Urban planning is a matter of common sense

He would love to start a magazine. A magazine that explores a specific theme in each edition, and, very importantly, juxtaposes different opinions and visions. Urban planner Henk Hartzema sees it all for himself: ‘I’m thinking of a large group of editors who make issues in varying compositions. Not on the basis of current events, but on the basis of their interests and motivations. An issue about cathedrals

For example, or about vistas for my part. ‘As an architecture student in Delft, Hartzema spent many hours in the library. Leafing through books and periodicals was like a voyage of discovery. ‘You got a good idea of what was going on, were introduced to a variety of design visions. Those different opinions sharpened my mind. Sometimes I read something that made me think: there’s no arguing with that. But then I looked at the rebuttal and thought exactly the same thing. This forced me to form my own opinion. ‘The current generation of design students has the impression that they rarely visit the library. Let alone that they read a book or have a subscription to a magazine or newspaper. Doesn’t that concern you?’ That’s a shame, but I understand it. With the advent of the internet, so much information is poured out on them. You don’t know where to start anymore. Today, the journey of discovery is a wandering.’ A short silence. Dan: ‘I found it difficult to translate what I read into my design work. I did more browsing and wrote down words or phrases that touched me at that moment, that coincided with what I was doing. To be honest, I never fully absorbed theories and treatises, I picked out what I could use.’

Letter to the king

The predilection for the written word is expressed in an impressive oeuvre of letters and opinion pieces. As far as he knows, he was the only urban planner to write a response in 2012 to Minister Schultz’s Structural Vision for Infrastructure and Space, in which he advised her not to leave everything to local authorities. In Het Financiële Dagblad, he agitated against the intention to relax the building rules along the coast, participated in an essay competition about the future of the Randstad and addressed Prime Minister Rutte and King Willem-Alexander directly by letter. What did you write to the king?’ I linked up with the dissatisfaction with the EU, about the feeling that people have that everything is decided in Brussels. I wrote to him that it is precisely for this reason that we should not squander what we still have control over in the Netherlands: healthcare, pensions and spatial planning. “What was his answer?” Laughing: ‘That he doesn’t deal with such concrete matters.’ Remarkably, Hartzema hardly makes his voice heard in the professional world itself. He says: ‘I notice that I don’t feel at home in panel discussions or professional debates. I am too eager to go deeper into a subject than possible, beyond the issues of the day. That’s why I avoid those kinds of occasions as much as possible.’ An exception was his letter in the March issue of Blauwe Kamer. In it, Hartzema responded to the interview with Edzo Bindels in the 2017 Blue Room Yearbook. In it, Bindels paints a gloomy picture of urban planning. ‘In many projects, I experience that the kongsi has already been finalised, between the financial and legal guys, the traffic engineers and the builders. We (the urban planners, ed.) are allowed to make a nice picture of the outdoor space, architects are only allowed to draw a façade,’ says Bindels. Hartzema now: ‘It seems as if Edzo (together they once won the Young Maaskant Prize, at West 8 they were partners for years, ed.) has lost faith in urban planning.’ He thinks that urban planners are sidelined. ‘Yes, and I understand where that comes from. It sometimes feels like the profession is slipping through our fingers. But that does not mean that we should resign ourselves to that. It is precisely then that we have to take action, make sure that we reinvent ourselves in this tilting world.’ In your e-mail to the editors, you speak of urban planning 3.0. What is that? ‘I know, it’s a terrible name, but I mean nothing more than that we are once again setting out the lines along which cities can develop, that we are designing structures within which society can move forward, within which each group comes into its own. These can be dikes, roads, streets, parks, ribbons, squares. This is not new – it is the core of what urban planning once was.’

Social engineering thinking

To reinforce his point, Hartzema outlines how the field developed from ‘urban planning 1.0’ – serving society to stimulate development, individuality and progress – into a totalitarian discipline that wanted to put citizens in a straitjacket on the basis of norms, rules and an excessive social engineering mindset. ‘After the war, urban planning became a prescriptive field from a subservient field. We knew what percentage of social rental housing was good for a neighborhood, what facilities were needed per hundred homes, how much greenery was needed, how wide a sidewalk. This compulsion to control expressed itself every ten years in a different urban design pattern. In the sixties and seventies the stamps, then the cauliflower districts, on the

most recently the low terraced houses in the Vinex districts. ‘Surely you can also say that the designers of the post-war neighbourhoods – when urban planning was not yet part of the market – were idealists, that they wanted the best for society? ‘That’s true, and I’m not saying it wasn’t well-intentioned. But that “ideal view of society” was based on a rigid social engineering thinking. The designers of the time were convinced that they knew what was good for the people. But in their plans there was no room for creativity, for their own initiative, let alone for private commissioning or bottom-up.

It is not surprising, according to Hartzema, that this form of urban planning went so well with modernist architecture, with its implacable urge for sober and geometric forms. ‘In Delft, I was taught by third-generation modernists who told me that a façade had to be pure, but without knowing why. In my first weeks, they told us that we would eventually label our parental homes, with roofs and brick and where we had grown up so nicely, as ugly.’

Façades

Hartzema had to deal with a similar emphasis on aesthetics, even on façade image, during his time at West 8. ‘At one point we were working on the renewal of Crooswijk, a bad

neighborhood in Rotterdam where I happened to live. Our proposal was no more than a classic demolition-new construction plan, in which the individuality of the residents must be reflected in the architecture of the façade design in the new building, just like on Borneo-Sporenburg in Amsterdam. I found this hard to digest. How can you reduce the renewal operation of such a difficult neighbourhood to a discussion about façades? I wanted to focus on the mechanism of individuality behind the facades, of the people: what do they want, what do they need? Why was there no attention for that? It is partly the influence of landscape architecture, a discipline originating from garden design, on the creation of illusions, the staging of spaces. In a way, that is a decadent activity, which you should not let loose on Crooswijk.’

After a moment. ‘Incidentally, I learned in Delft from Professor Clemens Steenbergen that creating illusions is also liberating. Landscape architects in Italy, France and England shaped the imagination, created environments to escape the everyday.’

Buzz of Zuidas

In the corner of the meeting room of Hartzema’s office on Rotterdam’s Westblaak stands a model. It is the plan for the campus of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam – a project of which he has been a supervisor for thirteen years and in which he puts his ‘urban planning 3.0’ into practice. ‘Such a campus is a dynamic environment. Students come and go, the buzz of the Zuidas is right around the corner. Such an area has

recognisable public spaces are needed: squares with a living room feel, streets that evoke pleasant associations, clear boundaries that keep the campus recognisable in the big city.’ With his finger, Hartzema follows the diagonal line that runs from the so-called Campus Square directly to train and metro station Zuid. Where the line crosses De Boelelaan, Hartzema and his people designed a bend in the otherwise dead straight street profile. ‘Very simple, but effective. As a result, motorists know that they are approaching a special place.’

All-Knowing Designer

What Hartzema wants to say is that if the cohesion in the public space is well regulated, you don’t have to do much else as an urban planner. ‘Give others the space to shape their projects and ambitions within that structure? ‘Architects and developers often already have a good idea of what they want to build. It is up to us to point out some urban principles, such as the prevention of draught holes, a bench in the sun, a comfortable entrance, a place for bicycles. Not complicated at all, really, just common sense.’

Hartzema has experienced that this ‘letting go’ has a liberating effect in Leiden, where he has been working on a master plan for the Bio Science Park since 2004. ‘We have to deal with dozens of owners there. They are not waiting for the omniscient designer who wants to overhaul the entire urban layout. That’s why you have to look for what binds them, for common ground.’ This was evident from the widely supported desire to improve the appearance of public space. Together with Juurlink and Geluk, Studio Hartzema proposed a ‘Dutch’ interior, with lots of water, native trees, bridges and footpaths. In this way, the designers hope to transform the business park into a campus. Don’t you run the risk of ignoring complicated problems because they don’t happen to belong to the common ground?

‘This sounds crazy, but in Leiden we don’t say anything about sustainability, biodiversity, traffic or social safety in the urban development plan. If an issue is urgent, it will be put on the table. It is better to arrange such matters in silence. So our design for the public space does take into account issues such as sustainability and biodiversity.’

So don’t prescribe, but let go? ‘Exactly. Don’t start nagging in advance about building heights or where the front door should be. These are precisely the reasons why we as urban planners are sometimes vilified. Don’t fall into the trap of endless discussions about regulations, but invite architects and builders to build that city together.’

Don’t you mean that image quality requirements. Does the search for common ground ever go wrong? ‘On a care estate in Bennebroek, we wanted to use the public space as a meeting place for the clients of a care cluster and the residents of new homes on the site. Partly because the care cluster became more isolated, the park space now forms a wedge between the two worlds that we wanted to connect.’

The nature of the Randstad

For years, Henk Hartzema has been toying with the idea of a plan for the Randstad,

A metropolis that, according to him, is still spacious and landscaped, but feels full and cluttered. Or as he wrote in the essay ‘The Randstad belongs to no one’: ‘How is it possible that the whole of the Netherlands is planned, but that we are nevertheless dissatisfied with the end result?’ The answer to this question lies, of course, in the lack of a coherent structure.  Hartzema believes that our motorway network ignores the true nature of the Randstad – ‘separate centres and hamlets in a Ruysdaelian green landscape’. Partly because this government-designed traffic network has led to miles of business parks, office parks and new housing estates. This tends towards nostalgia. ‘What I mean is that if we move through the western Netherlands now, we have no view of the real metropolis that is the Randstad. This is partly because we have no alternatives. The national roads, once built by Napoleon and which ran from church to church, have been destroyed. It is simply not possible to drive from city to village to city indoors, as a cross-section of everyday life.’ Should we restore the old provincial roads? ‘That’s an option. I am concerned with the quality of the Randstad, quiet neighborhoods and centers that develop independently, separated from each other by the space of a green heart. We shouldn’t just throw that away. Distance and independence are under pressure and I think that only a plan can provide guidance to turn the tide.’ So looking for shared core values? ‘Perhaps we should focus fully on what fascinates us all: ditches, bridges, locks, cycle routes – connections from core to core, a staging of the real Randstad.’

Faliekant fout

Before leaving, columnist Max Pam is discussed, who stated in the Volkskrant that the Netherlands has become one of the ugliest countries in the world ‘because of the infrastructural rubbish along our highways’, and who discovered to his horror that such a thing as spatial planning no longer exists since 2010 (when the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment was dissolved). Hartzema smiles: ‘It is illustrative of how we live our lives with regard to space and landscape.  Undisturbed, like: nothing can happen to us. While behind our backs things are going terribly wrong.’