Vincent Van Rossem
Maggie Oattes
Vincent van Rossem
De Gids
Eurozine
2004-10-04
Full
Holland isn't full, not at all, but it seems full. That's because a large majority of the Dutch people inhabit only a small part of our small country, i.e. the urban agglomeration known as the 'Randstad'. It is the heart of the Dutch economy. Foreigners who call the Netherlands Holland are actually right. As early as the seventeenth century the 'Western part of the country' was already the political and economic centre of the Republic, but the phenomenon of the Randstad was discovered only in the 1920s by urban development experts. A ring of rapidly growing cities had developed, partly as a result of the railway connections: Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht. In 1925 the demographic changes that accompanied the prosperity and modern health care system showed up on the map as a ring-shaped metropolis, which was inhabited by several million citizens.
Before 1940, and in particular before the victory march of mobility drastically changed how Dutch society functioned, the Randstad was a neatly arranged area. The major cities were very compact and densely populated, between the cities there was nothing, an endless grassland area described by Jac. P. Thijsse in De bonte wei (The Colourful Meadow). The victory marches of fertilizers and pesticides were yet to start. There were more people who lived in Amsterdam in 1930 than there are now (in 2004), but at the time, the city of Amsterdam was much smaller than it is today. For on average, there would be five people to a dwelling measuring 50 square metres or less. Today the average occupation rate is less than two people, while of course the size of the dwellings has increased. The modern low-density suburb, with its rows of single-family dwellings did not exist then, unlike the older suburbs with their detached houses in large gardens, such as the Gooi area and the Dune area, which had developed as a result of the new railway connections. In 1930 Amstelveen, today a large suburb of Amsterdam, was still the municipality of Nieuwer-Amstel and consisted of a village centre with a small church, surrounded by grassland and a few scattered farms.
In 1930 the spatial planning experts weren't too worried about the expansion of the Randstad. They had other things on their mind, especially the population density in the city centres, which was much too high. It had been known since the end of the nineteenth century that many health problems were caused by the stuffy houses with no sunlight in the large cities. Poverty and poor nutrition also contributed to the problem. In 1914 most recruits from Berlin were so unhealthy that they had to be declared unfit for military service. The main concern of the spatial planning experts was how they could put a stop to these awful conditions. They developed an ideal residential area, with lots of greenery, plenty of schools and other social facilities. As regards the type of dwelling: they preferred the single-family dwelling, but this pursuit of lower densities in housing was limited by transportation possibilities. People did not have cars, they had bicycles and there was public transport. The norm used by spatial planners in those days for maximum reasonable travelling time was half an hour by bicycle. It is still possible in Amsterdam today to cycle from the city centre to a house on the outskirts of the city in thirty minutes.
The spatial planners did foresee some growth in motor traffic in 1930, but post-war reality came as a total surprise, one the discipline never really managed to find an adequate response to. The neatly organized pre-war Randstad changed into a mess of uncontrollable suburbanization. All over the grasslands ambitious aldermen added new small residential areas to the village centres, which were populated exclusively by commuters. Living 'in the country', once the privilege of the higher middle classes, was completely democratized - thank you Henry Ford. This unexpected vitality of the Randstad put the spatial planning experts in the Netherlands on the defensive. They formulated a policy that declared the ring of cities that had been generated by the railway construction in the nineteenth century, the height of wisdom. In fact it denied the reality of motor traffic. The agrarian area between the large cities was to remain the 'Green Heart' of the Dutch metropolis. Later on, foreign experts also considered the Greenheart Metropolis a Wonder of the World. And the Randstad was to grow in an orderly fashion, not inwards, but outwards. This meant that specific urban growth centres were designated, such as Almere, and the experts presumed that these urban growth centres would attract sufficient employment to make them economically more or less self-sufficient. However, that is not what happened. And since no one had even considered the possibility that people live in Purmerend or Almere and work in Amsterdam, the traffic jam was born. That was not what they had had in mind.
And so spatial planning lost touch with reality. The housing shortage and the construction of public sector housing were declared a priority by a succession of ministers, but this one-sided focus on producing houses only diverted attention from changes in society, the rapidly increasing mobility of citizens and the growing aversion to mass-produced housing. In 1958 the policy document 'The Development of the Western part of the Country' recorded the spatial planning principles of the Randstad policy. The Green Heart was declared sacrosanct. It was surrounded by the existing ring of cities whose growth had to in an outward direction. A few years later, in 1966, the famous 'Second Policy Document on Spatial Planning in the Netherlands' came out. There probably is no other document, except the five-year plans of the Soviets, that put the illusion of the makeability of society on the scene quite so convincingly. The Netherlands was going to be organized completely according to plan. With a 'Greenheart Metropolis' in the Western part of the country and organized growth elsewhere based on the principle of clustered decentralization.
In retrospect it is a good thing that the Second Policy Document lacked all administrative basis. For with regard to spatial planning the Netherlands is administered first of all by local authorities, i.e. the municipal councils. Zoning plans are drawn up by the municipal administration and approved by the council. The provincial government focuses primarily on their legal implications. And we have these municipal administrations to thank for the fact that not the entire Dutch population is housed in growth centres with their high-rise areas. The process of suburbanization, inextricably entwined with car use, continued in spite of the undoubtedly good intentions of the government in The Hague. Not only in the Randstad and the Green Heart, but also and especially in the provinces of Gelderland and Brabant. Rural municipalities ensured that the Dutch housing market still offered a reasonable amount of the so ardently desired suburban living environment, with a house of one's own. And the spatial planning ideal that had been the basis for post-war policy, took shape only where national policy could be enforced by means of public housing subsidies, particularly in the large cities and in the urban growth centres. The many other instructive examples include: Kanaleneiland in Utrecht, the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam, and Capelle aan den IJssel.
The Randstad has indeed become full, and will become much fuller still because the compact city is still the guiding principle for the thinkers in The Hague. More than ever actually, because the environment lobby and those who worship 'green space' have a strong influence on spatial planning policies. All in all, the government policy of the past decades has brought nothing but poverty. The Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam is being torn down again, and the same will happen to many housing estates in the Randstad, which were intended as an alternative to the bad, naturally American example of the suburbanization of the city. But people live the good life in these frequently almost rustic suburbs in the Netherlands, a middle-class life that architects, spatial planners, and other intellectuals turn their noses up at, as they have been turning their noses up at ordinary life. Unlike Rem Koolhaas and his fans, average people fundamentally dislike congestion, public transport, and multi-story buildings. It is not likely to happen, but it would be wise to simply get rid of public housing and spatial planning altogether. The Netherlands could be much richer than it is by a radical liberalization of the housing market. Perhaps the middle classes would leave the large cities, but if enough outmoded rented houses would come on the market at reasonable prices, perhaps they would not.
We are always told that the impoverished ghettos in American cities are coming our way, because they are the result of unrestrained suburbanization. That is the reason why expensive owner-occupied houses are being built in disadvantaged areas in the Netherlands. In this way the middle class is forced to stay in the city, because there is no suburban alternative. And so the city becomes increasingly crowded; also known in administrative jargon as restructuring and condensation. It remains to be seen whether this policy is sensible. Government deliberately creates a housing shortage, with high prices as a result. That is good news for the construction industry and mortgagers, but not for other entrepreneurs. It furthermore limits the freedom of citizens in a way that does not suit a democratic country. It is high time to free the Randstad from its artificial spatial limitations. Then we will see that the Netherlands is far from full.