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The Province of Gelderland has long boasted a large number of country houses and landed estates, which over time coalesced into estate landscapes around the historical capitals of the Duchy of Guelders quarters of Nijmegen, Arnhem and Zutphen. Rapidly increasing urbanization from the end of the nineteenth century onwards threatened the coherence and accessibility of these landscapes. Gelderland's largest cities, Arnhem and Nijmegen, watched in dismay as many country houses and landed estates fell victim to subdivision and development. In response they started to buy up portions of that estate landscape to ensure that they would remain available to city dwellers. In addition, the 'safety net' provided by newly established nature and landscape organizations, in particular Natuurmonumenten and Geldersch Landschap & Kasteelen, also contributed to preservation and permanent accessibility by offering landed families the opportunity to keep their estate intact, albeit no longer under their ownership. Similar motives – the need to preserve attractive, accessible walking areas for the increasingly urbanized society – underpinned the government's introduction of the Nature Conservation Act in 1928. The Act was invoked more frequently in Gelderland than in any other province. It promoted the opening up of private properties as well as the preservation of the cultural value of the kind of 'natural beauty' to be found on landed estates. After the Second World War, in addition to resorting to the Nature Conservation Act, the owners of country houses and landed estates could avail themselves of an increasing variety of grants aimed at preserving (publicly accessible) nature, landscape and heritage, although the emphasis was firmly on nature. Estate landscapes like the Veluwezoom and the County of Zutphen were eventually safeguarded by a patchwork of different government regulations. In the twenty-first century, government policy shifted towards providing financial support for both public and private contributions to ...

"OpTrek in Transvaal. On the role of public art in urban development" reflects on the position of artists in areas of urban transformation and on the concept of urban curating. The articles present a survey of the commissions and research in the field of art and architecture initiated by mobile project office OpTrek in Transvaal between 2002 and 2010. Experts from home and abroad, such as 2012architecten from Rotterdam, the Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata and the Austrian artists' group WochenKlausur were invited to comment on the changes in the district with their work in the built environment. With this publication OpTrek contributes to the international discussion among artists, architects, urban planners, politicians and policy makers on the future development of urban spaces

This article is an intervention into a recent OZP debate on the future of political science as a discipline. Its main goal is to mediate between the respective positions of Ulrich Brand's and Helmut Kramer's conception of a critical project and Thomas Konig's presentation of organisational preliminaries of an academic project of political science. To this end, I firstly reformulate the essentials of a project of critique, referring on a thick notion of critique. Consequently, the relationship of the disciplinary and critical side of political science is rearranged on the basis of an appropriation of certain deliberations on discipline formation and philosophy of science, which centrally draw on the philosophy of Critical Realism. Adapted from the source document.