Comparing the City
Publication that captures the small differences between Maastricht and other cities.

Comparing the City
Annelys de Vet

Street names are whispering the history of the city. Walking from Central station to the Jan van Eyck academy, an incomprehensibly planned network of streets leads to unexpected corners and alleys. Each turn a new story, every sight an alteration. Situated about 180 kilometers from Amsterdam, Maastricht is a different world.

 Sometimes Maastricht seems more of a Belgian city than a Dutch one. However, crossing the border to Liège instantly shows that Maastricht is not at all Belgian the way Liège is. And it’s neither German the way Aachen is. Maybe one could consider Maastricht a true European city – capturing many histories, close to other countries, metropolitan with its wide river and a place of political agreements – the 1992 Maastricht Treaty confirms this identity. As such, it is a cradle of the European Union.
 
Above all Maastricht is its own city, unable to take on single identity. Each citizen or visitor will observe a different city, every glance captures another presence. Every eye colored by the things it has seen before. The city is a communication platform, unaware of what it communicates to whom. What a city tells is equally dependent on the spectator as well as the narrator. The more cultures and backgrounds presented, the more ways in which the city will be looked at. Maastricht as an endless collection of stories. Without any standards. Nothing is normal and a small difference could rise sky-high.

Seoul is not Maastricht
Min & Sulki Choi

To us, originating from a culture where everything moves and changes so quickly, where they’ll say “change everything except your family”, where virtually every house is equipped with high-speed internet connection only to be replaced with an even faster service overnight, and where a twenty-year-old building would be regarded as a relic, things are just too slow here. Decisions here take time to be made; people walk so slow that we have to say “excuse me” all the time; paperwork will take an eternity. On a physical, urban-environmental level, the general slowness seems to manifest itself in the age-old aspect of the buildings in the city center. Of course, it must be a different kind of slowness; a more consciously orchestrated one, to keep this town as it has been for centuries. One day we saw an old building being renovated by carving out the internal material, in an attempt not to touch anything on the external surface – as if making a stuffed specimen of an animal. In fact, many buildings in Maastricht look like stuffed animals: dead but beautifully preserved.

Looking on a brighter and more positive side of slowness, we do see the sense of patience, the willingness to take the time to make things perfect, to wait for things to mature. It’s a quality that is hard to &Mac222;nd in Korea nowadays, and here we don’t have to worry that a bridge might collapse because of the hasty construction – as it did happen in Seoul, with a disastrous result. For designers, it must be a blessing. In Seoul, deadlines come often as early as the following day – and the materials are still on their way. We like it here when they say “sorry about the tight schedule – it should be done in three months’ time”.

Texas is not Maastricht
Geoffrey Garrison

A cold day in Houston, Texas is an exception. This happens once or twice a winter, and although I can remember a few times when the water pipes froze into a solid cascade of ice where the escaping water had forced its way out, I can only remember one meager snow shower when I was five years old. The snow came down just long enough to powder the tips of the blades of grass in our front lawns. We made a rather anemic snowman that day and attempted to pelt one another with poorly packed snowballs. For the rest of the time, Houston is intolerably hot and humid and after a few minutes you retreat inside, drenched with sweat. Activity is limited to the brief movement from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned automobile to the air-conditioned shopping mall.

 In Maastricht, the opposite is true. Days when it does not rain seem hard to come by. If it rains in Houston, it’s ok, you won’t notice it anyway, because you’re driving along in your car listening to some no-name suburban rock band on the radio. In Maastricht, getting out of the rain is more of a problem, especially when you’re riding a bike. The generic music in Maastricht is a non-descript techno-based pop, and you hear it everywhere, even in seemingly conservative bars and restaurants. If you don’t like the music in the bar, you can get on your bicycle and ride five minutes to your home. In Houston, to get anywhere you have to get in a car and drive half an hour across massive Freeway overpasses that crisscross between the towering skyscrapers. Outside the downtown area, walking or riding a bike is not an option; the landscape is spread-out, full of shopping malls set far back from the road behind seemingly endless expanses of parking lots. In Maastricht, on the other hand, it is a task to find a parking space at all, and the cars while in motion must be forever on the lookout for the hundreds of Dutch on bicycles.

 Because Houston was built around cars, people do not come into contact with one another on the streets. This fact is reflected in the people’s wardrobes that tend to be less a matter of concern than the paint job or rims of their cars. Most people in Houston dress very casually. Even in winter, they walk around in shorts, sandals, and t-shirts.
 In Maastricht, what passes for acceptable masculine attire would raise some eyebrows in Houston. Here it is perfectly acceptable for a straight man to walk about in a pink shirt with the collar turned up, a pair of striped white trousers cut tight in the ass and enough hair gel to keep his hair from being messed up in a nuclear attack. The average middle-class male in Texas typically wears khaki chinos, or cargo pants with a polo shirt or t-shirt.

 Houston is far more racially diverse than Maastricht, but like most of the cities in the U.S., it suffers from the self-imposed segregation that drives the people further into the alienation of their gated communities and S.U.V.s.

Brooklyn is not Maastricht
Tamara Maletic & Dan Michaelson

Warsaw is not Maastricht
Monika Bakke

• In the Netherlands one cannot buy sour cherries, while they’re so central to Polish cuisine (including delicious pierogi, dumplings and a liqueur)
  
• In the Netherlands the smallest beer is really small, in Poland the smallest beer on tap is half a liter
  
• No one brings children to a pub in Poland (unimaginable)
  
• In Polish cinemas you’ll never have any refreshment breaks during the film
  
• In Poland more men wear moustaches
  
• In Poland women wearing mini shirts do not ride bicycles
• In Poland less people go for group entertainment, such as going on bike trips together in groups. In Maastricht I see groups on red (rented) scooters
• Carnival in Poland is not a group event either; it’s more a time for parties, not to such an extent as in Maastricht (where shops and offices are closed and everyone is on the streets or in pubs)
• Bureaucracy is bigger and more painful (slower) in the Netherlands (this is my biggest surprise)
• In Poland one usually doesn’t say hello to strangers in a public area
• In Poland one cannot buy cigarettes from a vending machine
• In Poland there are more wild animals; one can see them in the forests and grass fields (deer, fox, bats, hedge hogs, etc.) In urban areas there are wild cats (which is sad because they usually do not get proper care)

Brussels is not Maastricht
Sara de Bondt

Brussels is not Maastricht
Laurent Liefooghe