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.

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.

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.

After the second world war, the greenery aspect of the garden-city model was adopted by the modernist movement. Architects like Le Corbusier envisioned vast cities that consisted of towers within a parkland that were very different from the traditional city with relatively small buildings in a dense urban fabric. This evolution of the garden city proved to be less successful. In Europe especially, there was a large modernist movement after the war: Because of their grim architecture, huge scale, and industrial materials, the human element that made garden cities successful was taken out of the equation which resulted in the urban mess we can still see in the Banlieus of Paris, the post-war socialist outskirts of Moscow and the Barbican in London.

Of course, modernism has brought us some astounding pieces of architecture like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion, Oscar Niemeyer’s works in Brasilia, and the Guggenheim museum in New York by Frank Lloyd Wright, but certain urbanism-aspects of the modernist movement have proven undesirable like the unhuman scale of buildings and cheap materials.

This sparked a new movement: the Post-Modernists. Here the industrial, clean aesthetic was retired and replaced by principles of before the modernist building revolution. Instead of straight, repetitive urban landscapes, variation, swirling roads and small-scale buildings were reintroduced. In the Netherlands, this movement was first manifested in the form of ‘Bloemkoolwijken’, or Cauliflower-neighbourhoods. These were large planned neighbourhoods with a uniform, but somewhat traditional architecture. They consist of pointed roofs, brick facades and space for gardens. Despite being critisized for their chaotic layout, and now arguably outdated architecture, it did bring the human scale back, and these neighbourhoods are these days more accepted than the modernist ones from the 50’s and 60’s. The introduction of ‘woonerfen’, or ‘residential streets’, also played an important role in bringing the human scale back: these neighbourhoods discouraged drivers to drive fast, and made it more convenient to walk and play on the street.

In the decades that followed there was a lot of experimentation on how these neighbourhoods could be designed best. The funny thing is that the further we progressed, the nearer we got to traditional city designs. The neighbourhood of Nootdorp, the Hague, was designed as a neighbourhood center that had a lot in common with a historic Dutch town, despite being finished almost a century after the Bauhaus school was founded. Not only architecturally, but also spatially we are referring back to the historic town: Other developments in the country see a distancing from large-scale developments, and focus more on ‘Inbreiding’, or ‘Inspansion’, opposed to the traditional ‘expansion’ of cities, where brownfield developments in the urban area are encouraged due to scarce space. This infill of the urban structure densifies the city and makes the city more efficient in terms of amenity use.

This does raise some questions. How can it be that we are moving back to the historic cities, while they were despised during their own time? Maybe we will never know, but it leaves space to wonder.

Leander Krijnen

Pictures:

Read, L. (n.d.). Den Haag, Netherlands [Photo]. Retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/ sEUXSKkROWw