Designing with uncertainties: firm patterns for organic cities

As usual, we submitted plans for the Yearbook of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture 2024 with our office. Our campus plan for the Vrije Universiteit was rejected, not for the first time. The argumentation is as short as it is clear; too little of the plan has been realized to be able to assess its quality.

There is a lot in this answer. Something is only true if it is tangible. Or a plan is only good if it has proven itself in practice. But in my opinion, those criteria are not lasting and do not do justice to the added value of design. After all, how many charcoal sketches, planning contours and visions of the future are drawn up an inspiring, challenging and directing a multitude of planners. All this often from an urge and felt necessity to provide the uncertain future with a dot on the horizon. In short, dealing with and valuing urban development concepts that have not yet been executed is a puzzling issue.

Shaping society

The design of urban planning comes down to modeling society. In the Netherlands, with a great display of power and a refined pen, generations of designers have repeatedly managed to find new and convincing forms for ideal spatial constellations of living together. The designed solutions ranged from garden cities in the 20s and 30s, the stamp districts from the 50s, megastructures from the 60s, the cauliflower districts from the 70s to the straightforward language of the so called VINEX in the 90s and 00s. More recently, society seems to have fallen apart definitively. No one seems to anymore what ideal spatial proportions and arrangements we should strive for. With the help of a more spherical approach, urban designers try to glue the fractures that have arisen into a whole. Individuality unites in collectivities of well-being. Greenery and a contemporary post-industrial varnish conceal a painful lack of order and of shortcoming in choices to make. Buildings are often only sprinkled in space. In the meantime, biodiverse and climate-adaptive checklists turn green while accountants and (landscape) architects do the work. Urban planning has effectively abolished itself.

A Dutch planning paradox

In 2009, in the memorandum ‘A Culture of Design’, ministers Plasterk and Cramer sighed how it is possible that Dutch designers are highly regarded worldwide, while the average Dutch person thinks that our country is cluttered. It is a remarkable paradox that is still perceptible in our practice. Major considerations about the spatial future of our country go hand in hand with changes in the living environment that are more divisive than consensus. Amid all this confusion, urban designers, including regularly a Government Advisor to the Living Environment, stand powerless and desperate on the sidelines. European diplomacy apt expression for it: “The Dutch are always right, but seldom relevant”.

In 1966, the Second Policy Document on Spatial Planning was published. The accompanying maps showed urbanization patterns placed along lines of infrastructure. A broad, panoramic view placed the Netherlands in the context of Great Britain and Germany. The Netherlands was seen as a link in a promising, European spatial network. In my opinion, this map can be seen as one of the last in which spatial planning played a serious and influential role. In the subsequent government memorandums, there could be noticed an increasingly abstract spatiality in maps that were drawn. In 1991, the VINEX map still indicated the development of compact expansions in and near the major cities. However, a vision of the space between the agglomeration was lacking. Still, in retrospect, this appears to have been the last full-fledged spatial memorandum. Everything that followed became more and more abstract and, above all, vague. Spatial planning lost its physical component.

A culture from the bottom up

It now appears that our fascination for order has found its way to the local scale. This makes visible a Dutch practice of culture from the bottom up. This fits wonderfully well into another, long-standing tradition. After all, since the beginning of the last century, urban planners have been working meticulously on environments of shared values. Hundreds, if not thousands, of neighborhoods and districts have been composed with the greatest care. Measured and within tightly defined frameworks, entirely in line with the prevailing socioeconomic views of the time. They are sublime masterpieces of spatiality, built portraits of the social relations of that very moment. Every ten or fifteen years with a new signature, sure. Moving effortlessly with the socio-cultural and economic changes in society. Behind this seemingly effortless adaptability lies a cultural continuity. There is simply no other way. The urban planners build on the Dutch city in which class differences and contradictions are egalitarian embedded in a tradition of collective transparency and individual freedom. In his book ‘The Netherlands, between utility and charity’, Arnold Enklaar lists a series of values that suit the Dutch: reliability, temperance, agreement, equality and self-determination. Subsequently, residential neighborhoods are defined and safe islands. They are indicative of how the Dutch naturally interpret their well-being. In principle, it is inward-facing and not necessarily forged together into a bigger and systemic whole. The kaleidoscopic collection of plans, that can be seen in the Netherlands, without significant urban integrality on the scale of a metropolis, is one of the means to maintain the sense of independency. Cities, districts and neighbourhoods are more or less self-contained. They are miniatures of self-determination.

Of course, the wet subsoil plays a role in planned though fragmented growth. We can’t just build randomly everywhere, especially in Holland, containing the lowest part of the Netherlands. This reality has become true. The 1937 Law against Ribbon Development opposed ‘the erection of buildings or the construction of plantations in places located within a certain distance of a road.’ For decades, there was widespread resistance to peripherical shopping centers. The historic inner cities should be protected. This insistence on territorial control does not involve uncertainty or sprawl, quite the contrary. To my opinion that this is why entire generations of designers have been trained in banishing doubt. Both tools and a language of certainty and control has been developed to bring the future to the present and to rid it of possible open ends in advance.

A new reality

In the meantime, reality is catching up with us with big strides. Farmers have long been regarded as reliable guardians of the green open space, usually delivering a tidy flat billiard cloth landscape between the urban cores. Now, new and disruptive functions and their associated representatives are now suddenly emerging. These are uses that are often seen as necessary by a majority: for example, solar meadows, distribution centers and wind farms. In the best case, a set of aesthetic regulations is drawn up pointless farce, that drives like the broom wagon behind the peloton that is adrift full of new functions and urgencies. In the province of Zeeland, supermarkets and hardware stores are being built along the provincial roads in this spirit. This shows unequivocally that not only the landscape, but also the old towns have had their best time. A new reality is set to come, requiring new plans. The scale and impact of the changes are too vast and no longer match age-old certainties and customs. Moreover, the number of large and far-reaching plans is growing rapidly. An additional problem here, however, is that the government is showing the necessary slowness in pushing through many plans. Sometimes it even seems that only major disasters cause movement on a national scale. To prevent an undesirable reservoir and therefore delays, we will have to look for a new form of planning. In this, control or a final image should no longer be decisive, but a certain control or direction of the interplay of forces. Logically, this switch also means letting go of tried and tested routines. It all goes against our nature and that makes this transition even more difficult.

Letting go on an urban planning scale

It makes a difference that on a smaller scale, experiments have been carried out for decades with switching and letting go of known routines. This with varying degrees of success. KCAP’s 1993 development strategy for Rotterdam’s Wijnhaveneiland is an interesting example. In this nautic quarter a dynamic transformation method was deployed without the adoption of an urban development plan. It is considered a trailblazer for this new way of planning. The plan provides for densification by adding high-rise buildings in a previously underperforming district of the city center. Work has been done without a final design, but with a long list of rules to steer the freedom offered in the right direction. However, the result is debatable. Building owners, in defiance of the rules, clumped plots together in order to be able to build towers in line with the market. In addition, the fascination for the experiment of letting go somewhat obscured the view of spatial quality. The Wijnhaveneiland in Rotterdam did get an above-average urban density but is not particularly exceptional in terms of urban composition.

That experimentation can go a step further is proven by the Oosterwold district in Almere-Buiten. In 2013 MVRDV drew up a plan for this neighbourhood between new towns Almere and Zeewolde in the Flevo Polder. Oosterwold is an intended semi-agricultural living-working area of 4,300 hectares that residents and entrepreneurs are developing themselves. It is a special concept for organic area development, without urban development, without aesthetics policy and, therefore, with a lot of design freedom. However, the proposal also shows a certain degree of designer nihilism. This deliberately ‘disruptive’ approach and design philosophy is both fascinating and disconcerting. The extent to which this area development deviates from existing practice is causing great interest. The radical nature of the plan also puts enthusiastic proponents and cynical critics diametrically opposed to each other.

In principle, the new residents are supposed to do everything themselves, although an area director is appointed to ensure that the necessary runs smoothly. It also becomes clear that an unbridled commitment of residents under a form of direction is not always sufficient in certain aspects of the plan. For example, it turns out that the local authorities still must install the sewerage system in the neighborhood as part of its good governance obligations. After an evaluation, the Almere city council agreed to the continuation of the organic area development in 2023. However, it is also stipulated that the area organisation will take a more active role in the design and realisation of the basic spatial structure: the construction of (main) polder roads, main cycle paths, ecological connections, water connections, utilities, sewerage and social facilities. This adaptation to the original plan is an illustration of both the toughness of spatial and administrative routines, and of the long road that still must go. Whereas the Netherlands may have previously overshot in planned planning with a comprehensive approach for districts and neighbourhoods, the need for control seems unruly. It only takes one Almere experiment to fall back into a traditional design of urban planning. Namely, that of the construction of public structures on which individual freedoms are grafted and within which changing collectivities can arise.

Freedom is not possible without firm decisions

When the urban development plan for Zuidas Amsterdam was adopted in 1998, for the first time an open grid structure appeared in Dutch urban planning. In the United States, the grid stands for equality between citizens, unlimited possibilities and the control of the territory by humans. For urban planner Pi de Bruijn, who came up with the Masterplan, it will have been mainly about the neutrality of this order. But where the American version of the grid offers the conditions for freedom, in the Zuidas there is mainly a restrictive form. Of course, situated between the famous Plan Zuid by Berlage and Van Eesteren’s Buitenveldert, a modest design is appropriate. Yet there is also a certain outspokenness in this choice. A way, in the lee of the development of the then IJ bank plans, to provide space for commercial interpretation that did not exist in our country until then. While ABN-AMRO bank was faced with the choice between Amsterdam and London at the time, the municipality of Amsterdam made a decisive move. It decided on an Anglo-Saxon approach, grafted on free market principles, to put this part of the city near Schiphol on the international map. A major urban development step that surprisingly evoked hardly any local resistance. Almost three decades later in the development, the Zuidas still enjoys a certain anonymity; also among colleagues. A striking observation, also because it is now the most expensive, very centrally located and very metropolitan part of the Netherlands. Apparently, all those superlatives are not enough to make the plan resonate.

There are certainly a number of shortcomings that can be mentioned as an explanation. The grid of the Zuidas is a bit clumsy and simplistic. The long lines turn out to be a bit too short, and the block size is awkwardly small. But one advantage cannot be denied to a grid in general, and therefore also in this Amsterdam variant: it is adaptable in its neutrality.

Firm patterns for organic cities

Personally I experienced the limitations of the grid myself as a supervisor of the VU Campus Amsterdam in 2005 as an advisor for the Vrije Universiteit. VU Amsterdam half a century ago left the city centre in search of space. Forty years later, that location suddenly turned out to be close to a new urban epicenter of the city. Logically, VU Amsterdam wanted to be part of these new cosmopolitan dynamics. Based on this desire for integration, a system of squares has been incorporated across the grid of Zuidas. We envisioned centripetal spaces. Midpoints where the boundaries blur. From that moment onwards, the VU Campus continued to develop along with clear principles for the public space, and the end is not yet in sight. But its power is undiminished so that every further addition during those years is fitted along a crystal-clear line of thought. It is the power of a shared truth within an organization that may take half a century to become a reality.

This process will most likely take too long to meet the selection criteria of a yearbook for urban planning and landscape. But the timeline of the VU Campus is an excellent illustration of the way in which cities grow organically. Ideally, long-term processes are guided by designs that leave space for uncertainties and set spatial priorities. In a rapidly changing world, it is important to build certainties in urban development plans that allow the (still) unknown to be admitted. To achieve this, of course, requires a lot of persuasion, imagination and believe. Above all it requires an urban planner who can rise above the daily routines.