Bob Witman

Carolien Gehrels

Ben van Berkel

What We Want Has Never Been Done explores the route to a fully integrated building process. An integrated collaboration is crucial to tackle major spatial challenges in decades to come.

What We Want Has Never Been Done explores the route to a fully integrated building process. A route where all parties working on projects with major social impact remain alert to each other's concerns.

This does not happen all by itself. In reality, an integrated approach often gets mired in a wishful thinking scenario because the world of planning and construction is recalcitrant. Nevertheless, integrated collaboration is crucial if the Netherlands is to tackle major spatial challenges in decades to come. One million extra houses, energy transition, mobility issues, climate adaptation: these are just a few of the urgent tasks that cannot be tackled without a shared vision of the future and a guiding hand from The Hague.

The assertion of this book, an initiative from De Bouwagenda, is that integrated construction is a must and it must be done now. It contains examples of construction projects where an integrated approach to parts of the project did succeed. It offers a vision of the future, nurtured by De Bouwagenda's studio sessions, and projects the larger housing task at hand onto the map of the Netherlands.

What We Want Has Never Been Done is also a practical handbook from which every alderman, urban planner, project developer, policy official, architect, builder, engineer, financier or environmental group can draw inspiration.

What we want has never been done, and now it the moment to do it. It is needed now more than ever.

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