Architect and urban engineer Henk Hartzema has been appointed professor of Design in Urbanism by the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. A brand new research group, in which Hartzema will have the opportunity to test his theories about the street in practice with various students and teachers. In the international project Streetworks, patterns in urbanity, he will spend the next two years researching the function of the street in the European cities of Amsterdam, Brussels, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Porto and Zagreb.
The problem is that roads are not taken as a starting point when making urban development plans,’ says Hartzema. ‘There is a learned aversion to traffic-technical aspects. This is often different abroad. There they are more limited in making urban plans; There is more attention for the roads. It is not uncommon for the planning to be limited to the design of the street. In the Netherlands, we usually plan everything, but strangely enough, we forget about the street. Take a look at the Zuidas in Amsterdam, for example: a wonderful plan has been made for it, but there is no vision of the street in the entire design. That is too crazy for words. No spatial structure has been devised at all, it has not been decided whether a tram should run through it, or perhaps a canal. The design consisted only of building fields and when I saw that, my clog broke. North of the Zuidas, it was famous urban planner Berlage who first designed the profiles, to the south it was Van Eesteren who also included the collective spaces in his design. In the Zuidas itself, this has been completely omitted.
It has still not been decided how the Zuidas will be located on the city.’ According to Hartzema, a strong hand is needed to create a public space. ‘Everything comes together in the street, it is the city in motion and in stasis. It is a space for everything and everyone and you have to make choices, otherwise it will become an empty place where no one or nothing is involved. You need authority for those choices.
Hartzema delved further into the subject of ‘the street’ and read, among other things, about Napoleon, who built the first through roads in the Netherlands.
Strangely enough, the Netherlands appears to be the only country that has abolished Napoleon’s ways. There are still some remnants in the south of the country: the Boschdijk from Eindhoven to Den Bosch and the Napoleonseweg from the south to Venlo, and fragments can also be found elsewhere. The consequence of the removal of those through, secondary roads throughout the country is that a complete network is missing. For example, that you can no longer go directly from The Hague to Haarlem without taking the highway, where you then don’t get anything of the urban environment. Compare that with France. Many Dutch people choose the Routes Nationales instead of the Péages when traveling and get the French life as a gift. The structure of the roads determines the image of our environment. The roads in the Netherlands, especially in residential areas, are very short and form an unfathomable network. It seems as if we don’t want to be connected to each other. In our Dutch view, that is normal, but it is not normal. Short distances are part of our culture, it is the culture of disconnecting and keeping distance.
In his book ‘Space Making, Room for the Randstad’, Hartzema shows an image of the Randstad, depicted in all the urban development plans that exist. The map shows an area full of detached red blocks. Small, large, elongated and square. Lots of blocks where there are cities and only a few in the Green Heart.
The map clearly shows that in principle there is no connection between the different designs. Of course, it will never become a system like that. In this way, the Randstad remains a collection of independent projects instead of one big city, and apparently we want that. We want to think in blocks, which is more secure and clear. However, the road system is the key to further develop the Randstad. The Randstad seems full but is the emptiest metropolis in the world. We could take an example from New York. There the streets are straight and you can also get out of the city very easily. From the Empire State Building you can drive six blocks to get out
at the Henry Hudson River Parkway that brings the landscape of upstate New York into the city. In the Randstad, on the other hand, there are no through roads that go from the city centers to the outskirts. I can see a road in front of me from the Ring of Amsterdam to the outside, right through the Green Heart to Rotterdam. A road with a purpose, a final destination, and along the way a view of the beautiful Dutch polder landscape with windmills, cows and church towers. People then understand where they are while driving or cycling. Coming from abroad, Amsterdam is suddenly in the landscape instead of at the back of the Randstad.
What do all these theories mean for the streetscape in the cities themselves?
The road network is the spatial communication tool par excellence and that is disrupted if we use the roads as a means of separation. We should integrate them more with the landscape and with the city itself. An example: in the seventies, it was decided to give Rotterdam-Zuid a facelift, large-scale urban renewal. This was done, among other things, by reducing the traffic flows on the Oranjeboomstraat. Because, quite simply, traffic is a threat to the peace and quiet of the residents. A threshold was placed every 50 meters to keep the cars out. The result: due to the lack of customers, the shops on the street went bankrupt and the neighborhood became even poorer. If you compare that with, for example, the Overtoom in Amsterdam, where the street is part of the network in every way, you can see the difference. The Overtoom is one of the most flourishing streets in the city, and very recognizable for Amsterdam.
What will the students learn during Streetworks?
That it is not about right or wrong design, but about the realization that as a designer you intervene time and again in the way people and spaces relate to each other. This is done both with the design of the long lines and the way in which buildings are placed on the street and with which accessibility is shaped. To make the street a concrete research project, we will start with a walk along the long lines of Amsterdam. Think, for example, of the Overtoom, the Haarlemmerstraat and the Wibautstraat. Together with ten artists, the students will describe what they see, how those roads are structured. Then, during the project, the same long lines in the cities of Brussels, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Porto and Zagreb will be looked at and a comparison will be made. In this way, I hope that we will find out that the meaning of the city street in linear space can also be different from what we think is normal and that a discussion will be initiated.
Mieke Naus interviews Henk Hartzema, Stedelijk Interieur, May 2009. Photo: Roelof Pot
