Urban Identity in Modernist Urban Development - The Case of New-town Lelystad, the Netherlands

URBAN IDENTITY IN MODERNIST URBAN DEVELOPMENT

THE CASE OF NEW-TOWN LELYSTAD, THE NETHERLANDS Master thesis

Mark Willem Lebbink, B.Sc. 117539

European Urban Studies Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany

Front cover image. Elevated pathway between low-rise apartments.

Atolwijk, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018.

COLOFON Master thesis for European Urban Studies August, 2018 Author Mark Willem Lebbink, B.Sc. 117539 Interviewees Joris van Casteren (author & jouranist) Michelle Provoost (director, International New Town Institute) Ronnie Zijp (urban designer, Municipality of Lelystad) Examiners prof. dr. Frank Eckardt Brigitte Zamzow, M.A. Institute for European Urban Studies Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany

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URBAN IDENTITY IN MODERNIST URBAN DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF NEW-TOWN LELYSTAD, THE NETHERLANDS Author Examiners

Mark Willem Lebbink, B.Sc. prof. dr. Frank Eckardt & Brigitte Zamzow, M.A.

ABSTRACT Inspired by the much criticised Disneyland-esque new-towns of Shanghai, China, the thesis brings this topic to the west. A fresh urban identity is often imposed on new-towns, and ranges from referring to the past, to appealing to futuristic ideals. The research here focused on the latter. The question revolves around how the planners and designers attempt to create this identity, and how it is subsequently perceived by the inhabitants. The tumultuous history of the study case; new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands, explored in this thesis shows, that creating a new city from scratch is easier said than done. The new-town coped with underpopulation, high criminality and a bad outside reputation over the last decades. The findings of this thesis were therefore unexpected by the author. Based on the treatment of existing literature and empirical studies on urban identity, surveys have been employed to measure the identification of the inhabitants with their city. The relatively positive results from the respondents regarding their urban identity are reflected on the conflicting efforts of urban planning and design of the current and past responsible institutions. The efforts to create urban identity are not clearly reflected in the identification and observations of the inhabitants, and therefore reflect the view that perhaps urban identification happens despite the efforts of designers, rather than because of them.

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MARKERWAARD (cancelled 3rd polder)

AMSTERDAM

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ALMERE

IJSSELMEER NORTH-EAST POLDER (1st polder)

LELYSTAD

ZWOLLE

FLEVOPOLDER (2nd polder)

Fig. 1. Contextual location of Lelystad in polders and relevant cities.

(Google Earth, 2018)

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INDEX 1 Introduction to the thesis

1.1 Introduction 1.2 Justification 1.3 Research question 1.4 Hypotheses 1.5 Methodology 1.6 Definitions

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10 12 13 13 14 15

2 Urban identity

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3 New-towns and the study case

32

4

The efforts of designers

48

5

Empirical study

58

6

Reflections

66

2.1 Introduction to the work on urban identity 2.2 Defining urban identity 2.3 Three realms of urban identity 2.4 Summary

3.1 Introduction to new towns 3.2 The case of Lelystad, the Netherlands 3.3 Summary

4.1 Goals and methods of the designers 4.2 Justification of methods and direction 4.3 Reflection of relevant experts on the process 4.4 Summary

5.1 Methodology 5.2 Perception of urban identity by inhabitants 5.3 Perception of reputation by visitors 5.4 Summary of findings

6.1 6.2

Reflection on empirical study and theory Reflection on efforts of creation and perception of urban identity

18 22 26 30

34 39 47

50 53 55 57

60 61 63 64

68 70

7 Conclusions

72

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Recommendations for future research

78

9

Acknowledgements

80

10

References

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Appendix

82 86

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1 INTRODUCTION TO THE THESIS

In this the chapter, the topic of the thesis will be introduced. Along with the justification, research question and hypotheses, the methodology will be elaborated on. Additionally relevant terms of which their meaning is not self-evident, will be provided with definitions.

Fig. 2. Roads between the neighborhoods, with one of the cycling and pedestrian bridges in the distance. Lelystad, the Netherlands.

May 18, 2018.

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1.1

INTRODUCTION

A man casually leaning on the side of a bridge is patiently waiting for a fish to bite his bait. The bridge the lone angler is standing on is a classical Dutch wooden canal bridge, one of those that can be opened. However, large brown stains of corrosion are showing behind the peeling white paint on the not-so-wooden construction of the bridge. The view from the bridge is equally deceiving. On the waterside a large row of brick townhouses, about 5 stories in height, immediately stands out. The townhouses have varying colors and differentiating facades, they are intended to give us the impression we are indeed in Amsterdam. When walking through the neighborhood it becomes clear. The countless air conditioning units mounted all over the facades suggest there is something off, and the enormous skyscrapers that can be seen on the horizon end the illusion definitively. The picture is not taken in Amsterdam, but in Shanghai, China.

Fig. 3. Fisherman in Gaoqiao, Shanghai, China. November 18, 2017.

The scene described above takes place in Gaoqiao, a new-town, in the outskirts of the vast metropolis of Shanghai, China.

Gaoqiao is part of the city’s “One City, Nine Towns” initiative, which commenced in 1999.

This initiative is meant to steer away people from the overcrowded city center, to new satellite towns (den Hartog, 2010). While decentralization in a rapidly urbanizing context is an interesting and perhaps important topic, what is relevant for this thesis is the theming of these towns. The mayor of the city had argued that the new developments should have international architecture styles to give them more recognition (den Hartog, 2010, p.

30). His wish was initially not well received by the planning bureau, but today, most of these imagined towns have finished construction.

Among these towns are a British inspired town, the aforementioned Dutch town and a German inspired town, complete with a copy of the Goethe and Schiller statue from Weimar (Yang, 2011). In another project near the city, a development company has erected a 108 meter high replica of the Eiffel tower, in a French themed town (A Taste of Paris in Shanghai, 2007).

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The attention these and other similar projects have gotten in the international media (A Taste of Paris in Shanghai, 2017; Mallonee, 2017; Valiente, Woodruff & Yiu, 2016; Yang, 2011) is perhaps telling us something about the expected outrage that another culture is copying “yours”. These blatantly unapologetic copies of architecture styles in the Chinese context are extreme examples of an attempt to attract buyers, by offering something else than generic high rise apartment buildings with little recognizable identity (den Hartog, 2010; Hulshof & Roggeveen, 2011). This identity of urban environments is the topic of this thesis and will be explored and defined further in the report.

What is important and perhaps sometimes overlooked in this outrage about these Chinese examples, is that in Europe, and other parts of the world, the creation of a local urban identity is commonplace as well. To stay with the example of Amsterdam, just outside the city center, on an old artificial island, a new residential neighborhood was built. This neighborhood, called Java-eiland, designed by Dutch architect Sjoerd Soeters, is filled with postmodern canal houses, complete with added canals to (partially) recreate the urban environment of the inner city of Amsterdam (PPHP, n.d.). While it is not a literal copy of the canal houses in the city, it is clear that a certain existing urban identity and its spatial characteristics are being used (fig. 4).

Urban identity is a complicated subject that is treated in different professions such as social and behavioral sciences and environmental psychology (Lalli, 1992; Riza, Doratli & Fasli, 2012), but is relevant in most if not all urbanism related sectors (Hull, Lam

Fig. 4. Modern canal houses in Java-eiland, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. August 9, 2017.

& Vigo, 1994; TĂślle, 2010). In this thesis, it is argued that there are three categories of possible research into urban identity. In the first category existing theory on the concept of urban identity often focuses on the relation of inhabitants of cities with large historic urban fabric with their physical environment (Aly, 2011; Lalli, 1992; TĂślle, 2010). This research however, does not show how the concept of urban identity works in modern urban areas like Gaoqiao, and Java-eiland. These projects are heavily inspired by an external historic urban identity, one from far away, and one from nearby. Projects leaning on an existing urban identity, constitute the second category. This thesis will focus on a third category of urban identity. This category concerns urban identity in modernist urban developments that do not lean on historic urban identity or even build on existing local identity. But rather focus on building an idealistic environment totally from scratch.

One of such urban environments is the new-town of Lelystad, the Netherlands.

Lelystad is one of the newest cities in the Netherlands and is built in its entirety on reclaimed land. The city was planned to be the central city of three large land reclamation sites in the former Zuiderzee (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, Baart, Bijlsma & Nio, 2012). The Zuiderzee was a large shallow bay in the Netherlands that was closed off by a dam, turned into a freshwater lake and given the name IJsselmeer. Of the large three planned land reclamations, only two were completed, leaving the already constructed city of Lelystad in a less than central position. As there were no previous existing settlements in this area, the city was built completely from

scratch. First plans for the capital of the new province were created in 1959 by modernist architect Cornelis van Eesteren, once the chairman of the International Congress of Modern Architecture [CIAM], but were rejected by the commission in charge of the project. The reasons that were given for the rejection of the functionalist and modernistic design were that it was too playful and expensive (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012). The government service for the IJsselmeer polders [RIJP], was now in charge of the design and used van Eesteren’s plan as a base for creating a toned down, cheaper plan. What remained was the functionalist approach and rational design (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012).

The purpose of this thesis is to research the considerations of the designers in creating a livable space for its future inhabitants, and what kind of urban identity this has created. This and the considerations of the people currently in charge of the spatial quality of the city will be reflected on the perspectives and views of the current inhabitants and critics of the city.

After the introduction, in the second chapter of this thesis, the focus will be put on the concept of urban identity, and what it means. This concept will be explored through relevant literature and subsequently defined for the purpose of the following research.

The third chapter of the thesis will focus on urban identity in new towns and includes the introduction to the study case. The fourth chapter will explore the efforts of the people involved in the design and realization of the study case to create a new urban identity, or any connection between the inhabitants/visitors and their physical environment. The fifth and most essential chapter of the research will contain the empirical findings of interviews and surveys done with the inhabitants and visitors of the study case. These findings are reflected upon in the sixth part of the thesis, which focuses on the reflection of the goals, execution and perception of the efforts of creating urban identity in the study case. With the conclusions in the seventh chapter, if possible, recommendations are made as to which of the used methods could be considered positive and useful for other developments.

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1.2

JUSTIFICATION

The examples of curiously themed Chinese new-towns in the introduction are not representative of many new-towns or large urban developments around the world.

However, many new-towns and large new urban developments are still being built throughout Asia and Africa for millions of inhabitants moving from the countryside to the city (UN, n.d.). On these mentioned continents the following quote is ever more relevant:

“...the past will at some point become too “small” to be inhabited and shared by those alive.”

(Koolhaas, 1995, p. 1248)

While existing research into urban identity focuses mostly on historic urban development, there is some research into urban identity in new-towns. One example of this research discusses the construction of a new urban identity on the basis of regionally relevant history and thus appealing to existing identity in the case of Telford New Town (Reynolds, 2015). Research on the urban identity of the post-war reconstructed Frankfurt and Rotterdam shows that other angles can be taken, and a new modern identities have been attempted to be created.

Even though a plethora of history is relevant for those locales the relevant authorities have decided to build an entirely new city and not to be burdened with the past (Čamprag, 2014). Documenting the relevant lessons from previously built developments can be vital in the success of the new ones. In this thesis it is argued these lessons should not merely include the struggle of physically realizing the intended design, but also the perception of the inhabitants on these efforts.

The choice for the study case of Lelystad is firstly because it suits the third category of research into urban identity as discussed in the introduction. As there are many new-towns and large urban development projects developed with modernist ideals and do not lean on historical identity, further justification is required.

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For the topic of urban identity, it is relevant that the study case is not just a new neighborhood to an existing city, but rather a new city as a whole. The reason for this differentiation is that residents in cities with existing historic urban fabric are reportedly referring to this historic part for their perceived urban identity of the city, even if they themselves live outside of those areas (Hull, et al., 1994; Lalli, 1992). To be able to more accurately reflect on the designers intentions to create urban identity it is therefore relevant that the subjects live in an environment almost entirely shaped by this intent. As the city of Lelystad is entirely designed and built in a matter of decades it fulfills this requirement.

The city is relatively young but has had time to mature and reflect on its development over the last fifty years since it first inhabitants moved in. With the example of Lelystad we should not only be able to reflect on the efforts of its initial creators, but also their past and current efforts to adjust this creation.

1.3

RESEARCH QUESTION

For the purpose of this thesis, a research question is formed to address the problem stated previously in the introduction and justification. The research question includes the selected study case for the reasons stated in the justification.

How is urban identity attempted to be created, and how is it perceived in modernist urban development? The case of new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands.

1.4

HYPOTHESES

A few hypotheses for the previously stated research question have been formed and stated below.

Designers of urban developments use historic architecture styles to appeal to an already existing urban identity, far or near.

Designers of urban developments use landmarks to impose an identity on the larger project area.

Urban identity in new-town Lelystad will be significantly less than in the case studies of Lalli (1988, 1992), possessing a historic city center.

As social structure facilitates urban identification (Wilkinson, 1986), the lack of existing communities in Lelystad cause lower identification with the city.

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1.5

METHODOLOGY

The first part of this thesis will be a theoretical study in the form of desk research.

One of the main goals of this research is to establish definitions for the expected use of the phrase ‘urban identity’ as well as all other terms that are expected to be used.

A literature study will focus on the various aspects of urban identity used by various disciplines. After this, three categories of urban identity will be established through the use of three different developments as examples.

After the concept of urban identity is treated, desk research is made on this urban identity in new towns. Firstly a literature study will be made to give an insight into the history and idealism of new towns. Secondly the study case, Lelystad, will be introduced through the discussion of its history, and its current state. For this purpose statistics and existing literature on the topic will be used to explain the context of the research.

To establish an accurate and complete view on the development of Lelystad, desk research on the topic will be complemented with interviews with experts on its past and current development. These interviews serve to give an insight into current and past intentions of creating urban identity.

This theory and observation are followed by the empirical part of the research.

Surveys accompanied by a small interview will be conducted with inhabitants and visitors of Lelystad. This study will focus on their perception of Lelystad externally, and as their physical environment.

In the last part of the research the intentions of the designers obtained through desk research and interviews will be reflected on with the results of the empirically gathered perceptions of inhabitants and visitors.

The thesis will be concluded with overall conclusions and possible answers to the research question. A reflection will be made on the accuracy of the stated hypotheses.

Introduction

Urban identity

New-towns

Theory

Theory

Existing empirical work

Built examples

Definition

Reputation

Historic urban development Historically inspired modern urban development Modernist urban development

Case study - Lelystad Historic background

Efforts

Perception

Designs

Reputation

Goals

Urban identity

Realization of plans

Empirical study

Conclusions Reflections Recommendations

Fig. 5. Overview of methodology and organization of the thesis.

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1.6

DEFINITIONS

In this thesis some phrases and terminology are used that are either ambiguous or otherwise uncommon, and are therefore defined here. Some terms, such as urban identity, will be further elaborated on later in this thesis.

‘Rowhouse’

A literal translation of the Dutch term ‘rijtjeshuis’. It describes a house located squarely between two often identical houses with no space in-between. Often in combinations of four or more.

‘Modern’

An indicator that the subject is, or comes from, recent times rather than from a long time ago.

‘Lelystad’

The urban area and surrounding suburban development of the new-town Lelystad, Flevoland, the Netherlands.

‘Modernism’

A philosophical movement from the beginning of the 20th century, covering many aspects of art and design, but in this thesis referring to the movement within urbanism. The philosophy is a reaction to bad living conditions and seeks progress through drastic standardization of housing and separation of functions within the cities.

‘The municipality’

The municipality Flevoland, the Netherlands.

‘Self identity’

The subjective perception of an individual on themselves and what they identify with. Possessing various categories of identity such as sexual, social and ethnic identity (Proshansky, 1978; Proshansky, et al., 1983).

‘Place identity’

Category of the individual self identity that refers to an unspecified place, a specific physical location (Proshansky, 1978).

‘Urban identity’

Scale of the individual place identity that refers to the city or a town as a whole (Lalli, 1988, 1992).

‘New-town’

A new city. Often planned top down directed by government institutions, and possessing a significant degree of autonomy, distinguishing it from satellite-cities (M. Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018).

of

Lelystad,

‘The RIJP’ ‘Rijksdienst voor de IJsselmeer Polders’

A specified government agency in charge of the spatial development and construction of and on the new land in the Netherlands.

‘CIAM’ ‘International Congress of Modern Architecture’

An organization with modernist architects such as Walter Gropius, Mart Stam, Gerrit Rietveld, Alvar Aalto, Aldo van Eyck, Le Corbusier and Cornelis van Eesteren as members.

‘PPMCC’ Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient

A measure of linear correlation between two variables. The formula is based on comparing two different strings of data and calculating the consistency of their values. Results range from -1 (total negative correlation), to 0 (no correlation), to +1 (total positive correlation).

‘Cronbach’s Alpha’

An estimate of the reliability of a test. The level of internal consistency of the test is used as a measure to predict the probability of similar results in following tests.

Results range from 0 (no internal consistency, unacceptable) to 1 (total internal consistency, excellent), with 0.7 representing the lower end of acceptable predicted reliability.

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2 URBAN IDENTITY

In this part of the thesis, the relevant discussion in literature surrounding urban identity and existing empirical work on the matter are used to give an understanding of the concept and allow for a more conclusive definition. Additionally, this chapter includes the establishment of three realms in which urban identity can be studied and an argument is made to focus on one of them.

Fig. 6. Various accent colors on the facades of low-rise rowhouses.

Botter, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018

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2.1

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK ON URBAN IDENTITY

Introduction

The main goal of this and following parts of the thesis is to define the concept of urban identity, and to create an understanding of the surrounding theory and literature. One of the central themes in this theory is how people perceive their environment.

Kevin Lynch (1960) describes how city dwellers are constantly engaged in recognizing urban elements as part of finding their way through the city. These urban elements, Lynch argues, need to be organized to form a coherent image of the surroundings. Lynch organizes these urban elements into five categories that together build the mental map of the city. He calls this, ‘the image of the city’ This however, is not an image in the sense of outside reputation, but rather a mental map for the people inside the city. He argues that this image consists of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. The aforementioned categories and the argument surrounding them can be described as an effort to understand how city dwellers perceive their environment.

Many scholars following, and some preceding, the work of Lynch have been engaged in similar efforts. While in his theory Lynch focused his efforts of shaping an image of the city for the purpose of wayfinding (Lynch, 1960; Lalli, 1992), others have suggested that the organization of urban attributes can be used for defining a place identity, or ‘sense of place’ (Proshansky, 1978; Relph, 2008). Relevant to the concept of urban identity these efforts have not only focused on how people built an abstract image of their city, for orientation sake, but also how they value these physical attributes of their environment. Earlier research on this has been done on the household scale (Adler, Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981), and later on the neighborhood scale (Hull, et al., 1994). These mentioned studies do not focus on the city level but instead on their own smaller respective scales. The scale of these studies does not render them irrelevant to the topic of urban identity, as their method and findings are acknowledged to be influential in the research on the larger scale (Lalli, 1992;

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Hull, et al., 1994).

It is on this topic, the scale, that the distinction between the phrases place identity and urban identity is made. According to Lalli (1992) place identity is a term referring to identity of places of any scale, while urban related identity, or urban identity regards the scale of the urban structure, a city or a town as a unit.

The establishment of a local identity through the valuation of physical attributes is a process that is not clearly agreed upon in the literature collected for this thesis. However, Proshansky (1978, p.156) argues that; “The place identity of the individual is neither a simple nor a static structure.” He argues that the valuing of or identifying with attributes is part of that very place identity, which in turn is part of the self identity of the individual (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff, 1983).

The self theory and other theories are part of another approach raised by Lalli (1992). He argues for the combination of what he calls, the cognitive perspective, the phenomenological perspective, the self and self-concept theories and the sociological influence. From this a more nuanced approach to finding the urban identity of a place is formed, focusing on quantitative results, but integrating the attitude of the subject to its surroundings, rather than just the attachment to physical attributes. In the following paragraphs, these different perspectives and other important ideas will be discussed.

The perspectives on urban identity

As Lalli (1992) proposes in his article on urban identity, there are at least four perspectives to the discourse on the topics relating to urban identity, or in some cases place identity. Different disciplines have taken various approaches to the topic, but have sometimes found themselves more overlapping than distinctly different.

Firstly, the so called cognitive perspective concerns the idea of cognitive mapping (Lalli, 1992). This idea, first proposed by Tolman (1948), considers that

the subjects of his studies, both men and rats, create a cognitive representation of their surroundings. Later, two distinct interpretations of these maps have come to light, an orientation-related representation, as described by Lynch (1960), and a meaning-related representation. While both representations have in some instances named these cognitive maps ‘images’ of the subjects surroundings, only the meaningrelated representation has included softer factors, such as symbolism or the subjects valuation of the attributes in its surroundings (Downs & Stea, 1979). The cognitive perspective has been largely been the territory of the environmental psychologists, while the following perspective has been taken by human geographers (Relph, 1976; Lalli, 1992).

This second perspective is named the phenomenological perspective. This perspective focuses on the emotional attachment to the environment of the subjects (Lalli, 1992). It is argued that this emotional attachment to, or identification with the environment is mostly unselfconscious and is only made aware when under threat (Relph, 1976; Proshansky, et al., 1983). Hull et al. (1993) demonstrate this in their research on the attachment to urban attributes after a destructive hurricane, revealing which lost artifacts they had valued most. In this phenomenological perspective, the relation between the subject and their environment is seen in a more holistic sense, rather than just the observation of the subject (Relph, 1976; Lalli, 1992).

The third perspective concerns the self and self-concept theories. Here, place identity is seen as part of the subjects individual identity, next to gender identity, political identity or ethnic identity (Lalli, 1992).

This idea is mainly adopted by sociologists and social psychologists and have significantly influenced the work of Proshansky (Lalli, 1992), which is discussed in previous paragraphs.

The fourth perspective is the sociological influence, mainly from the angle of urban sociology. Lalli (1992) argues that the purely sociological approaches of Treinen (1965) and others only have limited consideration for the physical characteristics of actions and social structures. These

aspects do come to light in urban sociology, where the spatial factors have a more important position. One important finding of these studies is the value of ‘home’ or ‘Heimat’, emphasizing the importance of rurality, in contrast to the urban which only in the last decades has been seen as holding more positive aspects (Häußermann & Siebel, 1987).

With the four noted perspectives in the previous paragraphs, Lalli (1992) has suggested that although some of the theoretical work on concepts approaching place identity are relevant to the empirical work on urban related identity, the actual existing empirical work is severely lacking in regard to urban identity.

Existing empirical work on place and urban identity

While there has been a decent amount of empirical work done over the last decade, most of this focuses on smaller scales such as homes and neighborhoods or specific correlations to topics such as performance of tourism (Hallak, Brown & Lindsay, 2012). Not all empirical work related to urban identity will be discussed here, but rather a selection of works ranging from the identification and valuation of urban attributes (Hull, et al., 1994) to the comprehensive study of urban identity from a holistic standpoint (Lalli, 1992).

Lalli (1992) points at previous studies done in the eighties by Rivlin (1982), Rowles (1983) Winter and Church (1984) and Schneider (1986) with respective focus on bonds to the neighborhood, rootedness in a rural environment, relation between emotional ties to a location and political involvement, and perspectives on descriptions of urban environment. However, this section will focus more on the more recent examples of the research regarding this topic, including but not limited to Lalli’s own work (Lalli, 1988; Lalli 1992).

As mentioned earlier, it is stated that the importance of urban attributes to inhabitants becomes more salient when they are under pressure of changing or have been removed altogether. The research of Speller, Lyons and Twigger-Ross (2002) further

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emphasizes this position. This research is done from the environmental psychology viewpoint, which is taken often in regard to place and urban identity (Lalli, 1988, 1992; Speller, et al., 2002). The empirical part of this research focuses on the changing conceptions of urban identity in the residents of an old mining town that is undergoing impactful changes. The whole town was torn down and residents and houses were subsequently moved to another spot, although not rebuilt in the same way. According to the research many of the inhabitants of the town had troubles identifying in the same way with the new town as they did with the old one (Speller, et al., 2002). The changing environment of the inhabitants of the town is said to have greatly impacted their connection to each other and the community, and exposed a divide in people that previously identified more with the mining community, and those that did so less (Spellet, et al., 2002). It becomes apparent that the topic of continuity is a recurring and salient topic when it comes to the identification with urban environment.

The study of place identity by Hull, et al. (1994) focuses more on the symbolism of urban attributes in relation to place identity, but highlights a statement made in earlier paragraphs. This statement regards the value of urban attributes and is largely unselfconscious, but can be exposed when under threat. In this study the place identity of people who have suffered significant damage to their physical environment is constructed through the valuation of urban attributes, or symbols, as they are named in this study. Many of these symbols have been lost or damaged by the power of a large hurricane and have therefore exposed another layer of valuation.

This layer is the value of “missing”, something difficult to reproduce in normal scenarios.

From the results of the study they argue that the symbols within the urban environment can remind people of a common history and invoke a stronger sense of community (Hull, et al., 1994).

In a more recent study by Hallak, et al. (2012) the focus is on the relation between the performance of tourism entrepreneurs and their place identity. It is argued here that a sense of community, established through place identity, may have a positive effect on

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their involvement with the local community and in fact their overall success. To measure the place identity of the subjects Hallak et al.

(2012) used Lalli’s (1992) urban-related identity scale, this scale will be discussed in later paragraphs. With the research, the writers argue, they have established that place identity is relevant to tourism management and is therefore impactful outside the realm of community. The argument for this is the conclusion that the results of the study identified a positive relationship between place identity and entrepreneurial performance.

Important to the goal of this chapter, the formulating of the definition of the term urban identity, as opposed to the more general place identity is the work of Lalli (1998). In this paper he attempts to incorporate the town scale into the process rather than the generic ‘place’ which often refers to smaller scales.

For the empirical work the establishment of three dimensions is central to the surveys done. The first dimension is named ‘personal continuity’ containing questions related to the familiarity and experience with the urban environment. The second dimension is ‘external presentation’, which is concerned with notions such as pride and other evaluations of the town made by the subject.

The final category is ‘general identification’ which looked into whether subjects felt at home or felt rooted in the town. The results of the study showed a direct relation between the length of residence and identification with the town (Lalli, 1988).

A few years later, the same author (Lalli, 1992) published a new study. This study is similar to the one described in the last paragraph, however, this time instead of three dimensions, Lalli (1992) uses five dimensions, splitting ‘general identification’ into two and adding another dimension. These five dimensions according to Lalli (1992) make up the urban-related identity, or urban identity of the person. The first dimension described in this study has not changed and is called ‘external evaluation’ and focuses on their evaluation of their town and its reputation.

The second dimension is called ‘continuity with personal past’ and is very similar to the ‘personal continuity’ dimension of the previous study. This dimension focuses on the

personal historic and symbolic connection to the town. The third dimension is called ‘general attachment’ and measures the rootedness and belonging aspects of the urban identity. The fourth, similar to the fifth, are both sub-dimensions of ‘general attachment’. ‘Perception of familiarity’ constitutes this fourth dimension and covers the daily interaction and importance of the town to everyday life. The final dimension that is treated by Lalli (1992) is ‘commitment’. In this dimension people are asked to expose the perceived importance of the town for their future, and whether they would want to stay there. These five dimensions are each split up in several questions that have overlapping significance to the topic. This way, an average score of the questions can be used as a representative for each dimension. The score is derived from proposing statements in a 1 to 5 point based system, where the subject can either disagree strongly (1) or agree strongly (5), and every whole number in between.

The study was performed on the town of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

A historic town with an old town center and split by the river Neckar.

The results of the study indicated several correlations that were expected by the writer (Lalli, 1992). The first of these correlations were the subscales or dimensions themselves. Additionally, the ‘external evaluation’ dimension seems to correlate most with all the other dimensions. In this study correlations with the identification with the town and secondary questions were also inspected. One of the important findings was that length of residence correlates positively with the degree of identification with the town. The birthplace of the subject however had no influence on the identification with the town. Lalli (1992) argues here that the methods applied in this study are successfully operationalized and can be used in diverse issues in the field.

Over the last paragraphs an overview has been given of some of the relevant empirical studies on the topic of place and urban identity. These studies, with Lalli (1992) in particular, give a valuable insight into the possibilities of measuring urban identity in the field.

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2.2

DEFINING URBAN IDENTITY

In this chapter a definition of urban identity will be derived from existing theory on the subject. Following the definition of urban identity, the relation between urban identity and the topics of physical environment, social structure, demography, politics, heritage and idealism will be discussed.

Definitions

In the previous chapter a small overview has been given on existing theory and empirical studies regarding the topic of place identity and urban identity. But how exactly will these terms be defined for this study? And what influences will be taken into account? The following paragraphs will give an overview of the interpretations of the terminology on the topic of urban identity, and a final definition will be derived from this.

As the term urban identity is in most definitions a part of place identity (Lalli, 1988, 1992), which in turn is a part of the self identity (Proshansky, et al., 1983), these concepts will be discussed first.

The concept of self and following self identity are said to be at the basis of the main concept of this thesis, urban identity.

Various theorists have discussed the self concept and as Proshansky et al. (1983, p. 58) state:

“...’self’ can be thought of as a term which describes the individual as a total system including both conscious and unconscious perception of his past, his daily experiences and behaviours, and his future aspirations.”

The self, in this sense is the perception of the individual on their own being, in the broadest sense of the word.

Beyond this, it is argued that part, or a substructure, of this self concept is self identity (Krupat, 1983; Proshansky, et al., 1983; Lalli, 1992). This self identity is described as the collection of several specific identities (Proshansky, 1978). These are identities such

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as sexual identity, social class, ethnic identity, occupation, religious identity, political identity and more.

It follows from this that place identity is the collection of the sub identities of the self identity that relate to space. This place identity however is not specific on the scale of this physical environment, and is dependent on the definition of this scale when used (Lalli, 1992).

“By place identity we mean those dimensions of the self that define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, preferences, feelings, values, goals and behavioural tendencies and skills relevant to this environment.”

(Proshansky, 1978, p. 155)

The use of the term space identity is often related to smaller scales, losing some meaning on the bigger scale, due to the growing significance of factors not seen as purely connected to the physical environment (Lalli, 1992). For example some of these factors are strong sociological factors concerning pride of the city turning into tribalism and discrimination.

The lack of specified scale in the concept of place identity is the main difference with the term urban identity (Lalli, 1988, 1992).

Lalli (1988, p. 303) takes issue with the term place used by other scholars and calls it “[a] very broad and partly fuzzy concept...”. His efforts of defining and creating a usable term to measure place identity on the urban scale, the scale of town or cities, result in the term urban identity (Lalli, 1988).

To summarize, as argued by Lalli (1988; 1992) urban identity, sometimes phrased as urban related identity, is defined as a specific scale of place identity, referring to the scale of a town or a city. Place identity is the part of the self-identity that refers to the physical environment through different aspects of dimensions such as ideas, beliefs, and feelings (Proshansky, 1978).

Physical environment

In the last paragraphs and chapters the point has been made that urban identity relates to the urban, the town and city scale.

Additionally it has been argued that many of the aspects that form place and urban identity are in fact physical attributes. In the following paragraphs this relation between the physical environment and urban identity will be explored further.

Crucial to the concepts of urban and place identity is the reference to the physical environment through use of the words urban and place. In the last paragraphs the difference between the two terms has been discussed. However, the relative importance of the physical environment in the urban and place identity, and identity as a whole will be illustrated here. Some scholars have argued that although place influences identity of a person, the social factors are more impactful.

Hard (1987) argues that in the case of regional identity, the physical environment is barely a factor at all, and is mostly the result of social communication. Lalli (1992) calls this conclusion shortsighted. He argues that the physical environment is what guides social interactions and therefor shapes the course of this social construction of the identity. But what factors in this physical environment can be distinguished, and which of those have more, or less, influence?

Often referred to in literature on the city branding and identity are landmarks (Lynch, 1960; Clerici & Mironowicz, 2009; Riza, et. al., 2011). Tall skyscrapers, modern architecture, a TV tower or an impressive bridge, these are all examples of what can be regarded as landmarks in the city. What is their role as landmarks, and how do they relate to urban identity? Lynch (1960) focuses on the function of the landmark mainly as a point of reference for navigating through the city. Other scholars, such as Clerici and Mironowicz (2009) argue that landmarks can serve another function, namely becoming a symbol or representation for a certain area, neighborhood or city as a whole. Clear examples of landmarks becoming a symbol for their respective areas or cities are the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York City and the Harbour Bridge of Sydney.

While enormously important for the creation of marketing material for the tourism sector of these respective cities, the connection between quality of life for the inhabitants of the city and these landmarks is not very clear.

Nevertheless, one aspect of urban identity seems to have a relatively strong connection to these landmarks. Lalli (1988, 1992) argues that part of what constitutes urban identity is external evaluation, this includes the aspect of perceived prestige and envy of the town.

As the external view of the city can arguably be influenced by city marketing, for that is its goal, this can in turn change the way inhabitants think their city is being perceived by outsiders, subsequently influencing their urban identity.

Other than landmarks, the urban design of the city, or rather in terms of experience of the inhabitants, the morphology and structure of the urban fabric is arguably an important part of the physical environment that shapes urban identity. It are these aspects of the physical environment that cause social interactions that shape the urban identity as described by Lalli (1992). ÄŒamprag (2014) argues that other than the placement and shape of the buildings, the building materials and therefore colors and texture of the buildings have been locally specific for a long time due to the use of locally available resources. From the 20th century on, resources become more globally available and the need for the use of locally specific resources was lost. In historic parts of some cities these local materials are still prevalent and give the exterior a local character. According to Hough (1990), in the newer parts of the city, the fabric is no longer based on necessity but rather on design, meaning urban design now, willingly or unwillingly influences urban identity. In later paragraphs on the creation of urban identity, this last argument will be discussed in more depth.

Following the reasoning of Lalli (1992) and Hard (1987) the importance of social interaction to form urban identity and its strong relation to the urban fabric, that facilitates and often causes these interactions, it can be stated that because no city has the same physical state, in every city or town the inhabitants have a different

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perception of urban identity. Although it might seem obvious, the previous conclusion is imperative to the following research and therefore needs to be expressed.

Social structure

As expressed in the previous paragraphs, some scholars have argued that the social interactions and structure is what most shapes place identity (Hard, 1987).

Although Hards argument was not agreed upon by all scholars (Lalli, 1992), it cannot be denied that social interaction is a large part of what shapes urban identity. In this part of the thesis the relation of this social structure to urban identity will be discussed in more depth.

As previously identified, urban identity is defined as part of a perception of the self, conscious, as well as subconscious (Relph, 1976; Proshansky, et al., 1983). These identities of the individual are subjective to the experience of that person and are therefore subject to more than just obvious physical influences. As the social interactions between people are often the result of, or shaped by the streets, corners and squares where they meet, the social structure is closely tied to this physical environment (Lalli, 1988, 1992). But how does this social structure influence the view of the urban environment, and therefore urban identity? Other than just the physical environment, the communities, as part of a social structure, facilitate social interactions through which meanings are shaped, and provide the context to express their own identity (Wilkinson, 1986). The forming of these communities is an effect of the need to distinguish groups of people from others (Samspon & Goodrich, 2009). Tools to make these distinctions between groups can be visual attributes such as skin or hair color but relevant to the topic of urban identity can be the geographical location of the ‘group members’.

From the prior statements it can be argued that the relation between physical environment, social structure and urban identity cannot be seen as separate.

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Demography and politics

Other than the matters that most researchers and discussed literature have focused on, such as the earlier noted physical environment and social structure, underlying demographics and political involvement influence the perception of place and urban identity.

In virtually all empirical studies mentioned in earlier paragraphs, the age, gender, occupation, length of residency, type of residency, place of birth of the respondents and many other factors are included in the surveys on place and urban identity, to be able to build a profile of and spot correlations within the respondents (Lalli, 1988, 1992; Hull, et al., 1994; Hallak, et al., 2012). These factors are not directly related to the research concept at hand, but rather the underlying factors that are expected to influence the outcomes of the study. Correlations between the main research subject, in this case place or urban identity, and these underlying factors are generally the most effective way to distinguish between similar or different answers to questions regarding the main subject.

While Lalli (1992) points out that politics can be seen another factor that influences local identity and urban identity, this claim is based entirely on the measurement of political engagement, not on the actual political beliefs on the individual.

As suggested by Winter and Church (1984), respondents who identify more with their environment are more likely to be politically engaged in their community.

The contents of these politics however, remain undiscussed. Over the past few paragraphs, and in much of the studied literature one can get the impression that the physical environment is something static or a factor that has not been influenced by the respondents. While in some contexts this is the case, in many countries and cities, local politics, with elected members, have a say in the physical development of the environment. An important aspect of this that relates to urban identity is the classification and treatment of heritage.

Heritage

For many cities around the world, but especially in Europe, it is the historic city center, the urban fabric, the narrow streets, the crooked houses, the old cathedrals that help shape the urban identity of the city. At least, it seems that way. Empirical studies such as Hull, et al. (1994) show that at least part of the urban attributes that are referred to by respondent sin regard to place identity have a historical significance. This historical significance is a difficult and uncomfortable subject, due to its subjective nature. What is important to one individual can be irrelevant to another. Heritage, in the sense of urban attributes however, is not as easy as this.

Heritage in the realm of towns or cities often concerns century old buildings, or buildings that belong to a certain valuable architectural style. In some instances, an entire part of the city, usually the historic city center is considered heritage and is consequently protected under local or national regulations, or even as part of UNESCO world heritage (UNESCO World Heritage, n.d.). Since urban identity is not usually defined as its importance to the rest of the world, but rather whether or not the inhabitants identify with the place, this heritage is only partially relevant to the topic at hand. The general concept of heritage however, shows many similarities with the concept of place and urban identity.

How is determined what urban attributes constitute heritage is a difficult question and does not result in the same answer in all locations and time periods. But what is certain is that whenever something is considered heritage, it is a sign of an ideological conviction that history is important to us and our offspring. In some periods of time these convictions were less strong, and due to bad living conditions, the same cosy city centers so important in heritage now, were seen as dirty and dangerous (Howard, 1965). Modern ideals rejected these old, dirty, narrow streets and argued for a clean, spacious and rational environment (Howard, 1965).

Idealism and the creation of identity

The idealism of the early 20th century was led in the spheres of urbanism by Lloyd Wright, Howard, Le Corbusier. Each had their own perception of what the future city should look like, but one general theme was clear. The city was to be modern, clean, spacious and would be a rejection of the cities of the past (Howard, 1965; Fishman, 1982) This movement has resulted in buildings, neighborhoods and even cities with little reference to the past, but instead to the future. Some examples of this will be discussed in later paragraphs.

After the second world war in Europe, urban designers faced an enormous challenge, the rebuilding of the many destroyed cities. This essentially created two camps, one called for rebuilding the cities, some to the teeth (such as Gdansk, Poland and Dresden, Germany), and others that rejected the dirty, uncomfortable past, and built a reinvented modern city (such as Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Frankfurt, Germany).

No matter the approach, the impact on the urban identity of the city was enormous, some calling the rebuilt cities a fake, and others calling the modern replacements cold and lacking of identity (Czepczynski, 2008; Čamprag, 2014). A prominent right wing nationalist politician in the Netherlands even called an important modernist architect responsible for projects in the former historic center of Rotterdam a “perpetrator of crimes against humanity” (Wagendorp, 2017) for not embracing the past enough.

While political rhetoric does not define the city’s identity, it can influence the city, or the perception of it. The rebuilding of buildings that were destroyed years before is a clear example of an attempt to restore urban identity. But how do new, idealistic, modern developments that do not refer to the past create the same connection of the inhabitants with their city or town? Can a new urban identity be constructed without relying on a prior ‘organic’ development?

These central questions will be attempted to be answered in this thesis by the methods described in the methodology.

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2.3

THREE REALMS OF URBAN IDENTITY

In the next paragraphs the argument will be made that there exist three realms in which urban identity can be studied. The first realm includes those developments that have a significant historic urban fabric, with small narrow street and century old buildings. The second realm considers those developments that are modern, do not have a significant amount of organic growth and history, but use historic development as a clear inspiration or even copy their design. The third realm is what this thesis is about. This realm considers developments that do not lean on historic urban developments, do not clearly refer to them, but instead attempt to create a new urban identity, a modern, forward looking creation.

Urban identity in historic urban development

As explained in earlier paragraphs urban identity has a clear connection with the perceived historic value of buildings (Hull, et al., 1994). In many city centers in Europe and around the world, this historic development is abundant and thus influences the perceived urban identity by the inhabitants and visitors of the town. A clear example of this is the study case of the empirical research done by Lalli (1992) in Heidelberg, Germany. Although not explicitly mentioned in the research itself, the city center of Heidelberg is filled with historic attributes such as cobblestones, old buildings and churches, old fountains and statues, and a large pedestrian bridge across the river adjacent to the city center. Perhaps equally important is the roughness of the city center, different setbacks from one building to the next, crooked, narrow streets and a lack of large glass and metal modern architecture in that central area.

On top of the physical attributes of the historical city that could impact the urban identity of the city, the existence of an historic city center also brings a sense of historical tradition and being part of a longer, more important chain of events. As the historic city of Heidelberg was (as in many historic cities) not designed and imposed, but rather

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organically built and aged it could be used to attribute pride of a local community or city (fig.7).

Fig. 7. Square in the historic city center of Heidelberg, Germany (Caplar, n.d.)

In cities like Heidelberg, containing a large body of historic development, studies have shown that the local tourist industries and even the municipality often use this to market the town. Hubbard and Lilley (2000) discuss this subject in the case of Stratfordupon-Avon, United Kingdom. They argue that the towns interest in attracting revenue from tourists causes the commodification of place identity and a focus on retaining the image of the ‘medieval English townscape’.

What becomes clear from examples such as Heidelberg and Stratford-upon-Avon is that the historic image of the city of is not just static and maintained for enjoyment and pride of the inhabitants, but additionally a convenient marketing tool. Which parts of the city are determined to be historic or otherwise valuable for the identity of the city, and which ones are not, at least in the case described by Hubbard and Lilley (2000), depends on what is convenient for the town. Steering Stratfordupon-Avon to focus on maintaining an image from a specific time period, specifically the time it was the birthplace of William Shakespeare, is a conscious effort with mainly economic drivers. The authors argue that geographers should be careful to dismiss the desire to maintain a certain image of the city as ‘inauthentic’, but rather take into account these internal as well as external desires for a certain image or identity of the city (Hubbard & Lilley, 2000).

Urban identity in historically inspired contemporary urban development

The struggle of some historic cities to deal with their heritage and historic image and identity in a consistent way is emphasized in cities where a part or the entirety of the historic urban fabric has been destroyed during bombing campaigns in the second world war. Rebuilding an ‘inauthentic’ remake of the historic city was not supported by everyone, mainly because of strong desires to modernize the city (Čamprag, 2014).

Some cities like Gdansk, Poland and Dresden, Germany have rebuilt large parts of their historic urban fabric. Well known examples of cities that have decided not to rebuild after the destruction of their historic city centers are Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Frankfurt, Germany. These cities decided to modernize instead, and arguably lost a large part of their historic urban identity because of this. This is not to say that these cities have therefore lost any and all identification of their inhabitants to the city (Čamprag, 2014). Rotterdam and Frankfurt have instead developed modern city centers with large malls, a noticeable skyline and new architectural masterpieces designed by the biggest architects (fig. 8).

destruction of the city center, the modern municipal building has been demolished and the historic buildings along the Hühnermarkt are faithfully being rebuilt. Heilmeyer (2017) notes the general dislike of everything new and concrete that was built after the war, something that causes many post-war modern buildings to have been destroyed within a few decades of their construction.

Instead of recognizing value in these modern buildings, in many cases the designers and developers are looking back.

“Now, in most German cities, the preference is to rummage through city maps from before 1945 and use them as a starting point for new urban development.”

(Heilmeyer, 2017, p. 148)

Fig. 9. Original Hühnermarkt in 1903. Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

(Fay, 1903)

Fig. 8. Skyline of Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Wolf, 2015)

However, a clear wish to revive some of Frankfurt’s destroyed history has been actualized in a large project in its city center.

After the destruction of the historic buildings along the Hühnermarkt in the second world war, a modernistic municipal building had come in its place. But in 2018, almost 75 years after the bombardments on and

Fig. 10. Rebuilt Hühnermarkt in 2017. Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

(Bremer, 2017)

Granted, not all cities around the globe that are building projects inspired by historical developments have had a painful rupture with their own past. Some developments are simply built with a theme

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completely alien to their geographical location. In the introduction to this thesis the case of Gaoqiao just outside Shanghai, China has been discussed. Gaoqiao, or ‘Hollandvillage’, is a new-town themed almost entirely like the canal houses of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The difference with the example from Frankfurt is clear, almost 9000 kilometers and approximately 400 years apart from its original construction the famous canal houses have been copied (fig. 11). The Amsterdam themed new-town is not alone in its Disney-esque attempts of reconstruction of existing urban identities. London, Paris and German themed towns are all present (den Hartog, 2010). But the stark contrast to their surroundings is not to be ignored. China’s vast, generic, high-rise residential developments lack some of the spatial qualities that make historic urban developments like Amsterdam and Paris so well liked (den Hartog, 2010; Hulshof & Roggeveen, 2011). It is therefore not surprising that the developers have chosen to use this theming, especially since the sense of exotisism and exclusiveness is higher than what a classical Chinese theme would produce.

What is often overlooked is that the imitation of existing urban identity is not limited to China. Imitation is perhaps a strong word, but many projects around the Netherlands, outside the original canal districts are certainly heavily inspired by them.

In the introduction to this thesis Java-eiland, a new modern neighborhood in Amsterdam, inspired by 17th century canal houses, has been discussed. But to emphasize this is not an exception, Roombeek, in Enschede the Netherlands, will be used as an example here.

Roombeek is a neighborhood in one of the larger cities in the east of the Netherlands.

This modern neighborhood, like Java-eiland, includes a strip of modern interpretations of typical canal houses (fig. 12). While the examples of Roombeek and Gaoqiao are not completely comparable, they share the general approach of using an existing urban identity, with recognizable attributes, to build a modern neighborhood.

In the last few paragraphs some examples of urban identity in historical urban development and historically inspired urban development have been discussed. Some

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of the research on place and urban identity, especially empirical, has been on cities with this historical urban fabric such as Heidelberg (Lalli, 1988, 1992). The research on urban identity in historically inspired developments is less clear, but a lot of implicit writing has been done on the new-towns around Shanghai by den Hartog (2010) and others.

While actually perceived urban identity in historically inspired developments remains unclear, and a relevant subject of study, this thesis will focus on a third realm in which one can study urban identity.

Fig. 11. Replication of Dutch canal houses in Gaoqiao, Shanghai, China. November 18, 2017.

Fig. 12. Modern interpretation of Dutch canal houses in Roombeek, Enschede, the Netherlands. (Rondleidingen Roombeek Enschede, n.d.)

Urban identity in modernist urban development

While the phrase modernism has a lot of meanings, and can be interpreted in different ways in different fields, the main use of the word here is to describe a kind of urban development that is neither historically organically grown, nor is it modern and inspired by historical urban development.

Modernist urban development is that urban development which is designed with a vision of the future, with little to no references to the past, rejecting the dirty and dark existing cities.

In earlier paragraphs, the modernist re-development of cities like Frankfurt and Rotterdam has been mentioned. These cities have been rebuilt in a modern way but are, due to their retaining of some original structures and historic remnants, in no way the poster child of modernist urban development. The idealism of the modernist movement is best represented in projects like the Bijlmermeer, a large modernistic neighborhood built just outside Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The Bijlmermeer, or as its colloquially called ‘Bijlmer’, was built in the late 1960ies and consisted of high-rise residential flats layed out in the pattern of honeycombs (fig. 13).

Inspired by modernist architect Le Corbusier and the ideas of CIAM urban designer Nassuth designed the modern neighborhood with separation of functions, separation of different modes of transport and large quantities of green between the high-rise buildings (Monclús, Díez Medina & GarcíaPérez, 2018).

as the final nail in the coffin of modernist urban development in the west (Monclús, et al., 2018). At the time of writing only a small part of the original development still stands, the rest has been torn down and replaced by lower scale residential districts.

Modernist urban development often has a bad reputation and seen as cold and anonymous places, yet these developments are arguably some of the most thought through idealistic developments that exist to date. The pragmatism and functionalism of the projects were initially attractive because they provided a cheap and spacious living environment, but often showed weaknesses soon after completion.

In the previous paragraphs the example of the Bijlmer, a modernist neighborhood has been discussed. In this thesis however, the focus will not be on a neighborhood, but on a new-town. The reason for the study case being a new-town is manifold; A new-town is (supposed to be) an independent city where the residents cannot use existing historic urban fabric to identify with. Urban identity is best measured at the scale of the entire town or city, not just neighborhoods or other smaller developments (Lalli, 1988, 1992). And a new-town is perhaps a complete representation of popular and accepted architectural and urbanistic ideals of that time.

With the perceived failure of the design of the Bijlmer, one question is still unanswered; can modern developments create a new perceived urban identity? These and other questions will be treated in the case study and following chapters of this thesis.

Fig. 13. The Bijlmermeer near the end of its construction. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief Beeldbank, 1973)

In the case of the Bijlmer, the many projected middle class inhabitants never came, and because of a large number of immigrants coming in from the Dutch colony of Suriname that gained independence, the target group changed completely. The neighborhood became well known for the large amount of criminality and soon got a bad reputation. For many critics it was seen

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2.4

SUMMARY

Over the last chapter the concept of urban identity has been discussed in depth with the support of existing theoretical as well as empirical work. Here a short overview will be made of the treated subjects and arguments.

The term urban identity is not self-evident and therefore requires a look into existing theory on the matter. Lynch (1960) was one of the first scholars to argue for the categorization and organized recognition of urban attributes, in this case for the sake of navigating. Later, scholars such as Proshansky (1978) and Relph (2008) argued for the use of categorization of urban attributes and valuing them to establish a “sense of place”. This is the basis of the term urban identity. Urban identity is derived from the self concept, an individual perception of the self. This self concept is said to contain a number of different identities, things that an individual does or does not identify with (Lalli, 1992).

The often used phrase ‘place identity’ is one of these noted identities and refers to the specific identity of the individual that relates to the physical environment (Proshansky, 1978; Relph, 2008). Because ‘place identity’ does not specify a scale or subject, Lalli (1988, 1992) argues for the concept of ‘urban identity’. Urban identity is a scale of ‘place identity’ that refers to the city or town as a whole.

Other than the existing theoretical work on urban identity and related terminology, empirical work on the matter is discussed. The earlier mentioned valuing of urban attributes is applied on the household scale (Adler, et al., 1981) and later on the neighborhood scale (Hull, et al., 1994). Other empirical research mostly focuses on secondary correlations with urban identity.

An example of such a study is done by Hallak, et al. (2012) with the goal of researching the possibility of a positive correlation between personal urban identification and success in the tourism sector. One of the central figures in the empirical work on urban identity is Marco Lalli. In his research on urban identity in the cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg, both in Germany, empirical methods are explored and employed to establish quantifiable urban

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identity (Lalli, 1988, 1992). Five dimensions of urban identity are established to measure individual identification with the town or city.

Each dimension has its own specific aspects that are tested through the grading of relevant statements by the respondents. This method has proven useful and is repeated by other scholars (Hallak, et al., 2012).

In the second part of this chapter the definition of urban identity that follows from the treated literature is spelled out. This process is followed by exploring the relation of urban identity to several relevant topics; the physical environment, social structure, demography and politics, heritage and idealism.

In the final part of the chapter an argument is made for the distinguishing of three realms in which urban identity can be studied. The first realm is urban identity in historic urban development, meaning in developments with prominent historic urban fabric, carrying a certain tradition and attraction. The second realm is urban identity in historically inspired contemporary urban development. This realm is more complicated and contains those developments that are leaning on existing urban developments and use some of their unique characteristics to reproduce part or all of the existing urban identity of that place. Examples of post war reconstruction in cities are used, but also contemporary developments in cities in China and the Netherlands that reproduce the look and feel of classical Dutch canal-houses.

The final realm that is discussed is urban identity in modernist urban development. The example of the Bijlmer is used to argument a certain layer of controversy and failures surrounding these modernist developments, while at the same time showing that these developments are not relying on external or past urban identities and instead look to the future for inspiration.

Urban identity in this realm will be the focus of this thesis.

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3 NEW-TOWNS AND THE STUDY CASE

In the last chapter and in the introduction the thesis the concept of new-town has been mentioned several times.

But what exactly is a new-town? This question, along with an introduction the case study, Lelystad, will be the topic of this chapter.

Fig. 14. Aerial view of the construction of Lelystad. (Ondaan, 1962)

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3.1

INTRODUCTION TO NEW-TOWNS

In the literature around architectural and urbanistic theory it is almost impossible not to see concepts mentioned such as ‘Broadacre city, ‘Garden City’ and ‘Radiant City’. These three concepts each represent an idea of what the urban world should look like according to influential architects and urban planners in the early 20th century. The next paragraphs will go into the relevant history and reason for these theories, and go into the status of some contemporary examples of new-towns and their reputation.

the city would be self-sufficient. In his theory this number would be 32.000 inhabitants.

Once this city was fully populated, a new city would be built, and eventually a network of self-sufficient ‘Garden Cities’ would be created.

Historic background

Due to large population growth and migration from the countryside to the cities during the industrial revolution in Europe many cities became less and less favourable to live in. As the steam engine was popularized it caused a great influx of polluting factories and consequently workforce to accumulate in the city centers. Living conditions in the city center deteriorated notably in cities like London, U.K., where the lack of proper sanitation, pollution and overcrowdedness had great effects on the health of the city’s population (Razzell, 2002). Spread of diseases like cholera and smallpox were commonplace in the 19th century inner cities. Around Europe, many of the factory owners and a large part of the upper class had moved to mansions in the countryside.

At the end of the 19th century, Sir Ebenezer Howard proposed what he thought was a solution to many if not all of the existing problems in the modern city of this time. His ideas however, did not apply to existing cities, but rather was a formula to built new ones, even a whole network of them (Howard & Osborn, 1965; Fishman, 1982). Howards ideal city was focused on separating functions like residential areas and work, so that nobody in the ‘Garden City’ would have to live near dirty factories. The proposal of a circular shaped city with rings of different functions contained wide open boulevards to a large central park (fig. 15). To circumvent the problem of overpopulation, Howard proposed to maximize the number of inhabitants to where

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Fig. 15. Garden-City model from 1922. (Howard & Osborn, 1965)

Derived from the ‘Garden City’ of Howard, was the so called new-town movement. This movement consisted of a group of prominent gentlemen in the United Kingdom that wanted Howards plans to be realized, and petitioned for the construction of one hundred new-towns. The successes of this will be discussed in following paragraphs.

Fig. 16. Sketch of futuristic Broadacre City by Lloyd Wright. (Pfeiffer, Gössel & Wright, 2010)

While Howards plans were far reaching and a complete reversal of the existing cities of his time, other theories like the one of Frank Lloyd Wright went even further, disassembling the city almost entirely. Famous architect Lloyd Wright’s idea came into being during the rise of the

automobile and was therefore also a central theme of the plan. ‘Broadacre City’, as the theory was called, suggested to split up much of the land in the continental United States into acres, or around 4000 square meters.

Each family would get such a piece of land and the existing cities would be dissolved (Fishman, 1982). The decentralized city would be connected mostly by cars, and inhabitants would work part-time on their land, and part-time in the factory or office.

While it is difficult to describe ‘Broadacre City’ as an actual city, since it is rather trying to be the opposite, it has a lot in common with the ‘Garden City’. Both theories are a response to the less than optimal living conditions in the existing cities and look to future technologies and insights for solutions.

Another example of this, with radically different results, is ‘Ville Radieuse’, or ‘Radiant City’, by modernist architect Le Corbusier.

Fig. 17. A model of the Radiant City. (Foundation Le Corbusier, n.d.)

‘Radiant City’ followed from the fourth ‘International Congress of Modern Architecture’ [CIAM] held on a boat from Marseille, France to Athens, Greece, in 1933.

During this congress, modernist thinkers, architects and urbanists from all over Europe discussed the functional city and compared ideas and existing plans. Le Corbusier brought his early ideas for the ‘Radiant City’, and together with the other members of the congress, he produced a document named; the Athens Charter (van Es, et al., 2014). This document introduces minimal standards of living for modern residential developments, such as exposure to sunlight, sanitation, separation of traffic and abundance of green space. These standards were applied

to the ideas of Le Corbusier in his book on the ‘Radiant City’. In it, he describes the layout of how the city should be organized.

High-rise residential buildings with large swaths of green space between them. Over the green areas suspend large highways, to accommodate all the automobiles of the new inhabitants, without interfering with the leisure below. Away from the residential districts are the factories and the farmlands, all easily accessible by car.

While the three discussed visions for how new cities should look like, vary greatly in approach, their impacts on the real world are equally diverse.

The use of the modernist ideals of architects like the Corbusier showed problematic around the beginning of the 1970ies, when signs of alienation began to come up in the new-towns. The new towns in western Europe then slowly started to adopt theming, or refering to existing urban identities through architecture and planning, mainly in the city centers of these towns (M. Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018).

The reasons for actually constructing a physical new-town vary wildly and usually result from largely practical, rather than idealistic, considerations. Many new towns are built to house workers for a large new industrial site, usually mines, or for an organized population decentralization effort (den Hartog, 2010; Hulshof & Roggeveen, 2011). The ‘One City, Nine Towns’ plan for Shanghai, China, mentioned in the introduction to the thesis is only one of these examples.

Built examples

The ideas of Howard, Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier have not usually immediately been materialized in the real world. But some built examples have certainly been inspired by them.

Howards circular ‘Garden Cities’ have never been built, but around the world, in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Europe, but most of all in the United Kingdom, less literal interpretations of the ‘Garden City’ ideals have been built.

Howard had difficulties convincing investors

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of his idealistic plans, and had to make sacrifices in the execution. The collective ownership, rigid design and protected rents were all scrapped (Fishman, 1982). The towns inspired by the ‘Garden City’ ideals of Howard and the new-town movement from the U.K. had some successes around Europe after the second world war, as part of reconstruction efforts (Hall & Ward, 1998). The main aspect that did not return in many of the ‘Garden Cities’ was the self-sufficiency of the city, especially since many of the newly built towns essentially functioned like modern suburbs to a bigger city. One exception of this is Canberra, the newly built capital of Australia.

While not initiated by Howard, it was certainly inspired by the round shapes, separation of working from living, and the addition of plenty of green (fig. 18).

Large new neighborhood developments within existing cities, such as the earlier discussed Bijlmer in Amsterdam, were heavily inspired by Le Corbusier. Other completely new-towns, such as the newly built capital of Brazil, Brasília, designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, were also significantly influenced by CIAM and Le Corbusier (Mumford, 2002). Brasília is one of the first large newly built cities and features separated streams of traffic, large high-rise residential buildings, large amounts of green space and a significant amount of modernist architectural buildings. The symbolism of the modernist plan can be seen clearly from the sky, as the city’s main structure is shaped like an airplane (fig. 19).

Fig. 19. View on a model of Brasília, Brazil. (2016)

Fig. 18. Bird eye view of Canberra, Australia. (Heald, 2018)

The ‘Broadacre City’ of Lloyd Wright has also never been realized, but neither have projects clearly inspired by the theory. The popularization of the automobile did go hand in hand with suburbanization and sprawl, but not with any organized land redistribution or adoption of two professions by the inhabitants (Brueckner, 2000).

Before Le Corbusier published a book on the ‘Radiant City’, he had already envisioned most of its aspects in a plan to demolish a large part of downtown Paris, France, and build large residential high-rise buildings with separated layers of traffic (Fishman, 1982). This plan, plan Voisin, was however never built. Many other developments partially or significantly inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideals were later completed.

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As mentioned earlier, not all new-towns and cities have been clearly inspired by the ideas of famous architects and urban planners. The earlier discussed Disneyland-esque new-towns around Shanghai actually serve a greater purpose to the city, as it struggles to cope with rural to urban migration (den Hartog, 2010). Most new-towns in the Chinese context however are not specifically themed, and could be described as generic and with a much higher scale can feel slightly dystopian. The main function remains the same; housing the rapidly growing population of the country.

A similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale, has caused a push for decentralization in the Netherlands from the end of the 1960ies all the way into the next century. More details on this will be discussed in the introduction to the case study.

Citisism

While some of the new-towns and other large modern urban developments had been designed or inspired by the greatest architects, many modern projects like the Bijlmer received a fair share of doubt and criticism from architects like Aldo van Eyck and even from the head of the local planning department. They thought the plans lost the ‘human scale’ and considered the modernist expansions of Stockholm as an example of how it could go wrong. According to the head of the planning department of Amsterdam these expansions had become a distant satellite city and the high-rise buildings felt alianating. She thus pleaded for a lower scale in the design (Mentzel, 1989). There was however, a lot of optimism within the initiators and urban designers of the municipality about creating such a model neighborhood, and so the project continued (Mentzel, 1989). The criticism was not unfounded, and combined with unrelated problems such as large immigration streams, the neighborhood got a very bad reputation, was known as unsafe and was eventually largely demolished.

Criticism on other projects, like the themed new-towns around Shanghai, also comes from the designers of the projects themselves. Here the problems are vastly different than in the Netherlands. The European head architect involved with one of the projects notes:

“It is very sad that you have to build towns as a marketing product. But as planners we had no power to influence this.”

(Ranhagen, cited in den Hartog, 2010, p. 140)

This quote regards the theming of the new-towns, as it is a controversial topic within the architectural community. But at the same time, the lack of identity in other new-towns, that are more generic is also criticised:

“Private developers make the city as though it was a collection of mass-produced objects of little aesthetic quality” (Von Gerkan, cited in den Hartog, 2010, p. 174)

While criticism on specific cases is very relevant to the urban planning profession as a whole, there is also criticism on new-towns in general, at least in this case in the Dutch context. Michelle Provoost, the director of the ‘International New Town Institute’ [INTI] notes that virtually all new-towns off all generations show the same issue. Namely the extremely high ambitions and expectations, followed by becoming obsolete, abandoned by urban planners as well as politicians, and ignored by the architects of the next generations of new-towns, who go on to create cities with the exact same problems (Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018). While Provoost (personal communication, June 11, 2018) describes the new-towns as ambitious and possessing a certain pioneering spirit, she also acknowledges, that when compared to cities with historic urban development, they miss multiplicity and are usually the reflection of one specific moment in time. In this sense;

...it seems like new-towns are in a difficult situation from their conception. Either built in a modern way and be accused of lacking urban identity and multiplicity, or refer to the past too much and become known as a Disneyland.

Of course there is more nuance than just these extremes, but it is certainly a fine line to walk, and thus a difficult job to create a new-town from scratch, not even mentioning the actual construction.

Image and reputation

Other than the criticism of architects and other professionals, new-towns are not generally known for their good reputation by the general population either. With notable exceptions in China, where some new-towns and cities enjoy extraordinary reputations for being clean, high-tech and vibrant, regarding examples such as Shenzhen (Hulshof & Roggeveen, 2011; Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018). Similar situations can be seen in Angola where the new-town of Kilamba, an endless field of high-rise residential buildings, is wildly

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Fig. 20. Colorful New-town Kilamba, Angola. (Martha, 2011)

popular by the residents. Here the urban identity in the city seems to be secondary to all the pragmatic benefits the clean, spacious and relatively luxurious the Chinese built new-town can offer (fig. 20; Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018).

In the introduction to the thesis, some attention has been given to the media outrage of the theming of some of the Chinese new-towns. The media attention was not limited to the theming, as some of the new-towns were temporarily or indefinitely empty, the term ‘ghost-town’ was frequently used (Yang, 2011; Shelton, Zhou & Pan, 2018).

But many of the negative opinions seem to focus on common problems of new-towns, like the struggle with local identity and vacancies, rather than the concept of a new-town (A Taste of Paris in Shanghai, 2017; Mallonee, 2017; Valiente, Woodruff & Yiu, 2016; Yang, 2011; Shelton, Zhou & Pan, 2018).

This gives some hope for new-towns, as solutions to these problems could perhaps solve their reputations as well. As this is easier said than done, this thesis will go into some of arguments used by residents of the study case, to be able to give a better understanding of the experience of the inhabitants.

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3.2

THE CASE OF LELYSTAD, THE NETHERLANDS

In the last paragraphs an introduction has been given to new-towns. Some theories, recent and less recent examples of the towns have been discussed. While some insight into the topics of urban identity, modernism, and new towns has been given, the central questions of the thesis remain unanswered.

As the research question aims to consider the perception of the inhabitants of a modernist new-town on their urban identity, the study case, Lelystad, the Netherlands will be explored here.

be three large land reclamation sites, known as polders, with room in between to allow for traffic on the water (fig. 21). Construction began around 1918, when the Zuiderzee act was signed (van Lier & Steiner, 1982).

Historic background

Lelystad, the Netherlands is not just a new-town, the land on which it was built is also new. In the coming paragraphs the history of the city, the context within the national urban planning strategies and an overview of the construction and evolution of the city will be treated.

Land reclamation

The story of Lelystad begins in 1667, when a gentleman named Hendrik Stevin published a study on how to protect the often flooded Netherlands from the North Sea. He proposed to close off, and drain, a large shallow bay, called the Zuiderzee. The idea itself wasn’t strange, many areas in the low countries had been drained to create agricultural land and protect against floods.

The difference here was the scale off the project, this concerned an area the size of 5000 square kilometers, around four times the size of modern day London. The plan was not considered. However, at the end of the 19th century, new plans emerged. The country had gained expertise in draining larger bodies of water, and experts felt confident it could be done. There were some big changes made to the original plan, only some parts of the Zuiderzee were to be drained. First, the bay would be closed of by a large dam. This dam would slowly turn the salt water into sweet water, and allow the construction of the new land to be unburdened by the tides. While different options were considered, the plan by Cornelis Lely was agreed upon. There would

Fig. 21. Zuiderzee works plan, containing three new landmasses. (Lely, 1924)

With this plan, three things would be accomplished; protection against the floods around the shallow bay, greatly increase agricultural land and therefore food supply, and lastly, improve the water management capabilities (van Lier & Steiner, 1982). The first of the three polders fell dry in 1942, during the second world war. The second polder was larger and was drained in two parts. The first part was drained in 1957, but before that, the first houses were already being built on the location of modern day Lelystad. Only in 1968 the second part of the second polder was completed. The third polder was never realized.

As agriculture was the primary focus on the new land, urbanization did not really come into the picture in the beginning.

The plan was to create some smaller villages for the farmers on the new land to come together and perhaps trade. But after the second world war, the need for new housing was high, due to destroyed cities and a new population boom (van Lier & Steiner, 1982).

Modernist ideals

On the North-East polder, the first swath of new land, ten small towns and one central city had been built. All of the towns had been designed by traditional architects,

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with one exception. One town, called Nagele, was designed by Aldo van Eyck and was presented at the eighth CIAM (Lefaivre, van Eyck & Tzonis, 1999). The modernist design of the town was not to be the last influence of modernism on the new lands.

After the population of the pragmatically named North-East Polder, it was the turn of the second polder. This polder was named Flevoland, after the name the romans used for the Zuiderzee, ‘Lacus Flevo’. On this polder, the central city of the new land was to be built, at the center of the three polders.

Here, the city would fulfill a central function.

Some even speculated about a possible move of the national government to the new city (van Casteren, 2017). The design of the city was initially done by modernist Cornelis van Eesteren. Due to the abundance of space on the new land, and the general popularity of modernist thought at the time, van Eesteren had come up with a more spacious model with residential neighborhoods separated from traffic and industry (fig. 22; Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017).

Fig. 22. Concentric city, English new-town and the structure for Lelystad. Diagram for urban development, by van Eesteren, 1962.

(Reijndorp, et al., 2012, p. 32)

Some of the modernist tendencies in the design of van Eesteren can be seen in the separation of layers of traffic. The larger roads are on dikes around the neighborhoods and cycling paths run underneath (fig. 23).

These ideas are similar to those implemented in the Bijlmer around the same time.

Van Eesteren’s plan for the new-town was presented and seen as revolutionary for its time, perhaps too much so. The pragmatic government agency in charge of the new land [RIJP] which consisted mostly of agricultural

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engineers, rejected van Eesteren’s final proposal, and merely used it as an inspiration for their own new plans (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The commision argued the plan was too strict and not flexible enough for the different phases of growth of the city. In the new plan presented by the commision in 1969 the building density was higher and preparations for further growth were implemented, such as zones for further growth, and a north-south oriented city center that could grow with the city (fig. 24).

Fig. 23. Diagram for separated, walking, cycling and car traffic in Lelystad. (Nicolai, 2012, p. 203)

Fig. 24. Structure plan by the RIJP for Lelystad, 1969. (Nicolai, 2012, appendix)

Much of the suggested separation of traffic was transferred to the new plan, but with significant changes to its implementation. The busy roads surrounding the neighborhoods were no longer on raised dikes, but rather on the same level as the neighborhoods, between two raised strips of land. A major implication of this was that the cycling tunnels became bridges with long descending slopes cutting deep into the neighborhoods. Other than the design of the infrastructure, the amount of inhabitants

that were imagined to live in the city had changed significantly over the course of the years. While in the years of the construction of the new land new cities larger than a village were not even considered, in van Eesteren’s plan the city would finally be home to 50.000 inhabitants with the possibility of growth towards 100.000 (Nicolai, 2012).

By the time van Eesteren and the commision had presented their plans, the name of the city was already decided upon.

It was to be named after Cornelis Lely, the man responsible for the existence of the polders. Some concerns about the naming were raised by members of the commision.

Regardless, the city was named Lelystad.

“A capital [for the new polders] might have been designed, but it remains to be seen if it will develop according the expectations.

If this will not be the case, it would be less fortunate to have connected Lely’s name to this city” (van Casteren, 2017, p. 36)

Realization

The start of the construction and moving in of the first inhabitants of Lelystad in 1967 was just after the Dutch government had presented their plans for decentralizing the overcrowded cities in the west of the country.

In a report, a spatial vision and strategy were laid out for the future urban development of the country. At this time, the population of the country was growing rapidly and more and more people were moving to the larger cities in the west, such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht. To prevent congestion and uncontrolled urban sprawl, the government introduced the concept of ‘bundled deconcentration’, which in effect meant that the government stimulated the overflow of residents from the bigger cities to smaller towns with potential for growth, such as Lelystad (Reijndorp, et al., 2012).

While the population growth later proved to be overestimated, the strategies remained.

While this was all good news for the future of Lelystad, another unexpected turn of events was less positive. As the construction of the first neighborhoods of Lelystad had

completed and the first, stringently selected people, had moved in, plans for another city, between Amsterdam and Lelystad were being implemented. While a smaller, less important city at that location had been in the plans for decades, it now became clear that this could form a threat to the development of Lelystad.

At this point in time, the end of the 1970ies, the third polder, the Markerwaard, was still not realized. This meant, that the central location of Lelystad, as well as its regional importance, were not a reality either (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012).

Meanwhile, the construction of Lelystad continued, and with the completion of the residential areas around the city center in the beginning of the 1980ies, the city was now home to around 43.000 inhabitants (Nicolai, 2012). The neighborhoods all had different designs, but a lot of similarities can be spotted. The neighborhoods were all focused on one or two building typologies, rowhouses and semi-detached houses, all built for a family with kids. The design of the infrastructure of the city allowed the neighborhoods to be free of large amounts of car traffic, only cycling routes and destination traffic were integrated. The neighborhoods have modern houses often with flat roofs and no more than three stories in height.

While every neighborhood has their own characteristic design of houses, within the neighborhood, the styles were often the same. Some neighborhoods were more modern than others, some with elevated walkways and cycling paths and others with varying colors of their facades. The reason that one neighborhood had no coloured facades whatsoever, was the argument that life [the people] would add colour to the neighborhood (van Casteren, 2017). The mentioned low density neighborhood design arguably isolated the neighborhoods even more, as they were already separated by large roads in between that could only be crossed by a few available bridges (fig. 25). The houses within the neighborhoods were not directed to any streets, but rather to angular cul-de-sacs, which each contain a parking lot, and a small park or playground (fig. 26).

The streets and cul-de-sacs in many of the neighborhoods don’t have individual names, but rather a number. The similarity within

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Fig. 25. Roads between the neighborhoods, with one of the cycling and pedestrian bridges in the distance. Lelystad, the Netherlands.

May 18, 2018.

Fig. 28. Vacant stores in the old part of the city center. The elevated cycling path overhead has been torn down. Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 18, 2018.

Fig. 26. Parking in rectangular cul-de-sac.

Netherlands. May 18, 2018.

Jol, Lelystad, the

Fig. 29. Relative liveliness in the revamped part of the city center.

Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 18, 2018.

Fig. 27. Individually colored rowhouses. Archipel, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018.

Fig. 30. Open square behind the new Agora theater. Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 18, 2018.

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the neighborhood between the different cul-de-sacs was, and in many instances is still, striking. The lay-out of the neighborhoods is organized in such a way, that individuals who don’t need to be in that specific place, will never cross it.

In the center of the city, modern shopping streets were developed, with elevated cycling paths over the promenade, allowing for accessible shops on the second level. These shops proved to be unsuccessful and the elevated cycling path was subsequently demolished in 2000. Part of the original shopping streets still exist, although somewhat empty, while another part has been replaced by a more modern shopping street in 2009 (fig. 28, 29). Another element in the center, a large multifunctional building called ‘Agora’, which included a swimming pool and room for sports and events, was demolished in 2004 and replaced by a modern theater. This modern theater was designed by architect Ben van Berkel and serves as a landmark in the city since its construction in 2007 (fig. 30).

As a few neighborhoods and parts of the city center have already gone through the phases of construction, demolition and being rebuilt in the few decades of their existence, it becomes clear not everything in the city was smooth sailing. The next paragraphs will discuss some of the struggles the new-town went through during its development.

Problems and current state

Being one of the first new-towns in the Netherlands, Lelystad was in many aspects a first for the designers and inhabitants. Many new arrivals in the city felt uncomfortable and wives who stayed at home became lonely due to a lack of pre-existing social cohesion (van Casteren, 2017). Part of this problem was also blamed on the design of the city. It was perhaps too pragmatically organized. A local doctor said;

“Maybe all those shoeboxes have been put together a bit too neatly. An overdose of urbanistic logic could lead to a planneurose”

referring to design of the neighborhoods (van Casteren, p. 124). Due to the disappointing number of incoming inhabitants and oversized infrastructure, families with social and financial problems that were not welcome in Amsterdam or Almere, were housed in Lelystad (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017).

In the 80ies the rate of unemployment was significantly higher than average, and the city even had the highest crime rates of the whole country. Even the rate of divorces was incredibly high (NTR, 2017). On top of this, the oversized and underpopulated city had significant financial troubles and was put under special supervision by the national government in 1985 (Ministerie: Lelystad kan toe met miljoenen minder, 2017). The reputation of the city in the rest of the country had suffered significantly; a study of the municipality showed that, in 1986, 6% of the respondents throughout the country had a positive image of the city (van Casteren, 2017).

The large collection of problems stated in the last paragraph are in some cases, such as the oversized infrastructure, simply blamed on the design of the city. But one factor connects many of the problems; the overestimation of population that would be attracted by the city. Even in the year of writing, 2018, the city is home to no more than 77.000 inhabitants, significantly lower than the predicted 100.000, which was supposed to be reached in the year 2000 (Nicolai, 2012; Gemeente Lelystad, 2017a). Plans have since been adjusted to the disappointing growth, but oversized infrastructure is still a problem and some of the roads dividing the neighborhoods have since been downsized.

One factor in the disappointing growth is argued to be Almere. Almere is a second new-town, built between Lelystad and Amsterdam in 1976 (fig. 1; Reijndorp, et al., 2012). Almere’s much closer position to Amsterdam allowed the city to flourish as housing prices in Amsterdam skyrocketed.

While Lelystad has a relatively high amount of people working outside of the city, this is even higher for Almere. According to the national bureau for statistics in 2017 more than 18% of the workforce living in Almere was employed in Amsterdam, this is only 2,4% for Lelystad (CBS, 2018a). While the percentage

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of the workforce in Lelystad without a job is still above the national average, it has been slowly declining as the municipality has been investing heavily in attracting new companies to settle in Lelystad (Gemeente Lelystad, 2017b, 2018).

Other than the competition Lelystad received from Almere in housing workers who wanted to move out of busy and expensive Amsterdam, the central position of the city in the new land was also never realized. While officially the plan to build the third and final polder was just extended, in 2003 it was officially cancelled (VROM, 2004). This made it so that Lelystad was not at the center of the new land, but rather in a desolate corner. This fact, along with the other mentioned problems of Lelystad have not left a good impression of the city on the rest of the country, this current reputation will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

Reputation

As emphasised in prior paragraphs it is clear that the reputation of Lelystad has suffered as the city struggled in various areas of development. The following paragraphs will go into the image of the city through the local and national media, as well as through the eyes of the inhabitants as noted in existing research on the matter.

Image in the media

Since the 1950ies the national media in the Netherlands has been writing about the new city in the polder. The first articles mainly discussed whether the naming of the city after mr. Lely was appropriate or not (Flevostad of Lelystad, 1950). Not much later the ideals of the “ideal society” that Lelystad was to become were contemplated. A local newspaper from the north of the country publishes a positive article:

“... once, Lelystad will have large shopping promenades and the city will have beautiful large buildings, of which everyone will be proud.

Then shall, there where the water is still several meters high, be built spacious and modern residential neighborhoods. Then Lelystad will 44

be a Dutch city. She [Lelystad] will have a special place amongst those cities. Because the history of Lelystad, while shorter than any other city in the Netherlands, shall be great, because a handful of people with ideals will have built a future for thousands.”

(In het IJsselmeer Groeit een Centrum: Lelystad!, 1954, p. 7)

While this glowing optimism seemed to last forever, the first articles with concerns about the new-town appear around the moving in of the first inhabitants. The amount of people that wanted to move into the new city was lower than expected, especially attracting people with higher education proved difficult.

“The city might only be 50 kilometers away from Amsterdam, those are 50 kilometers over a long, straight, barren dike. For people who want to remain in contact with the social and cultural life in their country, it could be a insurmountable distance.”

(Van der Mijn, 1967, p. 7)

Other than the straight roads, the monotonous culture and construction in the city has not gone unnoticed and is described in an editorial in a national newspaper:

“One who walks through Lelystad and is in love with the old city shudders. They would get the impression - but this is purely a subjective observation - that here dozens of similarly shaped ladies are dragging similarly shaped groceries to similarly shaped houses.

There are - also a subjective observation - a noticeably high amount of cake and candy shops. Lots of space - lack of charm.”

(Lewin, 1975, p. 15)

In the following years, the coverage of the city does not get more positive. The overarching critiques of the city such as;

“It is a miracle how Lelystad with such pleasant houses and neighborhoods has become such an unattractive place…”

(Smit, 1985, p. 7)

have not become less frequent, and are now accompanied by a slew of reporting on criminal activities that have become rampant in the city. Many youngsters with no work or after school activities have joined small gangs and commit petty crimes, and are involved with burglary and vandalism (Peys, 1985; van Casteren, 2017). The perception of safety in Lelystad, as seen through the headlines in the Dutch newspapers, has not improved in any significant way since the negative reporting over the last decades. But as Lelystad is working hard on changing their reputation, they are attracting new large companies to settle an office or distribution center near Lelystad. With plenty of room, low costs and relatively central position in the country, there is enough to report on.

In the recent years the local airport of Lelystad, has been discussed in the newspapers and on TV because of possible expansion of services due to the overflow of flights from the largest airport of the country, which is not allowed to expand any further (Laconi, 2018).

The reputation of Lelystad has changed significantly over the past decades, from glowing optimism about the city of the future, to concerns about anonymity and unsafety. While the outside reputation and the image of Lelystad is relevant for this thesis, perhaps even more important is the perception of the inhabitants themselves.

In the following paragraphs, the existing research on what the inhabitants of the city think about the new-town will be explored.

Perception of the inhabitants through statistics

As the media has played its part in informing the country about the evolution of the new-town, the inhabitants have their own experiences. Research from the municipality of Lelystad on the city and neighborhood level has been conducted on several aspects.

Additionally the national statistic agency has accumulated information on the perception of wellbeing of the inhabitants of all municipalities in the country. This way, some comparisons can be made.

The inhabitants of Lelystad are not always positive about their neighborhoods and surroundings. When asked about whether

the inhabitants of the different neighborhoods in the new-town were satisfied with the state of their neighborhoods, no neighborhood scored an average higher than 2,5 out of 5 (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015a). While these numbers are difficult to value because of the lack of comparison to other cities, the numbers seem to indicate a negative perception of the city by the inhabitants. When asked about whether they feel attached to their neighborhoods, a completely different result is observed. 72% of the inhabitants said they feel attached to their neighborhoods, with only one neighborhood scoring as low as 56% and four out of sixteen designated neighborhoods scoring over 80% (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015b). This rather positive outcome is in contrast with the perception of safety in the city, which is on virtually all measured topics worse than the national average (CBS, 2018b). These statistics show that 41,7% of the respondents in Lelystad feels unsafe every now and then, which is almost 8% higher than the national average, but which is only slightly higher when compared to bigger cities (CBS, 2018b).

At least one connection between the reporting in national media and the perception of the inhabitants can be noted.

16,4% of the respondents say that the chance of burglary is ‘very high’, significantly higher than even the bigger cities in the country, such as Amsterdam with 11,6% and Utrecht with 9,8% (CBS, 2018b). The reputation of Lelystad being unsafe, due to reporting on crime in the national media, is echoed by the inhabitants.

While some negative aspects about Lelystad’s reputation are confirmed by the inhabitants, overall, the inhabitants of the city have a more positive image of the city than outsiders. The municipality, and to some extent the national studies, have touched upon the subject of place identity by treating attachment to the neighborhood. Urban identity however, is treated in a slightly more elaborate way by the municipality, and is compared to its reputation. While the phrase urban identity or any translation of it is not used in the reports, the word identity is often used to describe the internal reputation of the city. This is not the same definition as used in this thesis, but the individual questions are

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still relevant.

In this report, it becomes clear that in many aspects the inhabitants of the city have a significantly better impression of it than outsiders. Especially the statements: Lelystad is city with a lot of space, and Lelystad is an ideal city for living with kids, resonate significantly more with the inhabitants than with outsiders (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c). Nevertheless, 40% of the respondents indicate that they are proud of their city (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c). To put this in context, some cities with historical urban fabric like Amsterdam score just over 60% (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2003). There are a few areas on which the inhabitants of the city have a less positive opinion than outsiders. Only 11% of the respondents in Lelystad think the city has an enjoyable city center, while 24% of the outsiders think the same (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c).

From the treated studies here, it becomes clear that the inhabitants of the new-town don’t always agree with their reputation, but they are not afraid to criticize the current state of affairs in the city. The inhabitants enjoy the space and living with kids in the city, but are rarely positive about the city center. The expressed feeling of unsafety in the city is reflected in the reputation of the city. Pride of the city and attachment the neighborhoods is not absent in the city, but showing room for improvement.

Later in this thesis, the perception of the inhabitants of their city, and urban identity will be explored further through an empirical study, and subsequently reflected on the efforts of the designers of the city.

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3.3

SUMMARY

In the first part of this chapter, the origin and the ideas behind modern new-towns have been discussed. The bad living conditions in the cities in 19th century Europe led architects and other thinkers to ponder about how a better living environments would look like (Fishman, 1982; Razzell, 2002). Separating living from the dirty factories and roads, and leaving plenty of space for green are common themes in the different theories that are discussed (Howard & Osborn, 1965; Fishman, 1982). The new ideas that are developed also start to take into account the upcoming automobile and the infrastructure it requires. The separation of functions, and later also the separation of different modes of traffic are key aspects of the modernist thought of the beginning of the 20th century.

While before the second world war some new-towns inspired by the theories of Howard have been built, they left out a lot of key aspects and mostly focused on including plenty of green and separating functions (Fishman, 1982; Hall & Ward, 1998). After the second world war the scale of the new-towns and neighborhoods picked up, and high-rise was implemented in the new-towns, as envisioned by Le Corbusier. Famous examples such as the new-town of Brasilia, Brazil and the neighborhood the Bijlmer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands were constructed. Both of these projects were heavily criticised for their lack of human scale and the Bijlmer was even mostly demolished a few decades later.

The inflexibility of most of the new-towns and modernist neighborhoods has left a bad impression on the general public (Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018).

This brings us to the study case of this thesis, the new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands. As expressed in this chapter, not only the city is built entirely from scratch, also the land it is built on, is reclaimed from the sea. As the Netherlands has been in a continuous battle with the water since its conception, a solution to the floods in one part of the country, in combination with the addition of a significant amount of farmland, was realized during the first half of the 20th century (van Lier & Steiner, 1982). On this land,

a new city was to be built, a center of three large land reclamation projects, eventually reaching a population of 100.000 people. This position as a center was never realized, as the third and final polder, was never drained. In the end of the 1960ies the first inhabitants were to move in. The modernist design of the city, and its desolate position did not attract enough people to be sustainable (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017). Subsequently, people that were not welcome in Amsterdam and the competing new-town of Almere due to their social and financial problems, were housed in Lelystad (van Casteren, 2017).

Not surprisingly, because of under population and rising rates of criminality, social problems and a bad reputation in the country followed (van Casteren, 2017). Other than the reputation about the social problems and its desolate position, criticism on the repetitive modernist design of the city was not uncommon. Opinion pieces in national news papers comment on the lack of charm in the new-town (Van der Mijn, 1967; Lewin, 1975).

Inhabitants of the city acknowledge the high rates of burglary and general level of unsafety (CBS, 2018b). While the inhabitants are not happy about their city center, they do feel connected to their neighborhoods, and find it a good place to live with their children. Also, general pride of the city is not uncommon under the inhabitants (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c). Today, Lelystad is known for its abundance of space, and is investing heavily in attracting new businesses to settle.

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4 THE EFFORTS OF DESIGNERS

In the last chapters, the concepts of urban identity and new-towns have been treated in depth. The study case, Lelystad has been introduced, and its success, or lack thereof, as a new-town has been discussed.

In this chapter, the first part of the research question will be attempted to be answered:

How is urban identity attempted to be created and how is it perceived in modernist urban development?

The case of new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands.

This chapter will discuss the efforts of designers and planners in creating the new-town of Lelystad, and what future environment for the residents they had in mind. It will go into the goals of the designers in building this future and what methods they employed to achieve it. The focus will not only be on the initial plans, but also the later changes to the plans and the current intentions.

Fig. 31. Modern interpretations of canal houses on the Zilverparkkade, Lelystad, the Netherlands. June 9, 2018.

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49

4.1

GOALS AND METHODS OF DESIGNERS

The following paragraphs will discuss the goals and methods used to develop the city and the conscious efforts by various actors in creating a certain image and stimulate a certain identity of the new-town.

A chronological order will be used to give an impression of the changes over time. While it is sometimes difficult to define what efforts in the design are intended to influence the image or identity of the city, an overview of the seemingly influential decisions and their methods can be made.

As discussed briefly in the last chapter, the initial plans for the city of Lelystad were made by Cornelis van Eesteren.

Van Eesteren, at that time one of the biggest modernist urbanists of the Netherlands, was to design the architectural masterpiece of the largest engineering feats of that time (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017). This engineering feat was the creation of three new polders, the North-East Polder, Flevoland, and the - later discontinued - Markerwaard, the largest reclamation projects of the 20th century. The future center of the three polders was to be named after the man responsible for the land reclamation project, Cornelis Lely.

As the crowning piece to the land reclamation project, the city was to become an important and modern center in the region. Van Eesteren imagined a skyline on the waterside:

“The city was to rise from the water, as a metaphor for the victorious battle against the water.” (van Casteren, 2017, p. 81)

Large parks and shopping promenades would be accessible by bike and foot through the paths surrounded by green and uninterrupted by car traffic, that was to be put on raised dikes around the neighborhoods (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017).

The plans submitted by van Eesteren in 1964 were found to be much to modern and futuristic by the government agency in charge of the planning and organization of

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the new plan, called the RIJP (Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The pragmatic agricultural engineers of the RIJP demanded that the plan would become more rational and less romantic. While the original design lost more and more of its aspects, van Eesteren was forced to leave.

The ideas behind the new design proposed by the RIJP were pragmatic, a reaction to the living conditions in the urbanized west of the country. Lelystad was to be the opposite of this.

“The house hunters from the west would find space in Lelystad, an affordable house with a garden, coherence, abundance of green, low scale, traffic safety, peace and socially homogeneous environment.”

(Reijndorp, et al., 2012, p. 37)

Fig. 32. Sketch of the view on Lelystad. (van Eesteren, 1966)

To achieve these goals, the RIJP used the plan of van Eesteren as a basis for their own, more pragmatic and toned down plan.

This plan moved the city from the waterside more into the reclaimed land, and lowered the building density even further. As part of the effort to make the plan simpler and cheaper, the elevated roads were scrapped and instead of underpasses the cyclists and pedestrians now have to climb the long bridges crossing the roads (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017; R. Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

Additionally the RIJP implemented a level of flexibility to their plans, and oriented the city core in such a north-south direction so that it would be able to grow with the city (Nicolai, 2012).

While both van Eesteren and the RIJP had put forward designs that were relatively suburban, the initial plans of van Eesteren had included some metropolitan aspects on the waterside (van Casteren, 2017). A suburban character wasn’t strange for developments in that time, but for a new-town so far away from the other major cities, it was important to become an autonomous city. The RIJP however, had stated that for the urban centerpoint no high ambitions should be held.

Time would allow urbanity to develop, it was thought not to be plannable (Reijndorp, et al., 2012). The designers and engineers of the RIJP were not actively involved in giving urban character to the city, however, they stated that Lelystad should not get the ambience of a village. According to the strategies of the RIJP, suburban living qualities were to be combined with an urban level of facilities (Reijndorp, et al., 2012).

The two faced approach in the new design of Lelystad, a new-town with the benefits of both the vibrant city, as well as from the peaceful countryside, seemed and proved difficult to bring to a satisfying conclusion. However, some clear design choices were made toward reaching this goal.

The residential neighborhoods are designed with plenty of green and devoid of most car traffic (fig. 33). While some significant changes to van Eesteren’s plans were made, the overall infrastructure plan was kept the same. The large arterial roads do not enter the neighborhoods, instead smaller collector roads that run through the neighborhoods connect the cul-de-sacs to the outside world. In the city center, modern architecture and multilayered shopping promenades were realized to induce a vibrant feeling.

During the decades following the moving in of the first inhabitants, the city struggled to attract more population. In 1980 Lelystad became a municipality and the RIJP, the agency responsible for the initial planning, lost its role. At the end of the 20th century, the municipality decided to stop comparing itself to other cities. Lelystad from then on focuses on optimizing the suburban living environments (Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005; Reijndorp, et al., 2012). In 2005, the plans from the municipality make clear that they are forming their own identity. This identity is formulated as: ‘the green and blue city’. This formulation is short and leaves plenty to the imagination. But it becomes clear that the city and its inhabitants value the green living environments and its close distance to the water. A formulated identity is also given to each individual neighborhood.

The residential neighborhoods in the city are referred to as ’residential islands’ as to emphasise the segregation from the rest of the neighborhoods and city center. The identities of these neighborhoods that are formulated by the municipality are a description of their physical state, the used typologies, the close connection to green spaces or the lack thereof and the level of green used in the remaining public spaces.

The formulated identities for the residential neighborhoods are in this case closer to an observation of the current situation, than a vision for the future. It is the qualities that are noted in the current identities, that the city wants to enhance (Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005).

The heart of the new-town, which was imagined to be a modern metropolitan city center by van Eesteren, was toned down by the RIJP (van Casteren, 2017). Nevertheless, some modernity was brought into the design, and with the double leveled shopping street, it was the most urban and dense part of the city. After it became clear the the second level of the shopping street wasn’t financially sustainable, it was torn down in 2000. This left a less than attractive city center, which was largely rebuilt with a different design in 2009.

The goal of rebuilding this city center was to create a more enjoyable experience and attract more commercial activity.

Fig. 33. Green neighborhoods in Boswijk, Lelystad, the Netherlands.

June 8, 2018.

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The current strategies for development and stimulating identity in the new-town have largely remained the same since the large major structure plans were published in 2005. The green and blue city is still focusing on the benefits of living in quiet, green neighborhoods, but is now aiming to improve the existing city, instead of expanding. This last aim is more clearly expressed in the new documents (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014) than in the older structure plans (Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005).

This is at least partially because the growth of the city that was expected and wanted by the planners did not come. The new plans state the a few methods and strategies for this improvement. These strategies mainly involve a hand-off approach in which the promise not to interfere with existing commercial activities by avoiding creation of more competition is key. Other point of action are the improvement of existing housing stock from the 1970ies and 1980ies to become more competitive with the newer houses, by making them more sustainable (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014). What these measures include exactly is not specified. The effects of this strategy of focusing on the existing city, on the identity of the city is not obvious, and also not clearly expressed.

The strategies for urban development Lelystad has used in its few decades of existence have been briefly described in the last paragraphs. The identity of the city was to be one of a futuristic, prosperous center, the plans supporting this idea were deluded over the years. The challenges and changing reality the city faced over the following decades made the city reconsider its approach, and start becoming a ‘normal city’ first. When even the expected growth of the city’s population kept disappointing, the city started to focus on appreciating and strengthening its existing qualities. While Lelystad has a clear narrative for presenting itself to the outside world; affordable living in a green environment and a close location to the water. It is unclear if this identity works the same on the inhabitants of the city. The justification for the mentioned goals and methods will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

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4.2

JUSTIFICATION OF METHODS AND DIRECTION

The focus and implemented ideas for development in Lelystad have been the responsibility of several different actors over the course of its evolution. Over the following paragraphs the justifications by the various actors for the directions taken in the development of the city, and the intended, or unintended changes for the identity of the city will be discussed.

The justifications for the initial modern plans of van Eesteren were largely idealistic as it was a reaction to the flaws of the existing overcrowded cities. The modernistic approach of van Eesteren was filled with artistic considerations of the urbanist, and elements such as the proposed skyline on the waterside was made so that Lelystad’s image would live up the important regional metropolitan center it was the become (van Casteren, 2017). Large parts of the justification for the design were clear as day.

The inhabitants were to be freed of the busy and dangerous streets of the existing cities, and so the roads were to be elevated, so no unnecessary contact between them was ever made. The tranquility of the residential areas was guaranteed through an island like the design of the individual neighborhoods (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017).

While this romantic design was not completely implemented by the RIJP, the main aspects that were regarded as valuable to the livability of the city were kept. Many of the considerations were of pragmatic or financial origin. Others were more profound and predicted that if the city would not grow as expected, some attributes in the design would create an unattractive half empty city. The main concern here was the lack of flexibility in the original plan of van Eesteren. It was argued the city van Eesteren had imagined was more like a still painting, rather than an evolving city (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The justification for the changes that added flexibility to the plan can be traced down to the mentioned fear of a half empty city with too much infrastructure, but additionally the possibility of well integrated city expansions (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The pragmatic designers of the RIJP

considered both slow growth as well as a need for further development to be realistic scenarios. One assumption that was kept in place was that the city would grow to at least 100.000 inhabitants around the year 2000 (Nicolai, 2012). As this was not the case, due to several causes noted in previous paragraphs and chapters, many of the considerations of the municipality that became responsible for the design of the city later on, were heavily influenced by this fact (Nicolai, 2012).

The following decades after the construction were largely aimed at solving existing problems in the city, such as the lacking social cohesion, and attracting more population (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The attraction of more population has played a large role in the development of the city in the last few decades, as the target groups here are not existing inhabitants, but rather people from the overcrowded cities in the west of the country. The justification to expand the city with more spacious and green neighborhoods in the end of the 1990ies and the beginning of the 2000s, was to increase incoming tax revenue and use of infrastructure (Nicolai, 2012). This focus on expansion and growth is supported by the ‘green and blue’ identity of the city, as it specifically targets the needs of people in the busy cities, space and proximity to nature (Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

When, some years later, also the toned down plan for growth of the city proved unrealistic, the focus shifted to improving the existing city (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014).

This focus on improving the existing city is the current policy of the municipality.

What some of the measures following from this focus entail is discussed in the earlier paragraphs. Other than struggling with growth, the new focus is also a reaction to existing social problems in the older neighborhoods, which are also showing signs of physical decay (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

As the city developed, different actors became responsible for its direction and design, as a consequence past strategies were abandoned for new ones. Lelystad’s

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original plan did not become as successful as anticipated by the designers, thus future designers had to change the focus of development. A part of this process and their justifications have been discussed in the last paragraphs.

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4.3

REFLECTION OF THE RELEVANT EXPERTS ON THE PROCESS

In the last paragraphs, some of the justifications of the different actors and designers in the process of shaping Lelystad have been explored. In the following paragraphs, a reflection on the process by various experts through written and verbal accounts will be made. The development of the city, its context in urban planning and the successes and failures of its results will be discussed.

The development of the new-town Lelystad was not only a question of being able to construct a physical city, it was also thought the society would be shaped by its design.

“The agrarian engineers [the RIJP] thought their architectural order would in turn result in social order.” (van Casteren, 2017, p. 327)

In the literature and personal communications on Lelystad and the process of its development often return to this topic.

What in Dutch is called the ‘maakbaarheid’, which in English translates to something like ‘manufacturability’, of society is central to the modernist approach in Lelystad and other development. A journalist and writer, Joris van Casteren (2017), writes in his book on his youth in, and the development of Lelystad, that the pragmatism that was meant to shape the communities living in the city often had an opposite effect. The standardized houses did not inspire creativity, and the lack of role models in the city is perhaps one of the causes of rebellion and vandalism by the youth (van Casteren, 2017). Additionally, van Casteren (2017, personal communication, May 28, 2018) argues that one reason for the pragmatic and later problematic monotonous building typologies and design of Lelystad is that the designers of the city had designed a city for people exactly like them. The mistakes made in the approach of Lelystad are not uncommon, they are made in other new-towns too. Provoost (personal communication, June 11, 2018) points out that Lelystad, although a strong example,

contains many of the same intrinsic flaws as the other new-towns in the Netherlands built around that time. The lack of flexibility in the development, the overestimation of its own future success, and the struggle with shaping urban identity are argued to be universal flaws of new-towns (Reijndorp, et al., 2012; Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018). Van Casteren (personal communication, May 28, 2018) thinks that the story behind the city, the ‘fight against the water’, is not represented in the design of the city. He sums this and the uniformness of the city up rather poetically;

“A mailbox was a mailbox, a parking lot a parking lot. Trees did not resemble crooked figures, they were neatly planted. Nothing resembled something else, everything resembled itself. Lelystad was a serum against the imagination.” (van Casteren, 2017, p. 183)

On a more pragmatic note, one of the mentioned key aspects in the success of new-towns in general, is that the predicted inhabitants should actually move in (den Hartog, et al., 2010; Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012). In some countries, flashy, new and shiny modern housing developments are a stark contrast to the messy and dirty existing cities, and are therefore instantly attractive to new residents (den Hartog, 2010; Hulshof & Roggeveen, 2010; Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018). But other aspects play a large role. Provoost (personal communication, June 11, 2018) argues that the concept of a new-town can be appealing in certain cultures due to the wish for modernisation and progress in general.

The opposite seems to be true for Lelystad. Ronnie Zijp, an urban designer of the municipality of the city argues that Lelystad would rather not present itself as a newly built city (Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018). Some buildings, neighborhoods and infrastructural features like the elevated

55

cycling paths from the original designs have been torn down. Van Casteren (personal communication, May 28, 2018), as well as Zijp (personal communication, May 31, 2018) argue that these constructions should have been treated like heritage, but they have instead been replaced by rather standard modern neighborhoods and a partially new city center. The new city center instead of recognizing the ambitious modernist intentions of the past, resembles a modern interpretation of an historic medieval city center, with brown brick and crooked streets (Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

As mentioned before, Lelystad still struggles with its identity, Zijp echoed this unclarity in a personal communication. Zijp argues that the city doesn’t have a clear image of what the city currently is, what it wants to be, and therefore what it needs to get there (Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018). While this is perhaps a little bit of an overstatement, it is a criticism on the past as well as current apparatus of urban development responsible for the city. According to Provoost (personal communication, June 11, 2018), this lack of clear direction and effort in steering towards a certain identity is a danger for new-towns.

She questions whether the new-towns that have not connected their identity to their local context hold any value for the future. In contrast, van Casteren (personal communication, May 28, 2018) pleads for a stronger recognition of the city, not for its success, or lack thereof, but as an homage to the illusion that society can be shaped and manufactured like a city.

The last paragraphs have discussed a reflection of various experts on the evolution, current situation, urban identity and value of the study case. While these experts referenced in the last paragraphs generally agree on the lessons that can be learned from the history of Lelystad, the way forward for the new-town is not made clear.

Other than treating the views of scholars and other experts, the following chapters will discuss the views of the inhabitants and visitors of the city.

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4.4

SUMMARY

In this chapter, the efforts of the designers and planners in shaping Lelystad and its urban identity have been discussed.

While influencing the urban identity is only mentioned in very recent strategies of the municipality, the original designer had a clear vision for what the city would look like, and how it would be achieved. The RIJP, responsible for the development of the city, additionally seeked to influence the lifestyle of the inhabitants through the modernist and pragmatic design. A summary of these efforts, their methods and justifications will be made here.

Urban designer van Eesteren had a clear plan for the new-town of Lelystad; the city was to become the modern, metropolitan heart of the new land (van Casteren, 2017).

While many of the idealistic ideas made it to the final design, and eventually to reality, the agency responsible for the development, the RIJP, made significant changes (Nicolai, 2012; van Casteren, 2017). These changes affected the modernist transport system in the city, cars gained more priority than envisioned, but general ideas were still implemented. The plan was made cheaper and less romantic than the original, and more flexibility for the growth was incorporated. The more flexible plan made by the RIJP still proved unprepared for a low amount of inhabitants. When the predicted growth of the population of the city, as well as that of the country, significantly disappointed, Lelystad focused more on attracting inhabitants (Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005). This strategy meant that the focus of the designers and planners of the city went to attracting new inhabitants to new neighborhoods outside of the existing city. The sub-urban qualities of the city were attempted to be enhanced through incorporating more green. When this strategy to attract more and more inhabitants turned out to be insignificantly fruitful, the focus changed again (Nicolai, 2012; Gemeente Lelystad, 2014).

This time the focus was put on improving the existing city, as social problems were prevalent in the older neighborhoods.

Improving the physical state of the buildings was also included in the strategy, specifically

to make them more sustainable (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014). Not all of the original parts of the new-town got this attention, as some of the inner city and old neighborhoods have already been torn down and replaced by newer more modern versions. The city center is one of these locations, and is indented to bring a more ‘normal’ atmosphere to the new-town (Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

This distanciation from its past is criticised by some. Van Casteren (personal communication, May 28, 2018) as well as Zijp (personal communication, May 31, 2018) argue that many of the demolished buildings and infrastructure should have been classified as heritage, and subsequently protected. It would not have been known for its success, but rather show the ambitious intentions and serve as a lesson to future designers (van Casteren, personal communication, May 28, 2018). The doubtful ‘manufacturability’ of society mentioned by van Casteren (2017) seems to apply similarly to urban identity.

Attempting to influence urban identity might not always be successful, but it might be more damaging to not try at all (Provoost, personal communication, June 11, 2018).

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5 EMPIRICAL STUDY

In the last chapters, the concept of urban identity and the existing theory and empirical work surrounding it has been discussed. How urban identity relates to relevant topics is explored. Additionally, the argument has been made urban identity can be treated in three realms; historic urban development, historically inspired urban development and modernist urban development. For the introduction of the study case, which is other than just modernist urban development, also a new-town, an overview and introduction to new-towns is given. The case-study, new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands, is introduced and its evolution, current status and reputation are examined.

To begin answering the research question, the efforts of the designers and planners in shaping the new-town and arguably the urban identity of its inhabitants, over years have been treated. In this chapter the second part of the research question will be explored.

How is urban identity attempted to be created and how is it perceived in modernist urban development?

The case of new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands.

An empirical study is made to make a well argumented attempt at measuring the urban identity of the inhabitants of the city today. Additionally open questions regarding the development of the city, city center, and its status as a new-town are asked to give a more complete overview of the perception of the inhabitants and visitors in the city.

Fig. 34. Individually colored facades in low-rise rowhouses. Archipel, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018.

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59

5.1

EMPIRICAL METHODOLOGY

To answer the research question of this thesis, an empirical study is made to measure the urban identity of the inhabitants and visitors of the study case; Lelystad, the Netherlands.

As mentioned earlier in this thesis, the main part of this empirical study is based on earlier studies by Lalli (1988; 1992). In his first study on the matter, Lalli (1988) proposed subdividing the concept of urban identity into three measurable components. These components, ‘personal continuity’, ‘external presentation’ and ‘general identification’, are measured by providing respondents with multiple similar statements on each topic, and ask them to which degree they agree or disagree with each (Lalli, 1988).

Additional questions regarding their length of residence in the city, and whether on not the respondents were born in the city are asked, to seek a possibility for basic conclusions (Lalli, 1988).

The empirical part of this thesis concerns a very similar study, however, instead of the three categories used in Lalli’s first study (1988), the expanded five categories from his later study will be used (Lalli, 1992). The first category is ‘external evaluation’ [evaluation]. Here the perceived reputation and comparative status of the town will be reflected upon through three proposed statements on the subject that respondents can value. The second category is ‘general attachment’ [attachment]. In this category, the personal attachment to the city and feelings of nativity are measured.

The third category concerns the ‘continuity with personal past’ [continuity]. This category treats the connection of the city with the history of the respondent. The fourth category ‘perception of familiarity’ [familiarity] explores the belonging and level of familiarity with the city. The fifth and final category ‘commitment’ [commitment] is rather self-explanatory. In this final category, the commitment of the respondents to stay or keep involved with the city is measured.

Additionally, similar to the studies by Lalli (1988, 1992), open questions regarding the young age and modern design of the city are included. The questions are meant

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to show the opinions on the current status of the new-town, and to create the possibility to bring up issues and subjects previously not considered in the thesis. Additionally, correlations between the identification with the city and these answers to the open questions can be sought. For the same reason, general questions about gender, education, activities in Lelystad, and time spent and lived in the new-town are put forward.

The questions and statements are collected in a concise survey (see appendix).

The actual surveying will mainly take place in person, by approaching possible respondents on the busiest shopping street of Lelystad (de Promesse). Most of these surveys are conducted in a conversational matter, where the respondents give vocal responses to the asked questions. Additionally, the survey is put online and spread through relevant channels to reach more inhabitants of the city. The language in which the surveys are conducted is exclusively Dutch, due to the location and native tongue of the expected respondents.

The results of the surveys are aggregated digitally and subsequently discussed in later paragraphs.

The results of the surveys will be compared within themselves so possible relations with factors such as age, length of residence in the new-town, occupation and educational background can be spotted. A division in the results will be made between designated visitors and inhabitants of the town, so that outside perspective can be treated separately. Any results or findings that seem relevant, expected or unexpected will be treated here. A summary of the empirical findings will conclude this chapter, and partially answer the second part of the research question.

Considering the methods for inspecting the data of the study, some formulas for calculating the predicted reliability and internal correlations will be used. Firstly the internal correlations, between the scores of each category of urban identity, will be sought between the individual surveys. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient [PPMCC] will be utilized to calculate correlations between

the results of two categories of urban identity at a time. As all categories will be measured against each other, averages will be calculated over the correlations relevant to each category to show which categories are more or less related to the rest of the data. Additionally, these intercorrelations will be used to calculate the predicted reliability of the empirical study using Cronbach’s Alpha formula. This test reflects on the internal consistency of the results and produces a score between 0 and 1, with 0.50 being unacceptable, higher than 0.70 acceptable, and higher than 0.90 excellent.

Further in the thesis, these results and findings such as possible correlations will be compared to the existing research on the matter (Lalli, 1988, 1992). The theoretical study of this thesis will be used to reflect further on the research and give an overview of how to best interpret the results. The last part of the thesis focuses on answering the research question as a whole, combining the efforts of the designers and planners of Lelystad with the resulting perceived identity by the inhabitants. Additionally, the hypotheses noted earlier in the thesis will be tested here.

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5.2

PERCEPTION OF URBAN IDENTITY BY INHABITANTS

The measurement of the perception of urban identity of the inhabitants of the case study Lelystad is measured in a point system based on previous studies by Lalli (1988, 1992) in Mannheim, Germany and Heidelberg, Germany. In all five previously discussed categories, three statements are presented to the respondent, to which they can strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5), with each full number in between being available as well.

Although the surveys completed with the respondents additionally contained questions concerning the perception of the new-town by the inhabitants and their personal information, the following paragraphs will focus primarily on those questions relating to the measurement of urban identity.

Urban identity

cases is so large, one can only speculate. The bad reputation of Lelystad discussed in an earlier chapter, versus the fairly positive one of Heidelberg may play a role in this.

Secondly, a small overview of the total survey results is given (table 2), including an indication of the predicted reliability of the study. While this predicted reliability (0.78) is considered acceptable, as the number of respondents to the survey is relatively low (n = 27), the conclusions made on the basis of these results can only be used as an approximate insight to the perceived urban identity of the inhabitants. The results themselves have quite some intercorrelation between the categories with the notable exception of ‘evaluation’. Compared to the results of Lalli (1992) the correlations between all categories are significantly lower but still show a positive relation (table 1).

Average correlation

Evaluation

0.11

Attachment

0.45

Continuity

0.41

Familiarity

0.57

Commitment

0.54

Total

0.42

Descriptive statistics Subsets Questions total

n = 27 5 15

Average score

3.39

Standard deviation

0.66

Cronbach’s Alpha (predicted reliability)

0.78

Table 1. Average intercorrelation per category.

Table 2. Analysis of the scale and reliability.

When investigating the results of the study, it becomes clear that the overall identification with the city by its respondents, with an average 3.39 in Lelystad, is almost exactly the same score as in Heidelberg with 3.39 (Lalli, 1992, p. 297). This is a striking find that refutes at least one of the hypotheses of this thesis. In the beginning of the thesis the expectation of a lower grade of identification with the city in a new-town than in a city with a historic city was stated in the hypotheses.

Within the results of this study there are however still many differences to be found.

Where Heidelberg shows a significant positive correlation of 0.48 between ‘evaluation’ and the other categories of urban identity (Lalli, 1992, p. 296), the results from Lelystad show a very low positive correlation of 0.11 (table 1).

As to why this difference between the study-

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The results of the study in Lelystad bring forward some possible connections when comparing the urban identification with other factors. One of such factors is the length of residence in the town, and its relation to ‘attachment’, ‘continuity’, ‘familiarity’ and ‘commitment’, as shown in figure 35. It becomes clear from this analysis of the results that these four categories of urban identity show an increasing line with the length of residence, similar to the results of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992). Additionally, the figure visualizes the overall lower scores of ‘continuity’ (fig. 35). As this category relates to the personal history of the respondents in the city, it may be related to the fact that a majority of the people have not spent their whole lives in the city, with 87% of the

5.00 Attachment

Continuity

Identification

4.00

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3.00

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2.00

1.00 0-5

5 - 10

10 - 20

20 - 30

30 - 40

40 +

Length of residence in years Fig. 35. Identification over time.

respondents indicating that they have lived in other cities than Lelystad.

As Lelystad is a new-town, the question remains if this fact has any significant influence on the urban identity of its inhabitants. The study shows that the overall identification is not lower than that of a city with a significant historic urban fabric, such as Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992). Additionally, the overall urban identification with Lelystad shows no significant differences between respondents who indicate that the young age of the city influences their opinion of the town and those who don’t. These findings are interesting as 78% percent of the respondents indicate that they often visit other cities, with all of these respondents saying other city centers are more attractive than that of Lelystad. In open questions relating to why they find other city centers to be more attractive, many pragmatic concerns such as; a larger collection of shops, prices of goods and the vacancy of commercial space in the city center are raised by all respondents.

Other less pragmatic concerns, such as the the lack of an enjoyable atmosphere and the absence of historic buildings and development, are mentioned by 35% and 26% of the respondents respectively. These latter findings indicate that while perhaps the respondents find their city center less attractive than that of cities with historic urban fabric, the overall identification with the city as a whole is not lower than that of a city

with historic urban fabric, such as Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992).

The results of the surveys done in the case study of this thesis, Lelystad, the Netherlands, give an insight into how urban identity is perceived by its inhabitants. The findings give both expected and unexpected results, leaving room for interpretation as for what caused them. The first main finding of the study shows that the overall identification with the new-town by the inhabitants is the same as in the Heidelberg study (Lalli, 1992).

The ‘continuity’ category scores significantly lower than the other categories, indicating a possibility of a specific issue with either the asked questions or the low percentage of people having spent their entire life in the city.

Some of the respondents indicate that the young age of the city influences their opinion of the city, but it has no significant effect on their identification with the city compared to the respondents who indicated that their opinion was not influenced by the young age.

Other city centers than that of Lelystad are said to be more attractive by all respondents, referring to the amount of stores, but also the better atmosphere and abundance of old buildings as the main reasons.

In the following paragraphs, the perception of the reputation of the city through the exploration of the ‘evaluation’ category by the visitors of the new-town will be compared to the views of the inhabitants.

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PERCEPTION OF REPUTATION BY VISITORS

In the last paragraphs, the perception of urban identity of the inhabitants of Lelystad has been discussed. Part of this urban identity is the category ‘evaluation’, which concerns the perceived reputation of the new-town.

The respondents classified as visitors got a smaller selection of questions excluding the categories ‘attachment’, ‘continuity’, ‘familiarity’ and ‘commitment’, but including the category of ‘evaluation’. The reputation of Lelystad in the media and existing polls has been discussed in a previous chapter.

This part of the study will show the measured perception of reputation by the visitors and compare it to the same results measured among the inhabitants.

The perceived reputation of the case study is measured in the same way as the other categories of urban identity, by valuing three statements from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). The average results over all respondents, both inhabitants and visitors is 2.51, significantly lower than that of the case of Heidelberg, with an average over 3.50 (estimation deducted from figure 1, Lalli, 1992, p.296). The existing reputation of Lelystad as defined earlier is thus, at least partially, reflected in these findings. When separating the results of the inhabitants from the visitors, some differences become clear. The visitors are, with an average of 3.08, noticeably more positive about the reputation of the new town than the inhabitants themselves, with only 2.42. While not every statement resulted in the same difference, all statements were graded more positively by the visitors (fig.36).

The better reputation among visitors can possibly be explained by the fact that they spend their time visiting Lelystad, instead of going elsewhere. This might not be the complete explanation as the reason for their visit to Lelystad is not noted, and could be business related or otherwise.

Within the questions, the largest difference in response is to the first statement; ‘Lelystad has a good reputation’ (fig. 36). This suggests the inhabitants of Lelystad have a worse image of the outside reputation than the outsiders themselves. Again, this is only true if the visitors are representative of average outsiders, which is questionable.

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Inhabitants

Visitors

5.00

Identification

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3.00

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Lelystad has a good reputation

Lelystad is a Lelystad can be popular city recommended to trourists

Statements part of ‘evaluation’ Fig. 36. Inhabitants vs. visitors responses to statements of ‘evaluation’.

The past paragraphs discussed the less than positive outcomes of the part of the empirical study concerning the reputation of the new-town. The noted differences between the views of the visitors and those of the inhabitants show the inhabitants are more negative about the reputation overall.

Comparing the results to those of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992), the results are more negative overall, and less correlating with other categories of urban identity.

5.4

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

In this chapter, the empirical part of the study and its findings have been discussed.

For the purpose of answering the research question, the perceived urban identity of the inhabitants is measured through a survey.

Additionally, questions about the status of the city as a new-town and questions about the attractiveness of the city versus other cities are included. The survey used in this study is based on that of Lalli (1988, 1992) used in Mannheim and Heidelberg. This allows for some comparisons between the outcomes of the study.

The final quantity of the respondents is not very high, and thus the results have to be seen as merely a possible indication of the opinions of the population of the city. The calculated predicted reliability is satisfactory nevertheless (table 1). The results show clear positive correlations between the tested categories of urban identity; ‘attachment’, ‘continuity’, ‘familiarity’ and ‘commitment’, with the exception being ‘evaluation’. This category of ‘evaluation’, concerning the perceived reputation of the city is explored in more depth, and the responses of visitors and inhabitants on the matter are compared.

Overall, the urban identification of the inhabitants of new-town Lelystad is the same as that of the inhabitants of the historical town Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992), refuting the related hypothesis. Furthermore, the length of residence, just like in the Heidelberg example (Lalli, 1992), shows a clear increasing line in most aspects of urban identity. These results additionally show that the category of ‘continuity’, concerning the personal history of the respondent in the town is rated comparatively low (fig. 35).

This could perhaps be explained by the high percentage of inhabitants indicating to have lived in other cities, and thus not having all their history connected to Lelystad.

All of the respondents indicate they find other city centers to be more attractive than that of Lelystad, most indicating pragmatic concerns such as the offer of stores and prices of goods. A significant part of the respondents also indicated that they missed a good atmosphere and historic buildings and squares. This possibly indicates

that although the city being a new-town does not affect the general identification with the city, it does have consequences for the opinions on the town.

The reputation Lelystad has gotten over the years has not always been positive, perhaps even generally negative.

As mentioned earlier, one of the categories of urban identity, ‘evaluation’, takes into account the perceived reputation of the city in question. Overall, the respondents score significantly lower in this category than the respondents in the Heidelberg study (Lalli, 1992). This indicated they perceive the outside reputation of the city to be largely negative.

The respondents who said they were visitors to Lelystad, had a more positive view of the city than its inhabitants.

The results of the empirical study show various expected and unexpected outcomes. The following chapters will reflect on these findings with both the theory and the efforts of the designers, to give a well-argumented answer to the research question, and treat the hypotheses.

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6 REFLECTIONS

Over the last chapters, the relevant theoretical background about the concept of urban identity, new-towns, and the case study have been discussed. Additionally, the empirical part of the thesis has been treated, going into some of the correlations found in the results. This chapter of the thesis will focus on reflecting on the different chapters and create a broad overview of the collected information. Specific finds in the thesis that are relevant to the research question, or finds that are unexpected, will be elaborated on. The aim of the reflections is to give a suitable well-argumented basis to answer the research questions and to confirm or refute the hypotheses.

Fig. 37. Modern low-rise senior housing. Lelystad, the Netherlands.

May 18, 2018.

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6.1

REFLECTION ON EMPIRICAL STUDY AND THEORY

To link the theory on urban identity discussed in the second chapter and the empirical study on urban identity in the study case treated in the previous chapter, a reflection will be made. This and the following reflection will be used to build an overview of the treated matter in this thesis for answering the research question and validating the hypotheses.

The discussed theory on urban identity itself is written for an important part by the often mentioned Marco Lalli (1988, 1992), but is based on work on place and self identity. This self identity, as examined in earlier chapters, is the underlying concept of place and urban identity and therefore needed to be considered in the surveys used in the empirical study. While these considerations had previously been made in earlier studies to measure urban identity (Hallak, et al., 2012; Lalli, 1988, 1992), they had not been applied to new-towns. To be able to compare the empirical study of this thesis to the empirical work done in other locations, the methods themselves are merely translated to Dutch, the relevant local language.

As in most other studies concerning place and urban identity, secondary factors are included to identify possible relations between them (Hallak, et al., 2012; Hull, et al., 1994; Lalli, 1988, 1992). Some of these factors studied seemed more relevant in the case of Lelystad than others. One example of this is the factor of missing certain urban attributes or atmospheres as expressed in the case of hurricane Hugo (Hull, et al, 1994). While this factor did not seem to be very relevant to the new-town of Lelystad, where no large natural disasters have taken place, the results from the empirical study show that this assumption might have been wrong. As noted in the chapter on the empirical work, 87% of the respondents indicated they had lived in other cities. While it is not clear whether they have consciously experienced their time in these other cities, due to their age or otherwise, it would have been relevant to investigate specifically whether they missed certain urban attributes or atmosphere in the new-town after moving there from a town or city with significant historical urban

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development. Findings related to this topic have been noted, such as all respondents indicating that they find other city centers more attractive.

Other secondary factors, such as the length of residence in the new-town, have been included in the surveys for this thesis. As length of residence has shown a positive relation with certain aspects of urban identification in Heidelberg, Germany (Lalli, 1992), which contains significant amounts of historic urban fabric, this factor has been tested in this thesis as well. In Lelystad, a similar positive relation between this length of residence and most categories of urban identification can be seen (fig. 35).

Both of the mentioned factors of ‘missing’ and length of residence as influences on urban identification tie in with the cognitive as well as the phenomenological perspective which are discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. While not explicitly stated in the literature on the topic (Downs & Stea, 1979; Lynch, 1960; Tolman, 1948), from the findings from both Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992) and Lelystad, we can infer that time spent in the city influences becoming familiar with the city. The increasing ‘attachment’ over time with the city demonstrated in both Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992) and Lelystad, together with the found increase of ‘familiarity’ over time in Lelystad (fig. 35) support this idea.

When looking at the noted topics, which have been argued to theoretically influence urban identity, as discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, multiple connections to the outcomes of the empirical study can be found. For Lelystad, the absence of local characteristics, such as local materials and building traditions could have affected the overall identification with the city. While the identification with Lelystad by its inhabitants is not lower than that of Heidelberg, with an abundance of the local materials and traditions used in the construction of the city, a few respondents from Lelystad specifically note the absence of these old buildings and use of concrete as negative aspects of the city center.

As argued in one of the hypotheses for this thesis, and in the overview of the

theoretical work in the definition of urban identity in chapter two, the absence of existing prevalent communities in the new-town could be a cause for lower identification with the city as their role in the social structure of the city facilitates the process of identification (Wilkinson, 1986). As the identification is not lower than the old city of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992), it could mean this claim is either untrue, or communities have formed quickly in the new-town. While this is purely a speculation, the willful act of moving to Lelystad gave all the inhabitants many challenges in common, perhaps uniting them more than in any old city (van Casteren, 2017).

As this is not specifically investigated in this thesis, it can be relevant for further research.

There is, unfortunately, no specific existing research into urban identity in new-towns, and conclusions on whether these findings are representative for new-towns in general cannot be made here.

This fact, together with the relatively small amount of respondents in the empirical study of this thesis, make it difficult to argue whether the findings are reflective of the proposed realm of study made in the second chapter of this thesis. The realm of modernist urban development, in which urban identity has been studied here, specifies a select group of development, but those still vary wildly in scale, execution, age, and followed different courses of evolution during their existence. The other realms in which urban identity can be studied, historic urban development and historically inspired modern development, have not received similar amounts of attention in the empirical study for the reasons described in the first two chapters. However, a significant amount of comparisons to developments from these categories, mainly cities with significant historic urban fabric such as Heidelberg are made. The question here is if Heidelberg, and the research done there, is representative for the category of historic urban development, to which the answer is most likely not a resounding ‘yes’. The use of the results of the research in this thesis is therefore not to make general statements on either realms and categories, but to give an indication of how this study relates to them.

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6.2

REFLECTION ON EFFORTS OF CREATION AND PERCEPTION OF URBAN IDENTITY

As Lelystad was built from scratch, with no existing inhabitants and no city to identify with, the creation of the city has helped shape the urban identity of the new-town today. While in the case of urban identity, it is up to the individual to identify more or less with their surroundings, designers and planners have played a vital role in facilitating this environment. The following paragraphs will reflect these design decisions on the outcomes of the empirical study on urban identification in Lelystad.

While the original designs by van Eesteren were not fully implemented, its modernist aspects and supposed great importance to the region were transferred to the new plans. As the city ended up not fulfilling many of its aspirations, this possibly had consequences for the pride of the city by the inhabitants. However, as with many of the noted outcomes of the empirical study, the many challenges Lelystad has faced, and still faces, have not significantly impacted the pride of the city, nor the urban identification as a whole compared to existing studies (Lalli, 1988, 1992). So the question remains; what possible influences did the design and planning decisions have on the perception of urban identity in Lelystad?

The modernist design, as described in the third and fourth chapter of this thesis, had great consequences for the physical reality of the new-town. The separation of functions, and of individual neighborhoods, by large roads and connected with sporadic bridges seems to not have induced any negative feelings amongst the inhabitants.

Rather, inhabitants note the lack of cars and unwanted guests in the neighborhoods, and praise the quiet living environments (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c). Van Casteren (personal communication, May 28, 2018), while less positive than the polled inhabitants, emphasizes that the bridges and divides between the neighborhoods did not cause the problems of the city, neither could they prevent them.

The intentions of giving the sub-urban living environment of the new-town

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urban level facilities through the city center, as intended by the designers (Reijndorp, et al., 2012), produced less favorable results.

A flexible modernist design for the center with large promenades and elevated cycling paths was imagined and built. This city center struggled to become successful since its construction, and has since been largely rebuilt with a less modernistic design.

Nevertheless, all respondents indicate that they find other city centers to be more attractive and mention practical as well as aesthetic concerns. While in the empirical research in this thesis, as well as in research done by the municipality of the new-town (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c), inhabitants express plenty of criticism about their physical environment, it is not clear how this influences their perception of the city as a whole. As the designers of the RIJP, that took over the work of van Eesteren, are said to have had little concern for the character of the new-town (Reijndorp, et al., 2012), it can be described as surprising this has no noticeable effects on the perceived urban identity by the inhabitants when compared to studies by Lalli (1988, 1992).

Decades later, after the implementation of many modernist ideals and big plans for the city, the municipality that is now in charge of the design decided to turn the strategies around. Rather than the city being built after the modernist image of the future by van Eesteren and the RIJP, the image and strategies of the city now follow from the existing situation. The municipality calls this the ‘the green and blue city’ (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018). This slogan is a rather simplistic observation of the current situation, rather than a new goal to work towards to. And this is exactly the intent. Emphasising the strengths of the city that inhabitants have noted, seems to be the current core strategy for urban development (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018). While only a few of the respondents say their opinions on Lelystad are influenced by the young age of the city, it is possible that

greater focus on existing qualities, instead of continuously chasing a new identity can benefit the urban identity of the inhabitants over time.

While discussed in earlier chapters, landmarks can be used to induce an identity or atmosphere on a larger surrounding area, the effects of this have not been studied in either the existing studies (Hallak, et al., 2012; Hull, et al., 1994; Lalli, 1988, 1992) or in the empirical part of this thesis. This is perhaps a missed opportunity, as two major projects in the city, the modern theatre (fig. 30) and a large sculpture on the waterfront are each aiming to have an impact on the city (Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018).

The noted examples in earlier paragraphs entail some design decisions directly impacting the physical scale. However, van Casteren (2017, personal communication, May 28, 2018) argues that the main influence is a more overarching philosophical one. He suggests that the designers and planners have caused a lack of imaginability in the city and the lack of references to the accomplishments of the city, the successful ‘battle’ against the tides and pioneering spirit of the first inhabitants, are important influences in the development and perception of the city. While the aforementioned arguments do not seem unreasonable, none of these factors described are brought up by the inhabitants in the empirical study, and as mentioned before, pride of the city is not significantly low.

When comparing the efforts of the designers, on both the philosophical scale as well as the scale of implementation, to the perception of urban identity by the inhabitants of the new-town, some things become clear. As discussed over the last paragraphs, many factors that are suggested to have influence on the identity of the inhabitants, such as the modernist design, the lack of imageability and their physical outcomes, are not reflected in the findings of the empirical study on this urban identity of the inhabitants.

Some expectations, such as the negative influence of the separation of functions and neighborhoods was even proven to be seen as positive instead (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015c). While it is equally realistic that expectations which followed from the

theory and even from interviewed experts are proven incorrect, the difficulty to investigate the impacts of these noted factors cannot be understated.

In the last paragraphs attempts have been made to investigate the overlap between the efforts of creation and perception of urban identity as measured in the empirical part of this thesis. While interesting finds can be made on the opinions of inhabitants on the physical state and reputation of their city, the link between these opinions and their perception of urban identity is difficult to make. As urban identity is measured on a point scale, with no references to specific local realities, to allow for reproduction in other locales, it is only possible to speculate as to how urban identity is influenced by these specific local realities.

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7 CONCLUSIONS

In the previous chapter a reflection has been given on the overlapping factors of the general theory and research on urban identity, the efforts of the designers to create identity in the study case Lelystad, and the perceived urban identity measured in the empirical research in this thesis. This chapter will use the discussed topics and findings to answer the research question, and confirm or refute the hypotheses. Additionally, relevant or otherwise surprising findings of this thesis will be included and discussed here.

Fig. 38. Rowhouse painted with the colors of football club Ajax (Amsterdam).

Waterwijk, Lelystad, the Netherlands. June 9, 2018.

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7

CONCLUSIONS

To answer the research question stated and argued for in the beginning of this thesis, a study of both the theory and existing studies, as well as a new empirical study, have been made. In this thesis, the topic of urban identity has been explored in depth.

The definitions and theory on the term, and terms surrounding urban identity are treated, and existing empirical research on place and urban identity is discussed. Three realms in which urban identity can be studied are established. The focus here is on modernist developments, for their lack of historical reference and often clearly stated ideas for the future. Following this, the concepts of new-towns, and the case study with its history and development are introduced. How this urban identity is manifested in the case study of the modernist new-town Lelystad is explored. This exploration takes shape in the form of an empirical study based on earlier studies by Lalli (1988, 1992), to be able to make possible comparisons. The empirical study has been done with a relatively small amount of respondents, but results show an acceptable level of internal correlations.

This study produced both expected as well as unexpected outcomes, the ones most relevant to the research question and hypotheses will be the focus in the following paragraphs.

Designers of urban developments use historic architecture styles to appeal to an already existing urban identity, far or near.

The first hypothesis formed in the first chapter of this thesis concerns the expected attempts of designers and planners to use historical architecture styles to refer to existing external urban identities. While in a modernist city like Lelystad, most of the development is modern and no obvious references to building styles from medieval or other time periods were originally planned, a few new developments in the last decades have done so. While uncomparable to developments like Gaoqiao, the new developments in Lelystad mimic the same canal houses of Amsterdam, with both literal and modern interpretations (fig. 31). The main difference seems to be the scale, where in

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Lelystad a few relatively small blocks have these styles, in Gaoqiao, the whole new-town sports this fashion. All in all the first hypothesis is confirmed, albeit on a very small scale, and not through the original plans.

Designers of urban developments use landmarks to impose an identity on the larger project area.

While both of the developments noted above can be described as landmarks within the city, it is unclear what the impacts of these and other landmarks are on the urban identification of the inhabitants, or if the intent of their construction was to impose an urban identity on a larger scale. In the documents and interview covering the strategy of the municipality (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014; Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018), it is expressed that the goals of the landmarks concern the external image of the city rather than internal identification. The hypothesis concerning the use of landmarks to impose an identity on a larger area is therefore refuted. While the landmarks might have an influence on the urban identity on a larger scale, this is not measured and irrelevant to the hypothesis, as this concerns the intent rather than the effects. The measurement of the effects of these landmarks on the urban identity on a larger scale might be interesting to research in future studies on the topic of urban identity.

Urban identity in new-town Lelystad will be significantly less than in the case studies of Lalli (1988, 1992), possessing a historic city center.

One of the more surprising outcomes of the empirical study concerns the comparisons of overall urban identification in the new-town with that in a historical city as measured in Heidelberg, Germany (Lalli, 1992). The third noted hypothesis of this research states that urban identification of the inhabitants is expected to be less in modernist urban development, than in cities with significant historical urban fabric. On the basis of the outcomes of the empirical study in this thesis, this hypothesis is refuted. Overall,

the identification with the city scores exactly the same number in Lelystad, as in Heidelberg; 3.39 (Lalli, 1992). While some differences between the various categories of urban identity show divergence between the two cities, such as the lower perceived reputation of Lelystad, the overall identification remains the same. This expectation of lower urban identification in the modernist city in the form of a hypothesis is therefore disproven.

As social structure facilitates urban identification (Wilkinson, 1986), the lack of existing communities in Lelystad cause lower identification with the city.

Another expectation that was not reflected in this study is the predicted negative effects of a lack of pre-existing communities in the new-town on the forming of urban identity and specifically pride in the new-town. As argued by Wilkinson (1986), communities are the medium through which place and thus urban identity is constructed.

The expectation that Lelystad, as a new-town, without any pre-existing communities would therefore have more difficulties with constructing this identity, was seen as reasonable. After reviewing the results of the empirical study it becomes clear that even with this theoretical burden, the overall identification in the city is not lower than that in the city of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992).

It should be noted that although some conclusions are made here, the validity somewhat depends on the representativeness of the studies in both Lelystad and Heidelberg. As they are just two examples, further research in more similar cities on preferably larger groups of respondents would be beneficial.

How is urban identity attempted to be created, and how is it perceived in modernist urban development? The case of new-town Lelystad, the Netherlands.

The four hypotheses noted at the beginning of this thesis have been discussed, but the main question is yet to be answered.

This research question for the thesis cannot simply be answered by a yes or no, but instead requires some more elaboration. In the following paragraphs, the main research question of this thesis will be attempted to be

answered in a concise and complete manner.

The first part of the research question concerns the attempts of the planners and designers of the new-town in shaping urban identity. First, it should be established whether or not the planners and designers were in fact concerned with urban identity or creation of character in the city. While the modernist designer van Eesteren had a clear image of the future in mind, and was concerned with the final outcome of his plans, the RIJP, who took over this responsibility was more pragmatic and had little concern for the character and identity of the city (Nicolai, 2012; Reijndorp, et al., 2012; van Casteren, 2017). The municipality who later inherited the responsibility of urban design and planning in the city specifically indicates to be concerned with identity in the city albeit in a limited fashion (Gemeente Lelystad, 2014; Gemeente Lelystad & Arcadis, 2005; Zijp, personal communication, May 31, 2018). As the municipality’s policy on urban identity follows the current perceived identity and is therefore subordinate, rather than imposing an identity, it means that it is difficult to see the actual results of this strategy. The intentions, or lack thereof, by van Eesteren, the RIJP, as well as the municipality, to shape urban identity in the new-town nevertheless have consequences for the outcomes.

The new-town that was constructed was not just new, it was also nothing like any other city, the modernist design resulted in low scale residential neighborhoods which were free of unnecessary car traffic, and where houses were all directed towards small cul-de-sacs. The neighborhoods are strictly separated from each other and each has their own distinctive architectural and urban designs, while keeping similar cul-de-sacs and typologies. The strictly separated city center was revolutionary for its time and had modern overhead cycling paths.

Nevertheless, its lack of success prompted a more moderate reconstruction as a modern interpretation of a classical old city center.

After overcoming decades of high crime rates and a bad reputation, the inhabitants are positive about their living environments and identify to their city to the same degree as in Heidelberg, a city with an abundance of historic urban development (Gemeente Lelystad, 2015; Lalli, 1992). The perception

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of this urban identity in the new-town is the topic of the second part of the research question, and will be discussed here.

As discussed over the last paragraphs and chapters, the urban identification in the modernist new-town Lelystad is the subject of the second part of the research question. Through an empirical study based on the earlier studies

by Lalli (1988, 1992), the urban identity of the inhabitants in Lelystad is measured. The different categories of urban identity show similarities as well as some divergence. The category relating to the perceived reputation of the city scores slightly lower than other categories as measured in Lelystad, and significantly lower than that measured in the old town of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992). This is not unexpected as the reputation of the city in the rest of the country has not always been very good. Other findings such as relatively low ‘continuity’ suggest the personal history of the respondents in the city is not valued highly. A possible explanation for this is the large amount of people living in the city that have not spent their whole life there. Some other findings are clearly in line with trends observed in Heidelberg, such as the higher identification with the city in groups that have spent more time in the city (Lalli, 1992).

While the respondents all indicate other city centers are more attractive than that of Lelystad, pride of the city is not particularly low as compared to other Dutch cities, and urban identification overall is exactly the same as in the example of Heidelberg (Lalli, 1992).

This latter find was particularly surprising as two of hypotheses expected Lelystad, a new-town without historic city center, and without pre-existing communities, to have more trouble establishing urban identity amongst its inhabitants.

The reasons for these results are not particularly clear. The empirical research in this thesis is fairly limited by its scope, as well as scale. The predicted reliability score calculated through Cronbach’s Alpha shows acceptable results, but the reliability of this empirical study should not be overestimated.

However, some suggestions are made that can be investigated in further research.

It seems like the inhabitants of Lelystad, despite the bad reputation of the city, its

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decade long struggles with criminality, and lack of significant historical background, have come to appreciate their new-town, and developed pride and identity along the way. Perhaps the strategy of design in one of the neighborhoods represents the city as a whole: All the buildings in one neighborhood were left unpainted, as it was suggested the new life would bring metaphorical color to the neighborhood (van Casteren, 2017). This idea presents us with the possibility that urban identity is influenced more by social factors, and the drive to make the new-town your home, than with the actual physical environment.

Although this angle was previously suggested by Hard (1987) these and other ideas are not researched or scientifically argued for in this thesis. Thus, these topics can, and perhaps should, be researched in further studies. These suggestions for further research will be elaborated on in the following part of the thesis.

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8 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

While in this thesis the hypotheses have been treated, and the main research question has been answered and discussed, new questions and ambiguity on certain subjects have arisen. Some of these unanswered questions and unexplored topics have been mentioned over the last chapters, but here a concise overview of the recommendations for future research will be made.

1: Some simple solutions concerning the execution of the research should be considered. Larger amounts of respondents in the empirical part of following similar research would increase the representativeness of the perception of the inhabitants. Additionally, much effort should be put into translating the surveys to the respective local languages in a professional manner, to be able to more confidently compare results from different linguistic areas.

on the urban identity of the inhabitants, and which specific decisions relate to that.

4: While some of the findings in the thesis were expected, some were less expected, and the gathered data gave no satisfying way to explain these results.

One example of this is the finding that all inhabitants indicate to find other city centers to be more attractive than theirs.

The comparable study in Heidelberg does not include such a measure and because of this it is difficult to value. It is therefore vital to future studies to broaden the scope of the research to include more topics to spot possible correlations. Topics such as the influence of landmarks, political stance of the respondents and level of engagement in the community can be included. Possibly the addition of personal interviews with some or all of the respondents will allow for finding new topics to investigate in further future research.

2: The validity of Lalli’s (1988, 1992) method should be tested further to create a more reliable framework on which to relate the completed studies. At this moment, less than a handful of studies have been done, and not all of the specific results are accessible for comparison of results. While every city is different and not just defined by its age, a larger body of studies with the same methodology would rule out many other factors, and create a better understanding of the influences that shape urban identity.

3: In the content of the empirical research on urban identity, to answer the research question more clearly, the concept should be connected substantially more to specific physical attributes. This way it can be judged more definitively whether planners and designers had or have significant influence

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Fig. 39. Covered shopping promenade. Lelycentre, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018.

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9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During my thesis I have been supported by several wonderful people from educational, professional as well as personal spheres.

I would like to thank my thesis advisors prof. dr. Frank Eckardt and Brigitte Zamzow of the chair of Urban Studies and Social Research of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, for their extensive support and advice on my thesis. Their interest and unique insights helped me challenge myself more.

A special thanks goes to the relevant experts who agreed to share their knowledge and expertise in insightful and often engaging interviews; Joris van Casteren for sharing his deep knowledge of the development and history of Lelystad, as well as his personal experience in the town. Ronnie Zijp, for his insights in the current approach of the municipality in dealing with identity and more. And finally Michelle Provoost, for her inexhaustible knowledge of new-towns, their lessons, and their relevance.

The support of my cheerful, critical and supportive classmates of European and Advanced Urban Studies in distracting and helping me with my thesis will not be forgotten.

Additionally I would like to thank prof. dr.-ing. Bernd Nentwig and dipl.-ing.

Philippe Schmidt of the chair of Architectural Management of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, for enabling me to go after my interests in my internship in Shenzhen, China that inspired me to write on this topic.

Lastly I would like to thank my mother Wilma, father Bert, sister Franciska and my girlfriend Eva, for their unconditional support, encouragement, and sometimes helpful corrections to my writing.

I could not have done it without you.

Fig. 40. Individually styled attached houses. Gondel, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 18, 2018.

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5. Retrieved from https://resolver.kb.nl/ solve?urn=ABCDDD:010831253:mpeg21:a0548 Shelton, T., Zhou, C., & Pan, N. (2018, June 27). ‘An incredible amount of waste’: What China’s eerie ghost cities say about its economy. ABC Australia. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net. au/news/2018-06-27/china-ghost-citiesshow-growth-driven-by-debt/9912186 Smit, W. (1985, February 1). Ideologie en Stad [Ideology and the city]. Nederlands Dagblad, p. 7. Retrieved from https://resolver.kb.nl/ resolve?urn=ddd:010569860:mpeg21:a0113 Street, F. (2018, February 13). Paris or China: Can you tell real thing from replica? CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/ fake-paris-china/index.html Valiente, A., Woodruff, B., & Yiu, K. (2016, March 12). China’s ‘Fake’ Cities Are Eerie Replicas of Paris, London and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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Bevolkingsontwikkelingen 2014-2017 [Population developments 2014-2017].

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Gemeente Lelystad. (2017b). Werkloosheid Lelystad daalt naar 7,3 procent [Unemployment decreases to 7,3 percent]. Retrieved from https://www.lelystad.nl/4/Lelystad/ Nieuws-2018/Nieuws-2017/Maart/ Werkloosheid-Lelystad-daalt-naar-7,3procent.html Gemeente Lelystad. (2018). Deelregio LelystadAlmere groeit economisch mee met MRA [Sub-region Lelystad-Almere grows economically with the MRA]. Retrieved from https://www.lelystad.nl/4/Lelystad/ Nieuws-2018/Juni/Deelregio-Lelystad-Almeregroeit-economisch-mee-met-MRA.html NTR. (2017). Vijftig jaar Lelystad: Viering of herdenking? [Fifty years Lelystad: celebration or commemoration?]. Retrieved from https:// anderetijden.nl/artikel/4812/Vijftig-jaarLelystad PPHP. Java Eiland, Amsterdam. Retrieved from https://pphp.nl/project/java-eiland/ UN. 68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, says UN. Retrieved from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/ Files/WUP2018-PressRelease.pdf UNESCO World Heritage. World Heritage List.

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Structuurplan Lelystad 2015 [Structure plan Lelystad 2015]. Retrieved from https://www. lelystad.nl/4/Lelystad/Import/StructuurplanLelystad-2015.pdf Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM). (2004). Nota Ruimte [National Spatial strategy].

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Figures 1. Google Earth. (2018). Contextual location of Lelystad in polders and relevant cities.

Retrieved from: https://earth.google.com/web/ 7. Caplar, A. Square in the historic city center of Heidelberg, Germany. Retrieved from http:// www.heidelberg-marketing.de/en/experience/ sights/squares-parks-gardens/kornmarkt.html 8. Wolf, C. (2015). Skyline of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Retrieved from https://c-w-design. de/

9. Fay, C. F. (1903). Bilder aus dem alten Frankfurt am Main.

10. Bremer, N. (2017) Rebuilt Hühnermarkt in 2017. Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Retrieved from https://www.journal-frankfurt.de/ journal_news/Politik-10/Ein-Blick-auf-denHuehnermarkt-Stueck-fuer-Stueck-wird-dieAltstadt-fertig-30067.html 11. Rondleidingen Roombeek Enschede.

Modern interpretation of Dutch canal houses in Roombeek, Enschede, the Netherlands. Retrieved from https://www. rondleidingenroombeek.nl/architectuur/ 13. Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief Beeldbank. (1973). The Bijlmermeer near the end of its construction. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Retrieved from https://beeldbank. amsterdam.nl/beeldbank/weergave/ record/?id=B00000034874 14. Ondaan, E. (1962). Aerial view of the construction of Lelystad. Retrieved from http:// fotos.serc.nl/flevoland/lelystad/lelystad-1494/ 15. Howard, E. & Osborn, F. J. (1965). Garden cities of to-morrow (11. print). Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Pr. 16. Pfeiffer, B. B., Gössel, P., & Wright, F. L. (2010).

Frank Lloyd Wright: The complete works.

Cologne: Taschen.

17. Fondation Le Corbusier. A model of the Radiant City. Retrieved from http://www. fondationlecorbusier.fr/ 18. Heald, M. (2018). Birds eye view of Canberra, Australia. Retrieved from https://www.sporcle. com/blog/2018/05/why-canberra-what-isthe-capital-of-australia/ 19. (2016). View on a model of Brasília, Brazil. Retrieved from https:// grupodeplanejamentotemp.files.wordpress. com/2016/03/brasilia.jpg?w=660&h=369 20. Martha, S. (2011). Colorful New-town Kilamba, Angola. Retrieved from https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kilamba_Kiaxi_-_ May_2011_(3).jpg 21. Lely, C. (1924). Zuiderzee works plan, containing three new landmasses. Retrieved from http:// www.historischecartografie.nl/Logboek/ Nieuws/Afsluitdijk-bestaat-75-jaar.html 22. Reijndorp, A., Baart, T., Bijlsma, L., & Nio, I. (2012). Atlas nieuwe steden: De verstedelijking van de groeikernen. Amsterdam: Trancity-valiz.

23. Nicolai, J. (2012). Lelystad - Structuurplannen en Werkelijkheid in 2005. Amsterdam: F&N Boekservice.

24. Nicolai, J. (2012). Lelystad - Structuurplannen en Werkelijkheid in 2005. Amsterdam: F&N Boekservice.

32. Van Eesteren, C. (1966). Sketch of the view on Lelystad. Retrieved from http://bakkerict.nl/efl/ images/pub_4/thumb_11_15.jpg

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11 APPENDIX

Attached to this thesis are the survey used in the empirical part of this thesis, as well as audio recordings of the interviews with the relevant experts. Both the surveys with the inhabitants as the interviews with the experts were conducted entirely in Dutch, due to the native language of the subjects.

The interviews have been saved on a CD as MP3 files, and are playable in any audio playback program. Aditionally, the raw data of the surveys has been included as an Excel file.

Fig. 41. Parking lots in front of identical rowhouses. Karveel, Lelystad, the Netherlands. (18 May, 2018)

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AUDIO RECORDINGS OF INTERVIEWS & SURVEY DATA Interviewee 1 Language Date Location

Joris van Casteren, journalist and author of the book: Lelystad (2017) Dutch May 28, 2018 Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Interviewee 2 Language Date Location

Ronnie Zijp, urban designer at the Municipality of Lelystad Dutch May 31, 2018 Lelystad, the Netherlands

Interviewee 3 Language Date Location

Michelle Provoost, director of the International New Town Institute Dutch June 11, 2018 Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Surveys Language

Location

Inhabitants of Lelystad Dutch Various dates in May and June, 2018 Lelystad, the Netherlands

CD

91

STATUTORY DECLARATION

I hereby affirm that the Master thesis at hand is my own written work and that I have used no other sources and aids other than those indicated. All passages, which are quoted from publications or paraphrased from these sources, are indicated as such, i.e. cited, attributed.

This thesis was not submitted in the same or in a substantially similar version, not even partially, to another examination board and was not published elsewhere.

Weimar, August 22, 2018

92

Mark Willem Lebbink

Back cover image. Rowhouses behind public green.

Atolwijk, Lelystad, the Netherlands. May 26, 2018.

93

URBAN IDENTITY IN MODERNIST URBAN DEVELOPMENT THE CASE OF NEW-TOWN LELYSTAD, THE NETHERLANDS