The success of the Dutch urban planning tradition emphasises its intrinsic innocence. The idea of the Green Heart in the back garden of the large Dutch cities becomes the perfect alibi for an ongoing and unstructured development of almost all the available land outside this reservation. This is all .fed by a network of motorways, dilapidated dual carriageways that function as highways and as a kind of urban dike roads at the same.
Little by little the virginal garden of the Green Heart is now itself being taken over by the expanding
cities, which just keep growing without a broader vision to connect up these only recent centres. The ultimate, but constantly deferred question, whether the collection of four large cities is a metropolis or not, allows different interpretations.
Our proposal for a virginal Netherlands will give birth to a Randstad agglomeration that is fed by an extensive network of secondary roads. All cities are easy to reach via a large number of boulevards. partially newly constructed, partially widened local roads and partially downgraded former motorways like the A44 and the A 13. These boulevards form the stimulus for a new, coherent urban growth, resulting in a large, coherent metropolis.
All other motorways will become part of long traffic corridors. ~any exits will disappear to give high-speed traffic more space. There will be no building in large areas on both sides of these motorways, existing buildings on industrial estates will remain standing until they are written off. The Dutch heritage of historical towns, monuments of hydraulic engineering, greenhouses and other isolated architecture objects with unique landscape characteristics reminding of the past, with here and there a wood, a field and flowering meadows. together this testifies of a virginal landscape created by man.
Henk Hartzema, introduction text Internationale Architectuur Biennale Rotterdam, 2003
