The Atlas of Urbanization in the Netherlands

Jaap Evert Abrahamse & Menne Kosian, ‘Plotting Amsterdam. New techniques for research of urban development’, Rosa Tamborrino (ed.), Digital Urban History. Telling the history of the city at the age of the ICT revolution, Roma 2015, 67-87, plates X-XIII.

Abstract The Landscape Department of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands has been working on a GIS-cartography project, focusing on a large set of historical data that has come down to us from the seventeenth century. In the Dutch Golden Age, the province of Holland went through a period of rapid economic and urban development. Some cities were extended in several stages. Recent research has shown how functionality, beauty and profitability were the mutually dependent objectives of urban development. In the process of expansion, grounds in the newly planned areas were divided into lots, most of which were put up for auction. This resulted in a number of data sets, quite unique in nature, consisting of detailed maps and auction records, specifically linked to the urban parcellation structure. Amsterdam’s extensions were designed according to rapidly evolving insights into urbanism and the management of urban space. First observations show that GIS research of financial and ownership data yields new perspectives on the history of urbanism on the micro-scale of parcellation and can contribute to our knowledge of economic and urban history, of the functioning of early modern towns – and the modern city centres they evolved into.

Jaap Evert Abrahamse, De grote uitleg van Amsterdam. Stadsontwikkeling in de zeventiende eeuw, Bussum (Thoth Publishers) 2010, reprint 2011.

Between 1585 and 1663, during Amsterdam’s Golden Age, the city’s built-up area increased by more than fivefold. This growth over the centuries captured the attention of historians and city planners who analysed Amsterdam’s development from a variety of angles. However, there are two aspects that have attracted most of the attention: the large scale of the city’s expansions and their methodical planning. This second aspect has, since the nineteenth century, been seen mainly from the point of view of the townscape as a whole. Amsterdam was presented as a large-scale, scenographic composition, a ‘Versailles of the North’, and as a consequence, a work of genius. Later on, researchers began to study the city’s ground plan. Amsterdam’s development was seen as an elaboration of the ‘città ideale’, the apex of urban planning. In this study, urbanism and city development are looked at from a more pragmatic point of view. The ideal, theoretical city was replaced by the actual city, and, therefore, the optimal city. This study views Amsterdam as an unruly physical reality with an unpredictable spatial and social dynamism, that had to be organised and managed by the city’s officials, while they coped with the existing landscape, hydrological circumstances, the state of technology and the rudimentary legal instruments that were available to them at the time. The city’s ground plan was the result of a complex process in which different, sometimes incompatible, interests had to be balanced. A city design is not an isolated work of art, but a solution (or an attempted solution) for a broad range of problems within a specific situation. The city’s government was responsible for Amsterdam’s defence, functioning traffic and water infrastructures, the provision of sufficient numbers of empty lots for new construction and for the management of various other urban services. This task must be considered in relation to the circumstances in which urban development took place during this period: soil conditions, water management, traffic, a shortage of space for housing, harbour activities, trade and industry, spontaneous urbanisation, private landownership, and the entire network of infrastructures in which the city was entangled. But the city’s ground plan was not just the result of physical factors. Indeed, the social reality was also a prominent factor in the constitution of Amsterdam’s ground plan. The field of urbanism was a game of interests, interactions and sometimes confrontations between the forces of urbanisation and city design. Each of these factors had its influence on the planning processes and their outcomes. Furthermore, there were also the various instruments of urbanism: the methodology behind fortification plans, city design and the apportioning of parcels, as well as the legislative options.

2014

In this paper new estimates of the development of the population of the (northern) Netherlands in the period 1400-1850 are presented using many more or less recent estimates concerning regions and cities from numerous other authors. To add up these figures they have been interpolated to obtain annual estimates. This procedure resulted in estimates for the population of every town and for the rural parts of most of the provinces. Missing data have been extrapolated using trends of comparable regions. A distinction has been made between cities (with legal town rights) and countryside, and between coastal and inland provinces. Already around 1400 the Netherlands were heavily urbanized, with about a third of the population living in towns. Differences in urbanisation between coast and inland were limited. However, the coastal region (Holland) experienced a phase of rapid urbanisation between 1500 and 1650 related to the Dutch Golden Age, resulting in urbanisation-rates of over 55%, whil...

The Low Countries are seen as one of the few European regions in which a relatively large number of cities developed at an early date. Generally this urbanisation is understood to be a result of a process of commercialisation and specialisation, and in the view of some this urbanisation might have continued into modern industrial times. However in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, continuous urban growth was not general before the mid-nineteenth century. Why some cities experienced growth while others languished remains an interesting and relevant question. In this article some recent studies on urban decline in the Low Countries are evaluated. Why and where did this happen and what were the societal consequences of de-urbanisation? Three studies on Zeeland form an intriguing starting point for a discussion on decline in Dutch urban development that could be seen as a-typical, but is arguably part of the regional and temporal variety of the Dutch society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The study of urban form in the Netherlands has been heavily infuenced by the Modern Movement and characterized by strong disciplinary specialization. On the one hand there is the distinction between art and engineering and on the other the search for instrumental universal rationality. This helps to explain the increasing interest, initially within academe, in the frst English and German translations of some outstanding works of Italian researchers, who were at the time already acting as leaders in new perspectives in the felds of urban form and architecture. In keeping with the Dutch practical attitude, these investigations contributed to urban developments of the post-industrial era, beginning at the end of the 1970s. Today much of the study of urban form entails investigation of how global trends affect local systems and how local systems can be improved by analysing best practices. In that respect the Netherlands has been able to establish a leading role in contemporary architecture that is widely recognized within Europe.

2001

Contentss 3 Listt of tables 6 Listt of figures 7 Prefacee 8 Chapterr 1 Introduction 9 1.11 The Netherlands: a planner's paradise? 9 1.22 The spatial future of the Netherlands: a societal, political and scientific debate 1.33 Research questions 1.44 Structure of the book Chapterr 2 Where people live and why they live there... theoriess about the dynamics in population distribution 19 2.11 Introduction 2.22.2 The spatial impact of economic and technological development 19 2.2.12.2.1 Economy and urban growth: growth pole theory, export base theorytheory and cumulative causation 19 2.2.22.2.2 The pros and cons of agglomeration 21 2.2.32.2.3 Urbanisation as a phased process 22 2.2.42.2.4 Technological changes, internationalisation and economic restructuringrestructuring 24 2.33 The spatial impact of demographic and socio-cultural changes 2.44 Interdisciplinary approaches: population distribution dynamics as aa product of economic, demographic and socio-cultural trends 2.4.12.4.1 Counter-urbanisation 31 2.4.22.4.2 The escalator region 33 2.4.33 Economic restructuring, changing household composition and thethe revival of urban population growth 34 2.55 The withdrawal of the welfare state and the role of physical planning 2.66 Conclusions: a model for explaining recent urbanisation trends in Northwest-Europee 40 Chapterr 3 City, region, network: theories about urban form, urbann networks and daily mobility 43 3.11 4.4.14.4.1 Concentrated deconcentration 4.4.24.4.2 The compact city 4.55 Towards a new central concept: the network city or the urban network? 73 4.66 From ambition to reality: the results of urbanisation policy 75 4.6.14.6.1 The political context of physical planning policy 76 4.6.24.6.2 Plans and the planning process 4.77 Conclusions 81 Chapterr 5 Research methodology 83 5.11 Introduction: approaches in the evaluation of planning policy 83 5.22 Evaluation of Dutch national population distribution policy 85 5.33 An international comparison of urbanisation trends and policies inn Northwest-Europe 88 5.3.15.3.1 A typology of planning systems as a tool for comparative research 89 5.3.25.3.2 Selection of case studies 5.3.35.3.3 Methods of data collection 94 5.3.45.3.4 Obstacles towards a 'working' comparison 95 5.44 Evaluation of Dutch national spatial mobility policy 96 Chapterr 6 The influence of national urbanisation policy on population distribution inn the Netherlands 101 6.11 Introduction 101 6.22 Development of population distribution in the Netherlands 101 6.2.16.2.1 Long-term development 101 6.2.26.2.2 Main trends since 1970 103 6.33 Economic trends influencing Dutch population distribution 105 6.44 Demographic and socio-cultural trends 108 6.55 Dutch policies on planning, housing and regional development 112 6.5.16.5.1 The Dutch welfare state 112 6.5.22 Physical planning, housing policy and regional economic policy 114 6.66 Between planning visions and urbanisation reality: an evaluation of the resultss of national population distribution policy in the Netherlands 117 6.6.16.6.1 Main targets of national population distribution policy inin Central

In 1989 the young Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings, who had just left the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, was called to develop a project for the area in between Rotterdam and the Hague that was going to face, in the next years, a huge increment of population and activities. This part of the Dutch territory is located in between two urban areas but, on the same time, it is located in the middle of another construction kwon as the Randstad, in which the explosive growth of urban or suburban phenomena has led to a singular blurring of the distinction between the city and the countryside. In this context Neutelings proposed his reinterpretation of the urban form called 'De Tapijtmetropool' or 'Patchwork Metropolis'. Starting from a six pages long article published in the 1991, this paper will try to deconstruct the work of Neutelings, analysing the context and the sketches and reconstruct them in a more comprehensive model of urbanisation. Moreover a reinterpretation of the territory will try to understand if the Neutelings' prevision has found a real effect in the contemporary Randstad territorial configuration.

The Flat City space syntax model (Read, 2005) has been developed to extend the functionality of the space syntax method into the periphery of the contemporary metropolitan city, and to provide a method for describing and evaluating the form of contemporary urban landscapes. The Flat City model proposes that the built environment is structured into layers of 'place-regions', each layer with its own definitive scale and each with its own connective network enabling the movement which ties that level of 'places' together into a 'region'. A detailed empirical study of the spatial distribution of street-edge commercial functions in the metropolitan territory around Amsterdam is presented here in the terms of this model. This distribution is understood as form and it will be proposed that different formations appear in the territory as 'emergent' products of processes of connection and movement within their respective 'place-region' layers, and of their local 'grounding' within layers at lower scale-levels. Detailed data of visible street-edge commercial function was collected for the entire landscape region and classed according to the scales of spread of their customer-bases. This data was mapped against their corresponding scales of movement 'grids' of the 'place-region' layers to locate them and to trace their generation as urbanization patterns in the metropolitan surface. A formation process appears to follow a clear logic of scale, functions locating themselves in relation to the movement grid which corresponds to the scale of spread of their customer base, while exact 'content' varies. But a process of 'grounding' appears to give many of these patterns their characteristic forms. Final settlement form depends very often on a process of the 'grounding' of higher-scaled functions in lower-scaled movement grids in a relation of 'co-orientation' with the higher-scaled movement grids. A provisional classification schema of metropolitan urbanization form is proposed on the basis of this one case and the method is briefly critically evaluated against other descriptions of metropolitan territorial form including those of The Amsterdam Region Seen Through the Flat City Model Amsterdam, like almost every city in the world, has come in the course of the 20th century through a time of profound change. Dutch cities missed some of the urban changes 19th century industrialization brought to other European cities and what large-scale industrialization there was in the Netherlands by the end of the 19th century had taken

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2021

2013

In spite of a strong tradition in spatial planning and ambitions to create compact cities, most rural-urban fringes in the Netherlands have seen substantial urbanization in recent decades. Urban expansions at the rural-urban fringe have formed complex hybrid landscapes consisting of residential areas, commercial zones, agricultural land, recreational functions and natural areas. These hybrid landscapes are characterized by great diversity in size, density, form and composition. Moreover, the urban developments in the rural-urban fringe take divergent forms in different urbanized regions. This paper analyses recent developments and urbanization patterns at the rural-urban fringe in the Netherlands. In some regions the urbanization is rather compact and concentric, whereas other regions show dispersed and polycentric morphological patterns. Paradoxically, at the local level, urban compaction policy seems quite successful, whereas at the regional level, local developments add up to traditionally unwanted urban development patterns. Moreover, the ongoing urbanization at the rural-urban fringe has been entailing many spatial, environmental, financial and social problems. Therefore, recent suburbanization and uncertainties concerning future spatial developments at the urban fringe raise some complex policy and design issues on the local, regional and national scale. At the national level, an important question is how increasing dispersed urbanization will affect the most urbanized regions in the Netherlands, in terms of both the economic performance of cities and the efficient use of existing infrastructure. At the regional level, there is a need for urbanization strategies that transcend municipal boundaries. At the local level, developing and deploying inventive urban (re-)design strategies to improve the spatial and functional quality of the rural-urban fringe are a challenge for local authorities and urban planners. Important design tasks are to create areas with combined functions, to improve connections between separated functions and to upgrade the identity of places at the fringe. 2 INTRODUCTION The Netherlands has a distinct and internationally much acclaimed tradition of spatial planning on the national, regional and municipal level. In a context of limited space, challenges of water management and a strong demographic and economic growth, Dutch planners and policy makers have strived for compact and well organised forms of urbanization since the 1950s. Nevertheless, most rural-urban fringes in the Netherlands have seen substantial changes in land-use in recent decades. Large-scale residential areas and recreational parks were developed. Furthermore, a considerable number of commercial areas, office parks and retail centres were constructed in the surroundings of cities, mostly on locations in the vicinity of motorways. In general, the urban fringe, as in many other countries (see Bryant et al. 1982, Audirac 1999, Gallent et al. 2006), is characterized by a large degree of spatial and functional heterogeneity. At the ruralurban fringe, new urban expansions emerge next to established areas, large-scale developments next to small-scale locations and urban functions next to rural functions. Formerly agricultural and natural areas around villages and cities have slowly transformed in into a complex and hybrid landscape with a combination of rural and urban functions. Compared to other countries, most of the urban developments at the rural-urban fringe in the Netherlands take place nearby existing cities. Therefore we define the ruralurban fringe as a rather narrow area (approximately 2 kilometres) between the city and the countryside. This area is like a shell around the existing urban area and follows its irregular contours. In other countries, such as the United States and Canada, definitions of the rural-urban fringe in metropolitan areas often describe much larger areas, in some cases up to 50 kilometres. 2.1 Research questions This paper addresses four main questions: What types of urban developments can be distinguished at the rural-urban fringe in the Netherlands? What are the morphological structures of recent urban developments The Rural-Urban Fringe in the Netherlands: a Morphological Analysis of Recent Urban Developments 964