Dreading the Future: Ambivalence and Doubt in the Dutch Urban Renewal Order

Abstract

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

Mobilization of the Masses: Dutch Planners, Local Politics, and the Threat of the Motor Age 1960-1980

“…A majority of the city councilors responded overwhelmingly positively to the scheme, thus sealing the fate of the Spuikwartier. 105 However, the car not only asserted itself in plans for the inner city. As Zwolsman unfolded his Nervi scheme, he simultaneously presented plans for the first suburban shopping center in the Netherlands.…”