Metropolitan Clubtalk #3: From the Netherlands to a Lowland City?

In Metropolitan Clubtalk, a podcast series by TU Delft’s Urban Design section, Robbert Jan van der Veen (TU Delft, ECHO Urban Design) talks to a range of guests about contemporary urban planning challenges. Experts from government, academia and design practice join the conversation to exchange ideas, with each episode focusing on a different spatial scale.

What constitutes good governance? Helmut Thoele, spatial strategist at the Province of South Holland, takes us straight into the subject. Siena’s town hall is home to fourteenth-century frescoes depicting the consequences of good and bad governance. One side of the room presents a nightmarish vision: an abandoned city with empty houses, burnt-out fields in the countryside and a few scattered, hostile figures. The other depicts a vibrant place where every door stands open. The city is growing and bustling with activity, filled with market traders, musicians, teachers, students and construction workers. The surrounding rolling hills are equally alive with work, travel and trade. It is an almost paradisiacal scene, one of the first of its time to move beyond biblical narratives and depict the real world in which people live together and make choices.

“What I find so beautiful,” says Helmut, “is that the frescoes portray the city and the countryside together, as equals. Their depiction of good governance reflects a profound sense of responsibility and a desire to help society flourish. Combined with an emphasis on shaping both the city and the countryside as interconnected parts of a whole, this strikes me as a hopeful message.”

From the Netherlands to a Lowland City?

The guests agree that good governance means making clear, decisive choices about spatial development. The Netherlands is urbanising rapidly, and this trend is set to continue over the coming decades.

Errik Buursink, policy coordinator for the National Spatial Strategy at the national government, explains: “Alongside all these beautiful images, I’ve brought some rather dull graphs and a map. But they illustrate two important developments happening in parallel. Across Europe, we see people moving en masse to cities and economically strong regions. The hinterland is emptying out, even in areas just three hours’ drive from here, while elsewhere people are crowding together. At the same time, global population growth is expected to reverse, perhaps as early as around 2050.”

This is not particularly surprising, Errik explains, because cities can rarely maintain their populations without migration, as most children are born in rural areas. For the Netherlands, however, this does not mean population growth will come to an end anytime soon. “The Netherlands is one of the places people will continue to move to.”

Anne Loes Nillesen, founder of Defacto and professor at TU Delft, responds with an aerial photograph of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The influx into major cities there is enormous. It is a place characterised by extraordinary dynamism, where extremely dense urban areas emerge and there is a constant, urgent need to transform the city.

“If you put a photograph of Midden-Delfland next to it, the landscape here might appear frozen in time, but we face enormous challenges too. The desire to preserve what we have sometimes seems to dominate. If opportunities for intervention remain limited and dependent on individual projects, we will never achieve the strategic interventions that can make a real difference and set transitions in motion.”

“The Netherlands is an urbanised country, yet it seems the Dutch deny that they are city dwellers,” Errik adds. “People in the Netherlands live in terraced houses. When I first visited the area between Delft and Rotterdam, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: an endless succession of low-rise residential neighbourhoods in one of the most densely populated parts of Europe. To me, it feels as though space is being wasted without creating any overarching sense of quality.”

The landscape has become difficult to read, while we are also failing to reap the benefits of urban living. Errik continues: “Most Dutch people spend every day in their cars. The Netherlands is a kind of Los Angeles.”

Exploring without boundaries, deciding through politics

The challenges we face call for systemic change, and the complexity involved is immense.

Anne Loes explains: “What makes things even more complicated is that administrative boundaries rarely coincide with the scale at which systems operate or at which we need to address the challenges. It’s a mismatch we are becoming increasingly aware of.”

Wouldn’t it be better, when developing ideas through design, to forget all boundaries and work instead around the catchment area of a river, the delta or a region such as north-western Europe?

Errik agrees, but points out that political and administrative realities remain fundamental. “Establishing new intermediate levels of government with sufficient authority has often proved difficult. If you want to make an impact, it is essential to understand clearly where decisions are made and at which level.”

These are lessons we can teach students. How do we translate ideas that transcend boundaries back into reality?

At the same time, making decisions at this scale is not the designer’s role. Errik explains: “In the design world, people tend to jump quickly to solutions. We conduct research, gain an increasingly detailed understanding of the complexity and then assume that the answer will emerge naturally from the analysis. But we live in a democracy, and ultimately, these decisions are political.”

As a designer, you can adopt different roles. One example is the use of what-if explorations, which reveal the spatial implications of different policy choices, Anne Loes explains. “They are a valuable way to explore a wide range of possibilities freely and openly, without immediately putting a plan on the table.”

A series of spatial scenarios can open up a conversation with policymakers and public officials.

Helmut adds: “This makes choices visible and brings complexity to life. At the same time, we need to remain critical and not hide behind complexity too easily. Ultimately, political choices are based on values. As an adviser, you also need to show, from time to time, that things are not necessarily as complicated as they seem. Space is finite, and so are natural resources. What, then, are our priorities? What is it that we really want?”

Living in the Delta

In 2022, the Dutch government declared that water and soil conditions should guide spatial development in the Netherlands. This represented a radical shift in thinking.

Errik explains: “What has traditionally characterised the Netherlands, in fact, is precisely that water and soil have not been the guiding factors.”

Anne Loes adds: “Over time, advances in technology have allowed us to build on increasingly challenging and unsuitable sites. Now that climate change is exposing the resulting vulnerabilities, we are beginning to see that we have taken the idea that everything can be engineered and controlled too far.”

“Making water and soil the guiding principles represents a radical shift in our thinking. What has traditionally defined the Netherlands is precisely that water and soil have not been the guiding factors.”

Will it still be possible to live in this vulnerable delta in the future? The speakers agree that the real question is how, because relocating or abandoning the Randstad, the densely urbanised western part of the Netherlands, is not an option.

We could build much more compactly, freeing up land outside cities for rewetting and rewilding.

“I can also imagine development in certain areas becoming much more adaptive,” says Anne Loes. This would mean forms of urbanisation capable of responding to and moving with nature.

“And we have an entire country to work with, not just the western part,” Helmut points out.

Errik adds: “Cities such as Ede and Arnhem are already providing homes for people from Amsterdam. These developments generate all the traffic movements we want to avoid. I think it would be wise to invest in strong regions with their own economic foundations. The point is not to relocate the Randstad somewhere else, but to create something complementary alongside it. We need more eggs in our basket.”

On Thursday, 16 November, Robbert Jan will welcome Kees Christiaanse (KCAP, ETH Zurich), Hilde Blank (BVR) and Maarten van Ham (TU Delft) for the final podcast of the year.

In our rapidly densifying cities, will there still be room for social and community facilities and light industrial activities? Will their disappearance come at the expense of liveability and urban vitality, and what can we do to prevent this?

Listen on Spotify via the TU Delft Urban Design channel.