This contribution investigates the arrival of British developers on Dutch soil during the 1970s from a transnational perspective. Doing so will not only reveal how British expertise and financial strength led to a maturation of the Dutch property market, but will also shed a new light on the economic, cultural and political ties between two European trading partners. There is much academic and public debate today about the invasion of global cities by foreign property investors, yet empirical investigations of historical predecessors to the current situation are virtually non-existent. This contribution puts Britain's business relationship and interactions with Europe and the Netherlands central. This will reveal why British developers became interested in European property in the first place, how they viewed the market and its players based on national characteristics and stereotypes, and why British involvement eventually became heavily contested on the local level. This will lead to a more comprehensive and multifaceted narrative of British involvement in overseas property affairs during a period of growing rapprochement between Britain and the EEC, and adds to our understanding of both Anglo-European relations and local sentiments towards international influences in a more general sense. The focus of the article lies on attitudes and mindsets, as these ultimately facilitated the transnational flows of capital and knowledge exchange.

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The current historiography of the Dutch urban renewal order focuses on an elite of audacious planners and technocratic civil servants, who allegedly embraced the comprehensive redevelopment of inner cities along functionalist lines. However, professional pamphlets and minutes from the 1950s and 1960s reveal a much more ambivalent and uncertain state of mind in the field of urban renewal, especially in the views put forward by local administrators. This article will demonstrate that insecurity about the dawn of the modern age was crucial for the swiftness with which Dutch planning and political elites abandoned comprehensive redevelopment in the early 1970s.The urban planner, the architect, the traffic engineer, the public housing official, the private developer and the civil servant -they have all lost the authority they once had. These days, politicians are afraid that the people's discontent about the solutions offered by architects and planners might lead to a rejection of their policies. 1 With this somewhat self-pitying statement, the 1976 annual report of the Breevast real estate company concisely summarised the societal changes that had affected its field in the preceding years. The reflections hinted at the politicisation of Dutch spatial planning in the early 1970s, during which time power relations between professionals and laymen became subject to no less debate than in other domains of society. 2 However, the annual report implies more than just the politicisation of society or the loss of authority once exerted by planning experts. It is also an elegy to the high modernist view of the future of Dutch cities, a future that was geared towards the comprehensive accommodation of the automobile age, rapidly growing population and advent of a

This contribution opens a new perspective on the politics of urban redevelopment in Dutch and German cities during the 1960s and early 1970s. More specifically, it examines the post-war expansion of Bredero, a Dutch private developer that forged public-private partnerships with the city councils of Utrecht and Hannover to get local urban redevelopment agendas of the ground. Within the period covered by this article, the political consensus was that the post-war economy, which was dominated by rising car ownership, business and consumerism, had to find its place and thrive in central urban areas. Developers such as Bredero were thought to dispose over the expertise and financial means to swiftly execute redevelopment schemes. Up until now, planning historians have largely neglected the role played by private developers in post-war urban redevelopment efforts. This contribution investigates how and why local administrators and private developers decided to work together in the first place, and how the expertise of Bredero in particular was translated into the development of Utrecht's Hoog Catharijne and Hannover's Raschplatz schemes. Through the innovate use of hitherto under-examined primary sources, this contribution sheds a new light on the allegedly recent phenomena of the internationalization and outsourcing of urban planning efforts.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Netherlands experienced a rapid growth in car ownership. Dutch planners and politicians soon realized that this growing automobility would radically transform the living environment, daily commute, and consumption behavior of millions of people, in particular of those living in or near large conurbations. By investigating how professional and political elites perceived increasing automobility, and how their responses subsequently affected urban planning in the Netherlands, this article offers a comprehensive and multifaceted narrative of the dawning of the Dutch motor age. I demonstrate how the gloomy and fearful predictions of planners and traffic engineers working in the 1960s foreshadowed a wider discontent with car-centered planning. Their engagements with local officials and urban action groups led to planning compromises I describe as a form of “gentle modernization,” typical for a country which has always opted for a cautious approach to modernity.