Bijlmer, built as a planned neighborhood near Amsterdam, was supposed to be the “prefect city” of the future, with high rise apartment complexes surrounded with green space to make the buildings more warm and inviting for residents.
You know, just like they did with American public housing projects at the same time.
Bijlmer worked out just as well.
“The goal was space, green, and light.”
The place was laid out in hexagon structure, so I guess it would make a great wargame map.
“We have all the benefits of a dense wealthy neighborhood but with the empty space of a rural one.” Or so they thought.
The buildings were 11 stories high, with storage space at ground level and communal areas.
Transportation? The pitch: “Innovative three-tiered transportation system! Dedicated roads for cyclists and pedestrians! Separate roads for personal cars buses and trucks! An elevated metro line” into Amsterdam proper.
The reality: “There you can find a stray junkie who is illegally occupying one of the apartments. A lot of middle class people do not want to live in the Bijlmer. Our apartments are empty, our construction has been delayed, our metro isn’t finished yet, so the Bijlmer is separated and alone.”
“The Bijlmer did not attract the amount of people that were expected. Many households were turned off by the large, alienating high-rises, so they left for recognizable suburbs instead.”
Oh, and the prices were too high as well.
“A place that was intended to attract middle class families just didn’t. It attracted poverty. Instead the Bijlmer’s design and negative stigma created a self-fulfilling cycle. The nature alleys and parking garages helped criminals get away with crime and made people feel unsafe.”
And then the Dutch government turned the place into an immigrant ghetto for people fleeing Suriname. Want to guess how that worked out?
“Overcrowding made it impossible to take a bath at rush hour.”
Two-thirds of the high rises were eventually demolished.
I wonder if the video of the projected city was actually from the era. I doubt it, because it really gives off a Backrooms vibe.
Government urban planners always think they can always do a better job than the free market, and they’re always wrong.
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9 Responses to “Dutch “Perfect” Planned City = Instant Slum”
One would think that after decades, nay… Centuries of failure, that the “brights” would begin to get a clue that they’re not quite as smart as they’ve been told.
You tell me something has been “planned”? I’m nearly always going to start doing planning of my own… On that thing failing. Utterly. Miserably.
See, there is this thing that I learned in the military, through long and sad experience: Plans are necessary, if only to have readily available pre-worked alternatives to hand. But, the one thing that plans are not? The thing that’s going to happen.
The saying in the service is that “…the plan is just a list of things that aren’t going to happen…”. That’s a sad truism, and what it illustrates is that you cannot rely on your ability to foresee and predict everything that might happen. In a military context, you have the enemy as your plan-killer; in civilian life, the thing that usually does in all these magnificent “planned communities” is that the planners themselves have never, ever lived as they imagine their residents will. They’re not members of that class, they’re not “that sort of people”, and because they can’t imagine what that sort of life is like, they can’t very well build to account for things.
The more I see of “planned” anything, the more I’m in favor of just “letting sh*t happen”, and dealing with it accordingly. Yeah, you probably need the contingencies and all the rest, but the thing is, you can’t predict what the hell is going to happen in terms of things breaking and opportunities arising. You can try, but since you’re not God, guess what? You’re not omniscient, nor are you omnipotent, both things being prerequisite for your plans to actually, y’know… Work as planned.
Longer I live, the more I become a pragmatic anarchist. You can’t control the world; don’t try to, and you’ll be a lot happier. All these idiots out there like Klaus Schwab imagine themselves as these all-knowing, all-powerful types that will lead the human race into the uplands of a fully planned future… And, what they get in return? The usual human perversity and failure to comply with the planning…
One thing these Utopia Urban Planners planned for is failure. Or rather their plans are guarantee to fail and they all have Pikachu surprise face when it does.
“The more I see of ‘planned’ anything, the more I’m in favor of just ‘letting sh*t happen’, and dealing with it accordingly.”
The French Physiocrats expressed this more elegantly: Laissez faire et laissez passer. Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius approached it a little differently: This too shall pass.
The Physiocrat sees economic impediment as being temporary; the Stoic sees suffering as being transitory. Laissez faire was an inspiration to Adam Smith and led to the development of economic law. “This too shall pass” was a palliative that made decline of the Empire acceptable.
If Adam Smith is Plan A then Marcus Aurelius is Plan B.
As Javier Milei recently reminded the World Economic Forum, free-market capitalism has led to an unprecedented prosperity. By contrast, “[S]ocialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon. It failed in all the countries where it was tried. It was an economic failure. It was a social failure. It was a cultural failure. It also murdered more than 100 million humans.”
Socialism brings decline and death. If Plan A is rejected, you will need Plan B to make your miserable life more tolerable.
Y’all are too kind. A point that has been made on EconTalk (I don’t recall if it was Russ Roberts himself or one of his buddies from twenty years ago at George Mason University) is that it’s one thing to have these wonderful, high-minded plans. It’s a completely different thing once somebody has actually given you power and a budget.
All those things that seem obvious and easy choices in the abstract get a lot tougher when you can throw an expensive contract to your cousin or that nice man who mentioned he’ll have a lucrative position open up in his business right around the time you’ll be leaving the project… and your resume looks like it’d be the perfect fit.
Besides, if you don’t help them out, Vinnie will never let the family hear the end of it, and the businessman has ‘heard rumors’ that you’re not always as professional of a mentor as one ought to be.
How much could it hurt? It’s not your money, and nobody’s asking you to live there…
Which is precisely the reason Africa is what Africa is. We’re headed that way; witness Fani Willis. You can’t even criticize a “strong black woman”, without being accused of racism. Never mind the level of corruption and malfeasance on display…
In reference to everything else in this post and the replies, I’ll just say this: The universe is fundamentally chaotic. Entropy is a thing; all processes tend towards decay, with the exception of life itself, and even that exhibits only partial punctuated tendencies towards complexity and organization. The universe does not “like” organization and things that are predictable, that consistently work… So, live accordingly.
Life is a constant, never-ending dance with chaos. Do your best, and bear in mind that any signs of consistency and of plans working out are merely transitory indicators that the universe is teasing you, pulling a fast one. Something will inevitably turn up that screws over everything… Usually, totally out of the blue.
Viz planned cities I have to admit that I loved Paris for its wonderful architecture thoughout and yet you will probably never find a more “planned” city even if the plan was to just forbid high rise crap. Ditto the old London and our own DC. Manhattan was nice to visit but I sure wouldn’t want to live there.
Any place that caters to the down and out turns into a slum but the mistake we all made 50 years ago was bulldozing all the slums and turning them into housing developments that City Housing authorities allowed to turn into slums. The homeless problem was always there but cities used to have flop houses for the down and out and the Y was a good/cheap place to get better and get along with your life.
Not anymore of course.
The legacy of Pruitt-Igoe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4a2zZCwU80
One would think that after decades, nay… Centuries of failure, that the “brights” would begin to get a clue that they’re not quite as smart as they’ve been told.
You tell me something has been “planned”? I’m nearly always going to start doing planning of my own… On that thing failing. Utterly. Miserably.
See, there is this thing that I learned in the military, through long and sad experience: Plans are necessary, if only to have readily available pre-worked alternatives to hand. But, the one thing that plans are not? The thing that’s going to happen.
The saying in the service is that “…the plan is just a list of things that aren’t going to happen…”. That’s a sad truism, and what it illustrates is that you cannot rely on your ability to foresee and predict everything that might happen. In a military context, you have the enemy as your plan-killer; in civilian life, the thing that usually does in all these magnificent “planned communities” is that the planners themselves have never, ever lived as they imagine their residents will. They’re not members of that class, they’re not “that sort of people”, and because they can’t imagine what that sort of life is like, they can’t very well build to account for things.
The more I see of “planned” anything, the more I’m in favor of just “letting sh*t happen”, and dealing with it accordingly. Yeah, you probably need the contingencies and all the rest, but the thing is, you can’t predict what the hell is going to happen in terms of things breaking and opportunities arising. You can try, but since you’re not God, guess what? You’re not omniscient, nor are you omnipotent, both things being prerequisite for your plans to actually, y’know… Work as planned.
Longer I live, the more I become a pragmatic anarchist. You can’t control the world; don’t try to, and you’ll be a lot happier. All these idiots out there like Klaus Schwab imagine themselves as these all-knowing, all-powerful types that will lead the human race into the uplands of a fully planned future… And, what they get in return? The usual human perversity and failure to comply with the planning…
Sounds like any Section 8 complex in the US after after about a year tbh…..
re: Kirk
One thing these Utopia Urban Planners planned for is failure. Or rather their plans are guarantee to fail and they all have Pikachu surprise face when it does.
Makes you wonder what gets taught in urban planning and architecture programs. Hard to ignore the pattern. Everywhere, every time.
“The more I see of ‘planned’ anything, the more I’m in favor of just ‘letting sh*t happen’, and dealing with it accordingly.”
The French Physiocrats expressed this more elegantly: Laissez faire et laissez passer. Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius approached it a little differently: This too shall pass.
The Physiocrat sees economic impediment as being temporary; the Stoic sees suffering as being transitory. Laissez faire was an inspiration to Adam Smith and led to the development of economic law. “This too shall pass” was a palliative that made decline of the Empire acceptable.
If Adam Smith is Plan A then Marcus Aurelius is Plan B.
As Javier Milei recently reminded the World Economic Forum, free-market capitalism has led to an unprecedented prosperity. By contrast, “[S]ocialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon. It failed in all the countries where it was tried. It was an economic failure. It was a social failure. It was a cultural failure. It also murdered more than 100 million humans.”
Socialism brings decline and death. If Plan A is rejected, you will need Plan B to make your miserable life more tolerable.
Y’all are too kind. A point that has been made on EconTalk (I don’t recall if it was Russ Roberts himself or one of his buddies from twenty years ago at George Mason University) is that it’s one thing to have these wonderful, high-minded plans. It’s a completely different thing once somebody has actually given you power and a budget.
All those things that seem obvious and easy choices in the abstract get a lot tougher when you can throw an expensive contract to your cousin or that nice man who mentioned he’ll have a lucrative position open up in his business right around the time you’ll be leaving the project… and your resume looks like it’d be the perfect fit.
Besides, if you don’t help them out, Vinnie will never let the family hear the end of it, and the businessman has ‘heard rumors’ that you’re not always as professional of a mentor as one ought to be.
How much could it hurt? It’s not your money, and nobody’s asking you to live there…
Which is precisely the reason Africa is what Africa is. We’re headed that way; witness Fani Willis. You can’t even criticize a “strong black woman”, without being accused of racism. Never mind the level of corruption and malfeasance on display…
In reference to everything else in this post and the replies, I’ll just say this: The universe is fundamentally chaotic. Entropy is a thing; all processes tend towards decay, with the exception of life itself, and even that exhibits only partial punctuated tendencies towards complexity and organization. The universe does not “like” organization and things that are predictable, that consistently work… So, live accordingly.
Life is a constant, never-ending dance with chaos. Do your best, and bear in mind that any signs of consistency and of plans working out are merely transitory indicators that the universe is teasing you, pulling a fast one. Something will inevitably turn up that screws over everything… Usually, totally out of the blue.
Viz planned cities I have to admit that I loved Paris for its wonderful architecture thoughout and yet you will probably never find a more “planned” city even if the plan was to just forbid high rise crap. Ditto the old London and our own DC. Manhattan was nice to visit but I sure wouldn’t want to live there.
Any place that caters to the down and out turns into a slum but the mistake we all made 50 years ago was bulldozing all the slums and turning them into housing developments that City Housing authorities allowed to turn into slums. The homeless problem was always there but cities used to have flop houses for the down and out and the Y was a good/cheap place to get better and get along with your life.
Not anymore of course.