How the Dutch Do It: Housing in the Netherlands

By Jane Holtz Kay

Holland is a self-made nation. Smaller than New England, more crowded than Japan, the country has shaped its housing policies across a waterbound landscape, limited in everything but the need to plan. Both the acres of land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee since the 1930s and the number of housing units built by the government since World War II would dumbfound U.S. planners.

Add the newer designs by Dutch architects, and you have not only aesthetic flair but the "level-headed and pragmatic application of technology and planning," as SuperDutch, the aptly titled 2000 book by Bart Lootsmar, observes.

National planning, not just for housing but for the conservation of water, land, infrastructure, and forests, is essential to Holland's existence and accounts for its reputation. So do progressive policies like the postwar plan to set aside some 30 percent of dwelling places for "social" (public) housing.

Green gardens in the interior of Borneo and Sporenburg typify vanguard design.

Amsterdam's newest housing mecca, the Eastern Harbour Docklands, built on reclaimed land, "polders," as the Dutch call them, is impressive. After a long planning process and a 1988 referendum to determine the national will, the Dutch transformed the watery site into four communities. The first step was the removal of a slaughterhouse on the industrial island of KNSM that year. Development followed on the islands of Java and Borneo Sporenburg thereafter.

By adroitly massing and individualizing rowhouses and outdoor space, the scheme for the new land set a pattern of unity and diversity. The rowhouses, set behind splendid facades, offer light and views from patios, open space and canals between the rows. Parking is out of sight. The result: compact but splendidly shaped surroundings that provide 8,000 homes for 17,000 people.

Borneo Sporenburg boasts the unique Scheepstimmermanstratt, an avenue of rowhouses, shoulder to shoulder along the canals. Last fall, it earned its creator, architect Adriaan Geuze of the firm West 8, Harvard's prestigious Veronica Rudge Green Prize for contributing to the public realm and urban life.

Declining Decades

Recent Dutch housing hasn't always held to such high standards. Spatial Planning and the Environment, a recently published report by the Ministry of Housing, has the tone of an apologia. Noting the affluence and aging of the population and the shrinking size of the family, the document looks penitently at the last decades, when quantity of housing topped quality. The result, say the authors, was often shoddy, or at the least unfriendly, construction. Plans for city centers also languished. "By the late 1970s, it was clear that architecture was hemorrhaging," Lootsmar notes in SuperDutch.

A visit bears that out. Like Europe and America, the Netherlands succumbed to Corbusian tower-in-the-park urban renewal, bland high-rise boxes, and sprawling suburbanization--and is stuck with it. Sterile mid-rises from the 1960s are the rule in Rotterdam's old harborfront neighborhood of Kop van Zuid, site of the barracks from which Dutch Jews were deported during World War II. To walk through the Zuidoost center outside Amsterdam today, is to see a grim, wind-whipped Edge City of towers; a drab sports arena; a glitzy, failed theater; and low-scale apartments--many in need of rehabilitation. Or uprooting.

Even the supposed core city of Almere, a new town near Amsterdam, offers a grim, car-centered environment. The boxy, mid-rise buildings now under construction are chillingly bleak. Despite the pleasant, single-family, canal-side houses, designed by the architecture firm, MVRVD, on Almere's outskirts and other homes by well-known architects, these suburbs are devoid of shops and dependent on cars. Despite bike paths and bus-only lanes, such remote outposts lack even a nod to Amsterdam's transportation web.

Dutch architecture has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, with superstars like Rem Koolhaus grabbing the world stage. But housing design has not always kept pace. A decade ago, the national government's Fourth Report on Physical Planning called for new housing districts to be built at countless scattered sites, called Vinex locations.

The scattered housing developments were criticized for their dispersal and lack of public transportation. Now expanding, the program is slated to create a total of 634,800 new dwellings by 2005. The good news is that it will locate roughly two-thirds of that housing in more central, urban zones.

Still, for all these cautionary notes, Holland's planners have an easier lot than their U.S. peers, bogged down by complicated and limited federal housing policies, a housing budget diminished by two-thirds in the '90s, and a disdain for city housing needs.

Changing times

Open-air windows and imaginative design characterize many of the high-density designs.

Yet, for all the Netherlands' planning pluses, and concern for what it calls "social" i.e. public housing, its policies are shifting toward a more market-oriented system, reflecting the country's tilt toward the right in last year's national election.

"Entering the real world of market-driven reality" has lessened government authority, says housing expert Arjen Oosterman. A government that once financed and dictated the course of housing corporations is letting go and loosening controls.

In an ironic twist, this change is occurring just as U.S. eyes turn eastward, seeking to absorb housing lessons from the Dutch, as they have transportation in France and Germany. Last fall, "New Design Paradigms for Housing," a program presented by the New Amsterdam Development Corporation, an assembly of Dutch builders turning their attention to New York. The Dutch developers, planners, and architects at New York's Van Alen Institute attracted considerable attention from builders and others interested in the field.

In June, New York's Urban Center will kick off a six-city tour of examples of Dutch urban housing. The models, says Els Verbaken, the exhibit designer who assembled the show, "combine medium or high density with safety, ecology, and tranquility, qualities that are usually found in low-density circumstances."

Verbaken notes that most of these recent topdrawer Dutch projects were financed by private money, contradicting the assumptions of many Americans about the key role of the government in housing, or at least in high style housing, in the Netherlands.

Who is being served?

In a late fall phone interview, Hans Huijsman, secretary of the Netherlands' central Board of Housing Assistance, looks back 100 years to describe Holland's slums, gradually eradicated by social housing, then skips forward to the last decade's movement toward deregulation.

Today, he says, market orientation and financial self-sufficiency are the mode. Government policies that now force municipalities to sell 30 percent of any new development to individual owners for "custom-made" houses are a far cry from earlier public emphases, he adds.

"Things are changing quite drastically," Huijsman continues. With living space short, jammed cities like Amsterdam (once 80 percent subsidized housing) must shift from serving the hard-pressed to encouraging the comfortable. Today's focus on serving middle- and high-income groups to entice them to stay in cities can slight the disadvantaged. Likewise, stricter proof of legality from immigrants and performance agreements exacted from low-income renters squeeze the less fortunate.

A sculptured bridge from the Central Dock.

"It was a good system," Huijsman says of the earlier subsidized housing requirements. But he's not opposed to the recent changes: "I think it was high time," he says of the shift in policy.

Others are more skeptical. There's more of a "free-for-all for developers," says Aaron Betsky, Dutch-born head of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam and former director of the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Still, some things haven't changed. "The most densely built country in the world" still has a pressing need to diagram its future, to look ahead, he feels. "Every plan, every road becomes one giant three-D puzzle," says Betsky. Nevertheless, the shift towards prioritizing private development is troublesome.

Some critics feel that the emphasis on "quality" and "free choice" in the latest Dutch housing survey, conducted by the ministry every fifth year, is a way of kowtowing to developers and serving the affluent. Even at Amsterdam's model Docklands development, planners succumbed to a supermarket developer's demand to exclude small shops for 10 years. And with few transit linkages, residents are left with a choice of 15-minute bike rides to get downtown or a slow crawl through increasing traffic jams.

Unsettled future

How much and how fast will such shifts in thinking alter a nation that keeps 83 percent of its land mass green-for farms (70 percent ) and open space (13 percent). Compact development is still a political dictate in this dense nation, says Huijsman, That won't change, but imperfect implementation will make it hard to check "negative development"-homes heading out of designated central cities.

Harm Tilman, editor of de Architect, fears that planning in his country is no more immune to car dominance and polynuclear settlements than it was to the '60s high-rise craze. "We have had a very social kind of development," he says, "but now the old model is in revision." Private housing is promoted, and public spaces and social housing are less assured. A tilt to the right, and to the road, threaten Dutch life. "We have to rethink" what we are doing, he says.

Still, for all such shifts in social policy, the Dutch legacy and achievement in planning are remarkable-socially, quantitatively, and administratively. Spend time in Holland or count the reams of documents and designs, and the model seems alive and well. Factor in that these accomplishments have been achieved for a population of almost 16 million living on 7,000 square miles of mostly reclaimed land-75 percent since World War II-and admiration grows.

Despite the Netherlands' diminishing ratio of subsidized housing to market housing (already down to 30 percent from earlier 50-50 figures), the number of such dwellings would turn a U.S. housing activist green with envy. Equally enviable is the fact that the Dutch have sacrificed neither their social values, nor their urbanism, to that growth. Health care, public universities, and public schools reflect their progressive stance.

While the U.S. offers minimal direction to settlement or structure, Dutch law demands Bijlmermeur ("bundled deconcentration"), or densification. Thus, two-thirds of the nation's 6.5 million housing units consist of attached houses, another third low-rise apartment buildings while only a small number are single-family homes.

The Ministry of Housing still restricts half of all new housing to built-up areas within the Randstad-the western conurbation around Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Utrecht, and the newer, less urban Almere-in order to preserve its "Green Heart."

The $450 million, 1990 "Delta Metropolis" plan for the area centered on the deltas of the Rhine, Mense, and Schelder rivers will be reinforced by the construction of some 190,000 homes between 2010 and 2030, all linked to a planned Deltametrolight rail line. "It is sustainable development," Allard Jolles, architectural historian in Amsterdam's 75-year-old physical planning department, says of the plans to connect this urban housing to rail, with 50,000 homes in Amsterdam alone. In plans for housing released after the United Nation summit conference in Johannesburg last year, the government spoke of "definitive urbanization accords" in 40 to 60 urban districts and 20 urban regions to accommodate an estimated million more people in the Delta Metropolis by 2030.

Always, strict building and design codes will set guidelines for everything from height to sustainability, rail connections to combinations of housing and care. And, despite change, the system of leasing the land, rather than outright purchase, will remain, benefiting "the community as a whole," says Jolles.

Still, housing advocates still voice fears that the shift from social to speculative housing will drive out Holland's vaunted "polder" model of consensus, based on the historic need to join resources to reclaim a nation, and the aesthetics of imaginative design. Can the land-short status that made this the world's most planned nation endure? Will the country maintain the social policies and tolerance that made it one of Europe's most progressive?

Whatever the outcome, what happens to Dutch housing matters. "If we are concerned about the future of the spatial debate, the Netherlands does have something to offer to other countries," says Betsky, as nations on both sides of the Atlantic look on.

Artificial peninsulas, Borneo and Sporenburg, show the vitality of Amsterdam's waterfront design.

This article appeared in Planning Magazine, February 2003.

Back to Articles Index