City of Maastricht

The City of Maastricht will provide the setting for one of the Living Lab experiments in WP4. Maastricht is a medium-sized Dutch city (120,000 inhabitants) in the very south of the Netherlands. It is situated close to Belgian and German borders. Maastricht is well known for its rich cultural heritage and joie de vivre. Maastricht, an old industrial city, is transforming into a knowledge intensive, regional oriented economy and is therefore situated in changing times. The internationally orientated university and colleges play an important role in this social and spatial transformation. Several new trends in demographics, economics and real estate have forced the city in recent years to explore new forms of urban development and planning. The city has taken concrete measures in order to anticipate this new era. Examples are the reprogramming of the housing stock and the development of a new long-term strategy for spatial planning. This strategy (Structure Vision Maastricht 2030) offers a robust framework instead of detailed development programmes, in order to facilitate citizens and organisations to participate in urban development processes. This new paradigm of city planning is being considered as a form of ‘spatial planning by invitation’.