is a well-tended park, barracks are bases for scouts, and the Rhine water flows quietly through the canals.

Over mushroom soup, Jonathan told me about his work at the Bassetti Foundation as a blogger and editor and his commitment to spreading knowledge about Responsible Innovation through editorial and theatrical tools. Under his guidance, I continued my exploration of the area around Utrecht, discovering how the Dutch efficiency of past military genius now pervades the citizen service sector, reflected even in public housing estates. One example is the 800 units of social housing designed in the late 1950s by the well-known (and Utrecht born) Modern Movement architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, in the Hoograven district bordering Lunetten. These social housing units, with their functional and dignified appearance, introduced similarly styled structures along our route to the city, on which we encountered a park, a pond, and the ever-present bicycle paths, combining housing needs with the well-being provided by contact with nature. We then arrived at the gates of Utrecht, where cafés line a canal under a row of heterogeneous but symmetrical facades, as Jonathan pointed out.

This is the beginning of the city, with its richness and contradictions, ranging from the Gothic rigour of the cathedral, once a stronghold of the Catholic faith in the Netherlands, to the opulence of the ‘Papal House‘, home of the only pope of Dutch origin; from the six little houses donated to the homeless in front of the Church of St Nicholas, to the Zoudenbalch Palace, an eccentric building with a Venetian façade and bright red windows.

Returning home, Jonathan, after proving to be an insightful guide and a tireless walker, reflected on a red thread linking the houses we encountered along our route. From the Pope’s house to the donation to the poor, from social housing to the palace of nobility, on all these levels ‘well done’ corresponds to a sense of beauty, measure and harmony. In a way, this may be a good summary of our long walk through Utrecht, and it echoes some of the findings of Jonathan’s doctoral research at the University of Bergamo, concluded a few years ago. What the results of mine are, it is still too early to tell; to find out, I took the train back to my studies in Wageningen, wetter but definitely enriched.