Hoboken Lecture 2023 'Nature of Cities' - a photographic report

After a pandemic break of three years, on 28 June 2023 in the splendid Kunsthal auditorium, the 10th Hoboken Lecture by professor Kate Jones attracted more than 200 people. The programme started with music (from Joseph Haydn's Hoboken Verzeichnis) performed by L’Aire String Quartet, and speaker Kate Jones was introduced by professor Kees Vink, telling, among other important achievements, that (allegedly) Charles Darwin is her 8th cousin.

In her lecture ‘Nature of Cities - building happier, healthier and more resilient urban environments’, Kate Jones explained how building nature back into cities is an important step to creating happier, healthier and more resilient areas for everyone to thrive. She demonstrated how nature-based solutions could help both mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change in cities and how citizen science and new technologies can help to create better data-driven management of our environments. The images that professor Kate Jones showed during her lecture can be downloaded here.

The musical intermezzo was a treat to both the audience and the speaker (who has a special interest in bats): L’Aire played an arrangement for string quartet of the overture of ‘Die Fledermaus’ (Johann Strauss).

After Questions & Answers, moderated by Maarten Keulemans (science editor de Volkskrant), the host of the evening, museum director Kees Moeliker, presented the speaker the traditional token of appreciation: the cast of the first-ever hyena coprolite (a 13.000 year old fossil excrement) found on the bottom of the North Sea. Lucy Ferguson, Deputy British Ambassador to the Netherlands, concluded the programme, quoting William Shakespeare: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’. Thanks to the perfect weather conditions, the afterparty was both inside and outside of the museum.

We thank our audience for coming and our partners and sponsors for their support. Below is a photographic report of the 10th Hoboken Lecture.