new developments

New developments

The gardening of cities

This expansion is also a success story from a planner’s point of view. We were able to tame the urban beast and make it listen to rational planning and new esthetics. The fear of a urban hell, as shown in the earlier pictures of modern cities, have been exchanged for the images of happy and controlled urban environments, which we all have come to enjoy like the boulevards of Paris, the squares of London and the green parks of Rotterdam.

And the modern urban citizen is more educated, more emancipated, wealthier, and healthier and has a much greater choice of resources than the person at the beginning of the 19the century.

During the last 150 years the city has changed profoundly due to the various stages of its expansion process, the big urban bang. From an extension of the industrialization process, the place were capital, machines, labor and distribution came together, to the postwar bureaucratic city when politics took control of the urban expansion and changed it into a reserve of social equality.

This period ended in the eighties, with the changing relation between the public and private sector, when suddenly the private sector, private developers (again) became part of the process of city development. This was the end of the postwar rebuilding period and we entered into the area in which the city became the center of new economic growth and due to the fast growing service industry there was an increase in inner city pressures to expand the office program. The city became, again, a place to work. After the big bang, came the big city boom.

Where are we today? For sure at the end of the boom, but it is not easy to find a general definition of the stage European cities are currently in. If anything modern urban culture, which has developed since the sixties, has created its own economic dynamics. The city is no longer the extension of the factory, the result of the organization of a production process; it has become the factory itself. This melting pot of cultures, economic activities, spending, creativity, clash of knowledge and information exchange is hard to map and to understand.

And this intrigues me very much. On one hand I still see, even in these times of crisis, tremendous urban designs being rolled out by municipalities to expand, transform and improve the city, while at the same time we still have very little understanding of what is going on in our urban areas. That something has changed due to the new global networks, the information technology, and sustainability drive, the growth in wealth, the changes towards a service economy etc. is obvious and undeniable. How to understand this and how to translate them into new programs and strategies is the question. And I come from the school where you first have to have a vision and a program, before you start to design the grand projects. It seems we are create solutions for demands we do not understand. This is better known as chasing urban mirages. False images of our future.

I am all in favor of ambitions and experiments, try and error to understand what fits in the modern city and what doesn’t. Urban planning errors are however very costly. There has been a clear increase, at least in The Netherlands, in failed projects. We have built a lot of offices for nobody, houses for non-existing habitants; we have exchanged landscape for logistic centers with no occupiers. We also see the transformation of the last generation of urban expansion like the business parks and residential areas from the 60ties and 70ties. They have lost their functionality and therefore have become the weak links in our urban systems. The public sector is no longer able to sustain its dominating role in the post war urban expansion process. Not financially, not politically, not organizationally.

This is not because we have lost our collective thinking power; it is because we are trapped in a system that can only respond in a single way to urban challenges. We have been trained to design urban schemes of impressive proportions to deal with the imperfections of our cities. We think in plans and construction, in the controllability of society top down, because the headlights of endless growth blind us. Because there has always been growth, whether the plans were right or wrong, we filled them up. In an environment of growth there is always scarcity. If you built them, they will come, they thought in Dubai, and before you start laughing: they were imitating us. The architect, real estate developer and the bureaucrat are trained to build the world, not to understand it.

We now have to develop new practices based on the themes of sustainability and this require us to understand the urban areas as systems, systems composed of various layers of social, economic, cultural, ecological and physical connections. Understanding this urban Lasagna is the key to successful new urban strategies. If we understand the key actors in these systems and the logic of current transformations, we have a much better chance of effectively improving our urban environment and create the sustainable city, with a lot less effort. This is the challenge of the coming years.

Our tools of the future will no longer be urban plans, but urban value strategies. This requires a totally different set of skills, knowledge and experience. This is first of all about urban management. It is Zen and the art of urban maintenance. It is the technique of gardeners and hoteliers, not as much of builders or engineers. Don’t be worried, we still need these disciplines, but in a very different context.

This change in mindset of all of us is a happy challenge. The only problem is to move to that new system expeditiously; there is little time and resources to waste. In the global game of competition between hot spots, The Netherlands is somewhere in the middle and that is not a great position to be in. The competition cannot be won by showing of with what we are going to do: we have to show what we are today. We have much to be proud of: our economic vitality, our humble cities, our integration of urban areas and landscape, our vitality and our highly appreciated living environment. Try not to imitate the others, be the best we can be. Ladies and gentlemen do not screw it up for the next generations with a lack of ambitions, or by chasing more mirages. Try to understand this new phenomenon called the new sustainable urban environment.

Rudy Stroink
Urban Entrepreneur