NAI and VANKE sign low cost housing agreement
Text from dutchdesigninchina.com:
The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and the Chinese project developer VANKE signed an agreement on 23 August in Beijing to cooperate in the field of social housing. The agreement also provides scope for cooperation in other fields. Ole Bouman, director of the NAI, and Mao Daqing, vice-president of VANKE, signed the agreement in the presence of the Dutch State Secretary Halbe Zijlstra. The first specific joint project is the development of a large number of low cost housing units near Beijing by a group of Dutch and Chinese architects.
The cooperation between the NAI and VANKE began in June 2010 and is part of the NAI Matchmaking programme. This programme deploys Dutch architectural expertise to tackle urgent spatial challenges all over the world. China is facing problems in the field of housing. Production is under severe pressure, but so are the sustainability of housing and the quality of residential districts.The NAI Matchmaking programme links Dutch experts to talented Chinese architects and a project developer. This results in profounder cultural awareness and encourages employment. In these respects the programme also matches the cultural policy of the State Secretary Zijlstra that promotes the link between the cultural and the economic dimension. ‘The NAI hereby shows that the creative industry is justly called a top sector’, Zijlstra remarks. ‘Dutch architects are among the best in the world, but they are having a hard time in the Netherlands at the moment because of the crisis. Partly thanks to the NAI, they can now put their creativity to good use in China – a textbook example of how to turn a problem into an opportunity.’
Besides being a museum with a library, large archive and platform activities, the NAI is also a sector institute for Dutch architecture. VANKE is the largest real estate developer in China.
