When I was a student some of my fellow students
declared city planning obsolete and urban design for dead; as they saw it there
would only be interventions as market forces determined the future development
of the city. Others were very vocal adepts of New Urbanism, especially after
the Congress for the New Urbanism was started in 1993. In contrast my teachers
at university were in the main functionalists, with some admiring and
advocating the shapeliness of post-modern planning. I strongly feel that any
spatial intervention or design should focus on the context and resolving the
given problem(s) whilst at the same time creating an attractive environment.
Many look down on such a practical approach, but I go about everyday practical
planning unashamedly!
As the years have progressed since I graduated, I’ve
seen the city around me change. Yes many of the developments are redevelopments
of older neighbourhoods, former industrial sites, empty office blocks and
former commercial sites (shops, market halls etcetera), but there have also
been large-scale building projects developing fields. The era of large-scale
developments (for housing and business) is almost at an end it seems. So the
new development areas comprising of several new housing estates, arranged as neighbourhoods
around a functional centre with a commercial estate on the side -known as Vinex
in the Netherlands-, will be the last of their kind. Although… there is talk of
expanding certain villages around fast growing urban areas, like The Hague,
Amsterdam, Groningen, Tilburg, Breda and Eindhoven.
House building on a large scale on a unified plan was
made possible in the Netherlands by the 1901 Housing Act, which sought to
improve housing standards and provide affordable housing for the working
classes. The first of these planned estates follow German examples of
Sitte-esque urban design on artistic principles and English garden city
examples, or they were built along rational and functional principles (the Low
Countries were important in early modernism). Planned housing started rather
small scale before WW1 and really took off after 1920 with a high point in the
1930. These neighbourhoods are well appreciated and were emulated after 1990 in
a New Urbanism / Postmodern effort to create place.
Two examples of 1920 urban design. On the left the
Sitte-esque neighbourhood of Sonsbeek-Noord in Arnhem which also resembles a
garden village (the number of houses per acre is to high to be a true garden
village). In contrast the New Objectivity approach by J.P. Oud in Mathenesse (right)
makes the most of the triangular plot whilst still giving all residents a
garden and a house with ample light and fresh air.
A phenomenon typical of the Netherlands is the way
that housing was planned after 1945. Modernist thinking had taken over planning
as the need for more housing could be more easily met via standardisation and repetition.
Also Pillarisation (Verzuiling) meant that society was segregated along politico-denominational
lines so planning had to allocate space for each group. This lead to the
so-called Wijkgedachte (urban district approach) which centred around the
decentralisation of the city. The urban district approach was first proposed in
the book ‘De stad der toekomst, de
toekomst der stad’ (The city of the future, the future of the city) by
building engineers Bos and Van Tijen. The CIAM delegation in Rotterdam was also
involved in the development and realisation of this urban design theory. Lotte
Stam-Beese made this approach famous with her designs for Pendrecht and
Hoogvliet in Rotterdam. Also in Rotterdam C.M. van der Stadt pioneered the
Stempelstructuur (Stamp Structure), a repeated ensemble of housing similar to
using a stamping block in printing wall paper.
Stamp Structure housing estates are everywhere in the Netherlands.
Here an example from Eindhoven-Eckart. Several ensembles of row housing are
repeated forming distinct neighbourhoods around the rational main
infrastructure. The urban district centre with shops is located on the edge
near the park along the Oude Gracht (Old Canal), a partially silted up arm of
the Dommel river. A similar structure of repeated unit can be seen on the other
side of the thoroughfare. The housing in the righthand corner is from the 1980s
and consists of more expensive housing.
The theoretical foundations of the urban district approach
was thoroughly modernist and revolved around functional and practical separation
on various levels. The lives of people could be hierarchically classed around several
social groups with different needs on different levels. The city could be
divided into social units, based on an idea(l) of the integrated village, of
about 20.000 people: the urban district unit. Each urban district would have a district
centre with sports facilities, shops and a secondary school. Each urban
district would be divided into neighbourhoods. This made it possible to
allocate specific neighbourhoods to a specific social pillar. In this approach
it is very important that the city is legible as a collection of spatial unit.
These are also physically separated in the urban designs up to the 1980s when
the anti-urban approach of Postmodernism starts to dominate, resulting in so-called
Bloemkoolwijken (Cauliflower Estates)
with little to no spatial definition. And they are therefore difficult to
navigate. The organic design principles advocated in the 1980s were a reaction
on the modernist estates that were seen as boring, bleak and not on a human
scale.
The district approach in action in Veldhoven. The old
villages (in yellow) of Zonderwijk (W), Veldhoven (V), Meerveldhoven (M) and Zeelst
(Z) were expanded by building several urban districts in the fields (in orange).
These are all physically separated by greenery and infrastructure. Each has its
own district centre (in purple), with a new city centre (in red) built where
the old villages meet the new developments.
In the 1980s financial difficulties force local
government to surrender urban development to market forces and limit its
involvement to legislative embedding, supervision and quality control. To
secure developers don’t simply build the houses they can make the most profit
from central government creates incentives to aid people to buy a house via a
direct subsidy and also prescribes minimal numbers of social housing (to be realised
by or for housing associations). The focus in public housing shifts towards
home ownership and the privatisation of social housing is started. At the same time
old neighbourhoods with social problems and often high crime rates are earmarked
for redevelopment. This is done by replacing large amounts of social and
affordable housing by more expensive middle class housing and even high-end
apartments. Thus the socio-economic problem neighbourhood is resolved on paper,
but the people are simply moved on to another area.
These redevelopments and even urban expansion in the
1980s and 90s is often piecemeal and in trances. A (re)development is portioned
with distinct areas set aside for different developers. Each hires a different
architect who is then instructed to create a distinct design (each developer
want to be visibly different for marketing purposes). This creates an extremely
fractured urban landscape of incidental design Sometimes large commercial developers
force local government into developing an area as they own all the land in an
area indicated on the development plan as earmarked for future development.
Some even manage to influence political decisions on where to locate urban
expansion based on their land positions. The city as a collection of
architectural incidents is -unsuccessfully- combatted in planning by using
themes, urban fields and geometric shapes and patterns.
The pinnacle of postmodern urban design must be
Kattenbroek in Amersfoort. This large estate of mostly housing (4600 in total) and
a small commercial estate was realised between the village of Hoogland and the
motorway to Amsterdam. The design comprises of 5 elements translated into
geometric shapes and architectural expression: The Ring, The Avenue of
Mansions, The Hidden Zone, The Mask and The Creek. These 5 design elements are
connected to 5 housing themes (The Closed City, The Fortress, The Farm Room, The
Bridge House and The Winter Garden), as well as 5 landscape themes (Water, Pond,
Wood, Field and Moor) and 5 urban morphologies (Avenue, Belt Road, Square,
Alley and Street). The design is especially striking seen from above, but at
street level shows itself to be little more than a collage of fashionable architecture
in contrasting groupings.
For all the themes used and tightly controlled appearance
of the housing built, the urban design is often little more than a narrative
connecting the various separate components aimed at easy translation into
legally binding land use maps. The fractured approach has now become the norm.
The city of Eindhoven even presents itself with the motto ‘Scherven In het
Groen’ (Shards in Greenery), although this is the result of the modernist
planning doctrine with urban districts. The abandonment of planning with
ensembles has lead to an urban landscape composed of fragments, that in the
best cases have a great internal spatial working through the use of functional,
spatial or architectural ensembles. On the larger scale the themed architecture
cant hide the underlying lack of ideas. Many people consider these areas as
non-places, as new housing estates could be anywhere and all look the same despite
the great variation in often colourful architecture. As a reaction some
planners and designers are revisiting designing with ensembles in an effort to
consciously create an urban landscape that is legible for its residents and
visitors alike.
The town of Leusden is a rather extreme example of a
fractured urban entity comprised mostly of incidental urban interventions. This
suburb of Amersfoort was never officially designated as such -as Amersfoort
itself was seen as an overflow city for both Amsterdam and Utrecht. The result was
a local authority being lead by private developers who saw opportunities for
house building. The regular pattern of the polderland around the old village
core (L) was incrementally developed; each new addition was given its own
pattern, its own architectural expression and its own boundary within a
framework of infrastructure.
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