REVERSAL OF IDEOLOGY During the industrial revolution, most large western cities could be described as dense, chaotic and very polluted. City renewal projects have long been around, and this era was no exception. These projects often consisted of demolishing old dilapidated neighbourhoods to replace them with big flashy new ones, displacing the original inhabitants to worse neighbourhoods. However, certain amenities that used to be considered non-crucial like greenery were introduced. Due to the growing size of urban areas, nature was lessand-less accessible for inhabitants. Some of the most famous parks date from this early era of the implementation of greenery: Central Park in New York City, Hyde Park in London and Vondelpark in Amsterdam.
Contours Tactical Urbanism of a New Decade
This changed with the implementation of social housing. In the Netherlands itself, the ‘Woningwet’, or ‘housing act’, made sure that dwellings for the less fortunate would have to abide by certain standards before being allowed to be built and rented out. This drastically increased the quality of social housing and would permanently change the urban landscape.
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These trends of both bringing green into cities and having new, better forms of housing within cities were combined into the concept of garden cities. These were first theorized by Ebenezer Howard. He described small communities that were surrounded by a green belt, within a city. At this point, green was still very scarce in cities and the idea of the movement was to incorporate idyllic rural life back into cities because they thought this would drastically improve people’s overall happiness. They proved to be right; The garden city model was implemented all over the globe over the 20th century.
