In recent years I have regularly written unsolicited advice to ‘The Hague’. The dismantling of spatial planning hurts my heart. I wrote a public participation response to the Infrastructure and Spatial Policy Document and thought that then Minister Schultz could not leave everything to local authorities. There are simply things that have to be arranged from above. Especially in denser urban areas, there is a need for guidance and structure, so I suggested making a Randstad plan.
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order. Will Durant
The Randstad is too full, too complex and also too beautiful to loosen the reins decentrally. The official response to my participation was that the Memorandum was about the whole of the Netherlands and not just about the Randstad. I could do with that.
As far as I could tell, there have been few urban planners who have responded to the Structural Vision in principle and I have been the only one to comment on the lack of a plan. That surprised me. For decades, we have made plans for our country and for the Randstad. Sometimes this was called a memorandum, sometimes a blueprint, a framework or a charcoal sketch. In all cases, it was an attempt to give direction and order to our country. We have gained world fame with it. God created the earth and man-made the Netherlands. We have now stopped making plans, just once without thinking about it. Perhaps we have become accustomed to it or have lost our faith.
So after a while I tried it towards the prime minister himself. A sand desert is not freedom, Route 66 is. If you don’t make plans, if there is no direction, no point on the horizon, it ultimately reduces the freedom of movement for citizens and companies. After all, freedom does not exist without its opposite, security. Providing stability is one of the core tasks of the government. Or, to speak with Spinoza: ‘the only goal of the state is therefore in reality freedom’.
Prime Minister Rutte, I thought, as a liberal and recognized lover of the city of New York, should endorse my plea. According to the Declaration of Independence, every American has an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The original author, Thomas Jefferson, once he became president, came up with the Jefferson grid. This divided the country into countless rectangles and laid the foundation for many American cities. The unbounded straight streets express the mastery of nature and offer everyone an equal basis. It gives a sense of freedom that everyone can still experience when visiting New York.
Meanwhile, we are getting more and more stuffy here, and especially in the Randstad. The original advantages of a polycentric and pluralistic set-up and thus the way in which the Randstad citizen has always lived – protected by order and distance – are under pressure. The cities are losing the safe frame of reference of the surrounding landscape. Cities, neighbourhoods and villages are in each other’s way, without new certainties taking their place. The full-stamping of the Randstad as a growth model is reaching its limits.
This also slowly but surely brings an end to an era before urban planning. A golden age in which tightly defined and compositionally cool plans saw the light of day and could be implemented 1 on 1. An end to the Berlagian promise of beauty, control and cohesion that has brought us so much. An end to a modernist wave that fitted wonderfully well into our culture and has raised entire generations with the idea that this is urban planning. It is, I think, not only the dogmatism that simply clings to all-encompassing control that allows this approach to degenerate into form instead of content in the long run. Or associated stiffness that reduces the credit. It must also be the zeitgeist itself that ensures that an episode comes to an end. There are different things going on than before.
The future city will be more diverse, greener and at the same time more sustainable, in short, even more demanding than the cities we know today. At the same time, the world is more complex, margins are smaller and the future is more uncertain. As designers, we also work more within the cities than we colour meadows. Here there are more stakeholders and overlapping interests, different money flows and levels of ambition. Plans become shaky and logically tend towards more generalities and abstract objectives. Before we know it, the spatial assignment is more of a process than a project.
That is precisely why, in my view, there is a greater need than ever for good urban planning. The urban planning of concrete things; making space, putting things in their place, arranging, provoking. To set out the lines along which the city can (re)develop; squares, parks, avenues, landscapes, roads, green belts, etc. So grab hold of the city, to be able to let go again. Less gesamtkunstwerk and more framework planning. Back with a vengeance, public space in all its shades and scales forms the framework, the framework around which the city can fill and contradictions, uncertainties and limitlessness are domesticated. With that tool, the urban planner can excel in changing times.
Despite our proverbial planning tradition and my good intentions, the Randstad will probably remain the only metropolis without a plan worldwide for a while. Although, you would think that demographic and economic growth and additional issues about water, climate, energy and mobility in combination with the scarcity of space will sooner or later force us to make sharp choices. Not for defensive reasons, but to make our country more beautiful and future-proof. We’ll see, there are plenty of opportunities!
Henk Hartzema, Blauwe Kamer, letter to editor, March 2018
