Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 3

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Bulletproof Glass. A Short History of Transparency, Public Space and Surveillance in Amsterdam Nieuw-West / Roel Griffioen

Keywords: Transparency, Surveillance, Urban Planning, Sociology, Amsterdam

<1> Over the past two years, the small 200 by 100 meter area between the Rijswijkstraat and the Heemstedestraat in Amsterdam Nieuw-West (New West) has undergone a complete metamorphosis. Before the transformation, there was nothing particularly distinctive about this patch of land. Just as elsewhere in the Nieuw-West district, the slab buildings had been neatly paired in L-shapes, each pair juxtaposed in such a way that they together produced publicly accessible inner yards, half-open yet comfortably sheltered from the traffic of the Heemstedestraat—the main corridor into the city centre. This pattern was repeated several times on adjacent lots, as if the urban planner had simply repeatedly ‘stamped’ it onto the empty plan [1]. The freestanding slabs were entirely subsumed in a park-like environment. The private gardens, small by comparison, were surrounded by broad belts of public green that separated the L-shaped blocks from the street, seamlessly connecting each green space, from the inner yards to the smallest flowerbed running alongside the housing for elderly people.

<2> After the demolition, three sturdy perimeter blocks featuring stern-looking facades following the contours of the allotments arose from behind the heaps of sand, containers, concrete mixers and site huts—heralds of change. These bulging blocks radically transformed the cityscape from an open landscape of architectural volumes that seemed to float in free space, to a traditional design, with urban streets jammed in between steep building fronts. In reality hardly any space has been lost. However, the blocks have digested it, internalized it. The space is stored inside the buildings, in the form of courtyards that have been raised and placed on top of half-sunken car parks. In a visual sense, the architects have tried to retain a sense of openness by creating large openings in the façade that allow at least a glimpse of the gardens from the street. Staircases leading to the raised gardens in the enclosed yards form a first ‘soft’ border between the public street and the controlled, collective space inside the building block. When the gates close at night, this ‘soft’ border is vamped up into a ‘hard’ physical border.

<3> The transformation of this tiny chunk of city is illustrative of the spatial revolution that is currently taking place in Nieuw-West, as well as in many other districts in the Netherlands that were constructed during the 1950 building boom. Silent and swift, although seriously decelerated by the recent financial blows, the cityscape is radically changing—street by street, block by block. The post-war housing projects with their autonomous building patterns in open space are torn down and replaced by closed configurations, with urban facades following street lines. Urban renewal has transformed the large-scale post-war city expansions in Amsterdam into sites of contestation between competing space conceptions, and competing ideas about citizenship and urbanity. Above all else, the changes described concern the ‘image’ of the city—to use a term coined by Kevin Lynch (cf.)—but hint at a less visible, but deeper social-spatial rupture that is taken place in this area, which has been dubbed “the largest building pit in Europe” (Mepschen, 2). The ideal of the ‘open city’ with transparent dwellings is abandoned in favor of the more pragmatic model of the ‘city of security’. By analyzing the changes in the architectural landscape of these neighborhoods, I aim to unveil conflicting conceptions of urbanity, citizenship, privacy, surveillance and the public sphere.

The Open City

<4> After the Second World War, countless cities in the Netherlands were belted up with new  neighborhoods engrafted on the doctrines of modernist urban planning, such as functional zoning, hierarchy in infrastructure, and an open morphology. One of the largest city expansions, and by far the most well-known, took place in Amsterdam, west of the ring-shaped motorway, simply dubbed ‘the Ring’, that embraces the pre-war city. Amsterdam Nieuw-West is comprised of the districts Slotermeer, Slotervaart, Westlandgracht, Overtoomse Veld, Osdorp, and Geuzenveld. The construction of these Westelijke Tuinsteden (Western Garden Cities) started in 1951 in Slotermeer, and while the bulk of the housing stock was built in the 1950s, construction didn’t truly end until the completion of Osdorp in the mid-1960s. What makes Nieuw-West a particularly interesting case is that the plans stem from before the war. The postwar extension plans were based on the famous 1934 ‘Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan’ (General Extension Plan) for Amsterdam designed by the City Development division of the Department of Public Works. Both the pre-war design and post-war execution took place under the supervision of Cornelis van Eesteren, who was the head of division from 1929 to 1958. Van Eesteren had been involved in the De Stijl movement and had played an important role in the Nieuwe Bouwen (New Building) movement. He was also chairman of the influential CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) between 1930 and 1947. Perhaps it was the reputation of Van Eesteren as a central figure in the history of modern architecture that granted the Westelijke Tuinsteden a prominent place in international specialist literature. In many handbooks, as the Dutch architecture historian Vincent van Rossem pointed out, the 1934 plan is hailed as a high point in the history of the avant-garde. The execution, too, was widely discussed internationally, although its reception was not altogether favourable (Van Rossem, 9).

<5> As a thorough understanding of a text is only possible if one ‘reads between the lines’, so the radical nature of the Nieuw-West cityscape can only be understood if one pays attention to what is between the objects: space. The urban fabric of the Westelijke Tuinsteden radically differed from the way buildings were organized inside the Ring. In Nieuw-West urban planners chose for a new spatial organization in the form of slab buildings, allowing for optimal sunlight to enter the houses. Amsterdam had already experimented a bit with slab building in the Landlust neighbourhood, and later on in parts of Bos en Lommer, a district west of the city centre, where the slab buildings were neatly arranged in long rows. Critics feared that this would result in a “dreadful accumulation of endless rows of houses all facing the same direction” (Van Rossem, 12). In order to overcome this sense of monotony, urban planners started thinking about more dynamic allotment patterns. In post-war Amsterdam a modular system was developed by Johanna H. Mulder, at the time employed by the City Development division, in which the building blocks were configured in L-shapes, each set of buildings fencing in a courtyard (cf. Mulder).

<6> The area surrounding the Heemstedestraat was archetypical for the spatial system Mulder invented. Each urban set of L-shaped buildings included different types of dwellings. On the side of the Rijswijkstraat, somewhat disconnected from the street, strips of low-rise housing for elderly people were opened up to the street via dead-end paths connecting to the backside of the slabs. Blocks of flats with shared entrance halls ran over the entire length of the rectangular allotments. Three large-scale flats running parallel to the Heemstedestraat, and marking out the parameters of the neighborhood, had a view of the canal that this neighborhood took its name from: the drearily straight Slotervaart canal.

<7> Not the buildings, but the space between the buildings shaped the appearance of the city. The slabs were planted as independent entities in an open, park-like landscape. The city was turned inside-out; the public realm was no longer restricted to the streets and squares, to the leftover spaces between building blocks that Le Corbusier has disdainfully called the “rue corridor” (Van Rossem). Openness instead became the focus of this modernist cityscape, illustrated by a Dutch handbook on urbanism from the period that claimed “the most important goal is to leave ‘unbuilt’” (qtd. Van der Cammen, De Klerk, 160). In a similar vein, a German handbook declared the sky, the sun, wind, heaven, trees, grass, flowers, and water the most important elements of urban planning (Bosma, Wagenaar, 271).

Amsterdam Nieuw-West, 1962. Source: I. Teijmant, Goed wonen in Nieuw-West, Amsterdam 2001

Glass House

<8> In literature on architectural history, the dissolution of the closed building block is often described as the logical next step in an evolution that was prompted by increasing interest in public health in the 19th century. The goal was to improve living conditions by allowing ‘air, light and space’ into the individual home. An alternative perspective on this development is to consider it as an attempt to achieve moral transparency. This development became manifest in the desire to abolish thresholds separating the individual dwelling (the household) from the city (society), as I will try to demonstrate below.

<9> Piet Mondrian starts his renowned essay ‘Neo-plasticisme: De Woning - De Straat - De Stad’ (Neoplasticism: The Dwelling—The Street—The City), originally published in the international journal i10 in 1926, with a nostalgic daydream of a time in which people preferred to live outside and the house was seen as merely a “shelter against the discomforts of the weather” [2]. Sadly, Mondrian writes, paradise is lost. This phase of social unity and unity with nature came to an end with the emergence of individualism. The “progress of man and the development of the individual” created the need for private space, a place where “one could deepen the concentration on the self, not hindered or stopped by others.” Nowadays, people have become “more concerned with their house and the ‘outside’ became the territory of traffic and recreation” (Mondrian, 12).

<10> Mondrian explicitly connects the way in which we dwell to differences in social class: “Today, there is no equality, and consequently no harmony, between the dwelling and the street. This is partly due to climate, but also to a lack of equality between various individuals. It makes complete sense that the inequality of society should cause individuals to flee each other.” Building the ideal city starts with building the ideal dwelling, argues Mondrian. “In order to create the city of the future, one must first create the new dwelling. Neoplasticism, however, conceives the dwelling not as a place in which to take refuge or separate oneself from others, but as a part of the whole, as a constructive element of the city” (Mondrian, 13;  cf. Padovan, 18). Further on in the text, Mondrian gives specific instructions about what the Neoplasticist dwelling should and should not look like. “The interior of the dwelling must no longer be an accumulation of rooms formed by four walls with nothing but holes instead of doors and windows, but a construction of colored and colorless planes, combined with furniture and equipment, which must be nothing in themselves but constituent elements of the whole. In a similar fashion, the human being must be nothing in himself, but rather a part of the whole. Then, no longer conscious of his individuality, he will be happy in this earthly paradise that he has himself created” (Mondrian, 18).

<11> Walter Benjamin, having frequently contributed to i10 was probably aware of Mondrian’s text, makes a similar connection between social equality and the abolishment of the opposition house—world. In his 1929 essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, he commends the modernist ideal of transparent architecture as something enforcing moral self-discipline. “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence,” he wrote. “It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus” (Benjamin, 209). In another text Benjamin stated that modern architecture’s pursuit of light and air would herald the end of the home “in the old sense of the word”, that is to say, the home that puts ‘security’ as first priority. Shelter and protection are desired by those who fear society. Glass, he writes, is the enemy of property and secrets (qtd. in Reed, 10). In the same vein, the constructivist El Lissitzky called steel the will of the proletariat, and glass its conscience (Marks, 238).

<12> To Benjamin, Mondrian and the likes, modern architecture prefigured a classless society in which the need for seclusion would be abolished. Strict divisions between inside and outside, between the house and the world, were rendered redundant, because the public realm would take on values traditionally reserved for the intimate realm of the household. In other words, the classless society itself was envisioned as a society without walls, as a glass house. This image of a see-through house was not randomly chosen. As the architecture historian Anthony Vidler observed in The Architectural Uncanny, “modernity has been haunted … by a myth of transparency: transparency of the self to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this represented, if not constructed, from Jeremy Bentham to Le Corbusier, by a universal transparency of building materials, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of air, light, and physical movement” (Vidler, 217). Indeed, the ideal of the glass house, a metaphor for total transparency and openness, is implied in much of the building and thinking of the modernists, both before and after the Second World War.

<13> After the war, the opening up of the cityscape went hand in hand with the opening up of the dwelling, radically more transparent than earlier generations of social housing. Facades were outfitted with large windows and balconies on both sides of the building. Post-war reconstruction architects saw windows as the ‘senses’ of the home, instruments that brought the domain of family life in touch with the outside world. For example, Jaap Bakema proposed that by letting the indoor and outdoor space freely flow into one another, life in the home could be part of what he called ‘the Big Event’: society, the world and even the Cosmos (Bakema, 67). Another prominent architect, Willem van Tijen, wrote: “The home no longer ends at the front door, there to encounter a hostile world.” He continues: “The neighborhood develops from a random conglomerate, in which only the building alignment creates order, to an organic unity of living, resting, playing, relaxation, feeding and cleaning, working and learning” (Somer, 99). In short, the thresholds separating the intimacy of family life from the hostile outside world are blurred. Space becomes fluid. The street flows into the dwelling and the dwelling expands into the street.

<14> In the statements of these architects (who were both from Rotterdam, but designed an entire neighborhood in Geuzenveld, Nieuw-West, to underscore the importance of their voices in the Amsterdam housing debates, cf. Teijmant), we actually see a Benjaminesque scenario taking shape, in which the individual and the family cannot be disconnected from the larger body of society. In a conceptual study on modernist urban planning, dated 1941 and composed by a group of architects including the aforementioned Willem van Tijen, the public space is envisioned as a sort of urban arena, the place where one is confronted by others (or more dramatically phrased, the Other). They picture the street as the place where the child   first encounters society, including its dangers and inconveniences (the examples given are a big dog, a teasing kid, and for some reason also the 'cruelty' of the fish wife), but also companionship, adventure, and social empathy (with the beggar). “Much as the family should always be the first element in the child’s life and the street the second, so the child that doesn’t know the street or is not able to take it on, will grow up in an antisocial manner” (qtd. in Van Velzen, n.14).

Glass Straightjacket

<15> Not all modernists agreed that the house and the street should merge in an eternal embrace. Looking at some of the overly transparent architecture of his younger colleagues, the first generation modernist J.J.P. Oud grumpily remarks that they are taken it too far, up to the point that it is “no longer funny.” It is embarrassing that residents must face the reality of having to cover windows that span the entire wall with curtains because they disliked being exposed to the public. In the first place a house should offer protection, Oud instructs; “There are occasions in which man seeks shelter (and these occasions are not scarce), and one [read: the architect] acts “sensational”, not “functional”, when this need is ignored” (Oud, 154).

<16> Indeed, seeking shelter was difficult in the new housing projects. Via balconies and windows the tentacles of the outside world penetrated deep into the private realm. With the coming of the new allotment, the relationship between personal or ‘owned’ space, and space that others—the architect or the municipalities—decided upon, had been changed. It is hard to overemphasize the impact of this development. The dissolution of closed building blocks into slabs had a tremendous influence on the relationship between privacy and publicity. It inaugurated the end of the ‘traditional’ division of the dwelling into representational and informal parts. The closed building block had known a certain relationship between the interior and the exterior, between private affairs and public life, as Castex, Depaule, Panerai have demonstrated in their seminal study Urban Forms. The dwelling on the street side was representative, visible, public, and bore the signature of the architect. On the courtyard side, invisible to the outside world, the dwelling was informal, and bore the signatures of the individual inhabitants. The sidewalks and the street were public and uniformly designed, while the courtyard itself offered an almost kaleidoscopic impression of the every-day life of the various residents (cf. Castex, Depaule, Panerai). 

<17> With the opening up of the building block, the intestines of the building were suddenly rendered visible to the outside world. To the satisfaction of modernist urban planners, the ‘open city’ displayed itself as a city of frontages. The ‘open block’ no longer “offered a cloak for a disorderly, dark courtyard”, as one architect heartily noted (Stam-Beese, 183). The garden, which traditionally belonged to the private realm of the house, became semi-public. In several neighborhoods in Amsterdam Nieuw-West fences and sheds were banned from gardens, because they would negatively affect the representative look of the urban plan (Mulder, 27). Wire netted fences were allowed, but could not come up higher than 1,10 meters. The meddlesomeness of the government went beyond the borders of residents’ gardens. The Amsterdam city council repeatedly discussed prohibiting the drying of laundry on balconies (Blauw, 38). Buildings were often equipped with a designated space for drying laundry in a discrete context, without Peeping Toms gazing at your underclothes.

<18> The interest in the verso of transparency gained momentum in the 1950’s on account of the advance of the social sciences in the Netherlands, and more specifically on account of empirical urban sociology. In the 1950’s extensive surveys took place in the new expansion neighborhoods, mostly in Rotterdam. One respondent in a 1955 survey held in the Rotterdam neighborhood Zuidwijk (designed by Lotte Beese-Stam) sighed: “Everything is so open over here. With all this glass everyone can look straight through your house. You can’t even pull up your stockings. And the garden is not at all free. We are planning to move” (Barends 1955, 108). In a survey from 1954 examining the ‘woonwelvaart’ (quality of life) of the occupants of housing for the elderly, a number of interviewees also complained about all the glass in the dwelling. They desired, to cite the survey, “more intimacy, clearly bound space and … less glass” (Barends 1954, 62). Although these empirical surveys enjoy the aura of objectivity, often bias shimmers through the surface. In fact, a portion of the interviewed elderly reacted very positively to the openness of the dwelling, but their remarks were gently brushed aside in a footnote, which the researchers claim that the preference for an abundance of glass in the house was insincere and “a symptom of the desire among old people to give the impression that they are in tune with the times; that they are ‘modern’” (Barends 1954, 62).

<19> Many sociologists sided with the critics of the transparency ideal. In 1955 a prominent sociologist named P. de Jong, the director of the Sociological Institute of the Reformed  Church, remarked at a discussion evening: “Contemporary dwellings no longer have hidden places. One can see right through them.” According to De Jong, this lack of shelter had a horrendous influence on children’s development. “It is in the hidden places that the child is formed, educated; that’s where it can create its own world” (qtd. in Engbersen, Engbersen, 75). It is interesting to note that De Jong not only blames the open organization of the modern dwelling, but also urbanism at large, which does not allow for secrets. This may remind us of Benjamin’s statement that transparency is the enemy of secrets and property, although in the case of De Jong this is assessed as an offense. Man is entitled to his secrets. Other sociologists feared that the lack of lockable spaces where individual family members can retreat, would ultimately result in lawlessness (maatschappelijke verwildering) and the disintegration of the family (Visman, 79).

Paradox

<20> Examples like these demonstrate the duality of the modernist glass house-metaphor in the 1950s, which, with the promise of freedom, equality and democracy on the one side, and the nightmare of totalitarian surveillance and loss of individuality on the other, was indeed Janus-faced. As Schuyt and Taverne have observed, the open cityscape and open dwellings from the 1950s were charged with notions of democracy and community spirit, but simultaneously functioned as a sign of the successful implementation of a deeply paternalistic program by the state, the ideologues and the city planners (Schuyt, Taverne, 175).

<21> This ambiguity is also apparent in the work of many thinkers of the time. Before the war, influential communitarian thinkers such as Johan Huizinga, Oswald Spengler and Jose Ortega y Gasset had voiced their concern about the emergence of the ‘mass-man’, a product of hyper-individualism induced by capitalism. Mass-man lacks a sense of duty, feels no responsibility for the things that are outside the sphere of his personal interest, and lacks values that anchor him to the world—which makes him vulnerable to demagoguery. From the perspective of the post-war cultural elite, history had proven this diagnosis to be correct. In their view mass-man had mindlessly sided with national-socialism, with the worst of possible outcomes. In the words of A.P. Bos, an important voice in the social housing debate, mass-man “resembles a dry grain of sand … an easy prey for any emerging power” (Bos, 16).

<22> Already during the occupation, representatives from the various sociopolitical segments of society (the so-called ‘zuilen’) discussed the possibility of joining forces for a nationwide ‘civilizing offensive’ against ‘barbarism’, in order to drub a new public spirit into the people. However, the culture-pessimistic tenor of the inter-war discourse made way for a radically hopeful undertone. The influential socialist and preacher Willem Banning propagated what he called ‘personalist-socialism’, an inclusive world view that tried to combine the liberal doctrine of self-development with the socialist emphasis on the importance of the individual. Banning wrote: “Our brand of socialism is indissolubly connected with the idea of freedom, which is formed in a new community life. Man is a polar creature: a private individuality with a personal value and a personal goal, with a craving for personal life-relationships (in friendship, family, work and society); he is a member of a community … and lives from community-relationships. Without the community, his life is without meaning, while a community without recognition of individuality leads to blind tyranny” (Banning, 583) [3].

<23> Communitarians like Banning claim citizens will never have agency as long as they are not part of a community. Libertarians, on the other hand, view is that each citizen is an autonomous subject whose foremost right is to develop his self. Each attempt to form him, to change his ways, or to force him into a certain framework, is the result of a paternalistic way of thinking, and should therefore be rejected. The urbanite is capable of constituting himself, to choose the values he decides to live by. Sjoerd Groenman, a major figure in the emerging field of urban sociology, writes in his book Ons deel in de ruimte (Our share in the space) (1959): “People don’t want to act ‘social’ in the neighborhood, and it is possible that this feeling is in conflict with the intentions of the urban planner, who wants to reinforce community life through communal gardens.” (Groenman, 7) According to Groenman, the city dweller wanted “less social control” and “more freedom to decide over his own life”. That freedom requires a core, a refuge from where one can take on the world, says Groenman. “From his house he constructs his world view. The house I live in, is the center of my world. … The world lies around my house” (Groenman, 60).

II

City of Security

<24> In ‘Neoplasticisme: De Woning—De Straat—De Stad’ Mondrian expresses the wish that in the future the dwelling is no longer regarded as a ‘box’. “The idea ‘home’ (Home, sweet home (sic)) must be given up” (Mondrian, 18). If the idea of the dwelling-as-box ever lost ground, it came back with a vengeance. Or at least it did in Nieuw-West. Under the banner of urban renewal, entire neighbourhoods are torn down and replaced by introverted types of dwellings, housing blocks closed to the outside world and enclave-like ‘residential domains’, islands in the urban fabric. Open housing as an emblem of social transparency has been defeated by the ‘my home is my castle’ ideal, in which the house becomes the antithesis of society, a safe haven that has to protect us from the threats of modern day life: insecurity, uncertainty, the unknown.

<25> It seems like History has put the adversaries of the glass house ideal in the right. Groenman's remark that for modern city dwellers the home would be “a core, a refuge from where one can take on the world” sounds almost prophetic—as if the sociologist could actually foresee the bankruptcy of the belief in architectural transparency. In fact, the revival in Nieuw-West of the dwelling-as-box, as the embodiment of enclosed and private space, only shows how modernist dichotomies such as openness and privacy, visibility and shelter, and transparency and opacity are thoroughly reshuffled into complex diagrams of surveillance [4], and that these notions have become fundamentally unstable. The transparency dichotomy (transparency = freedom vs. transparency = oppression), as it appeared to have surfaced in the 1950s, collapsed. In the final part of this essay, I aim to exemplify how this collapse has catalyzed physical and spatial changes in Amsterdam Nieuw-West; how it transformed the ‘open city’ into a ‘city of security’—a city full of spaces that can be ‘jittery’ or ‘prickly’, but are rarely truly open. 

<26> Nieuw-West is a pressure cooker for urban developments. During its short lifespan it  shifted from being a proud symbol of the welfare state into the city depot of the underprivileged. The influx of immigrant groups—first the small waves of foreign workers in the 1960s, later the bigger waves of predominantly Moroccans and Turks in the 1990s—deeply changed the composition of the population. In some parts (such as Overtoomse Veld) around 30 percent of the population is of Moroccan descent. This rapid demographic diversification was accompanied with an increase of poverty. Slotervaart has the highest percentage of minimum wage earners in Amsterdam. In 2007 all the neighborhoods that together comprise Nieuw-West were placed on a nationwide list of forty neighborhoods needing “extra attention”. Nieuw-West was synonymous for crime, social unrest, and even religious fundamentalism—both Mohammed Bouyeri (the murderer of Theo van Gogh) and some members of a terrorist cell christened Hofstad group were from here. In 2003 the then district council chairman Henk Goettsch explicitly referred to Slotervaart as “a ghetto”, continuing that “if we do nothing, ten years from now it will be a war zone” (qtd. in Kiene, s.p.). Going by the portrayal of Nieuw-West in the news coverage on television, one would think this was already the case (see figures 2a-d). Whether or not Nieuw-West was really in such a terminal state, matters little. The prejudicial belief that it is suffices to set of socially detrimental consequences, as the sociologist Loïc Wacquant commented on this process of neighborhood labeling (Wacquant, 125)

News coverage from Nieuw-West (broadcast 2a-c: NOS news, 4 feb 2008; broadcast 2d: Powned, 12 nov 2009)

News coverage from Nieuw-West (broadcast 2a-c: NOS news, 4 feb 2008; broadcast 2d: Powned, 12 nov 2009)

News coverage from Nieuw-West (broadcast 2a-c: NOS news, 4 feb 2008; broadcast 2d: Powned, 12 nov 2009)

News coverage from Nieuw-West (broadcast 2a-c: NOS news, 4 feb 2008; broadcast 2d: Powned, 12 nov 2009)

 

<27> Something had to happen. The municipalities and housing corporations opted for the most rigorous instrument at their disposal: urban redevelopment. Redevelopment is pitched as a means of exhorting socio-economical and cultural change by replacing the one-sided housing stock with new housing estates. This is dubbed “physical renewal”, to distinguish it from “social renewal”, which is not aimed at the hardware but at the software of the city. Physical renewal often is a euphemism for a belief in the possibility of a phoenix-like rebirth of an urban area, and redevelopment a euphemism for replacement. Large parts of Nieuw-West are being demolished according to this logic, swept from the map and rebuilt. In many neighborhoods up to eighty percent of the buildings dating from the 1950s are earmarked for demolishment, sometimes reaching even ninety percent or higher. For instance, Westlandgrachtbuurt, the Delflandpleinbuurt and Staalmanpleinbuurt in Slotervaart, and the area surrounding the Sam van Houtstraat in Geuzenveld, all await demolition (Griffioen 2010a). As a result of the financial crisis, many of these plans have been postponed indeterminably, however not definitely cancelled. Over the past two decades, urban redevelopment has proven to be an unstoppable production machine that leaves no room for reflection. Such is the rule of blind demolition-and-rebuilding-dynamics that simply replaces problematic neighborhoods with new neighborhoods, failing to acknowledge the historical sediments and local characteristics of the area. Some critics—in my view correctly—claim that the demolition of large numbers of residential buildings from this period signifies more than just the redevelopment of a large quantity of real estate (Tellinga, 23). Former district council chairman Goettsch himself admitted that the houses themselves were fine, and that the demolition plans were made from a “social point of view” (“uit maatschappelijk oogpunt”) (qtd. in Kiene, s.p.).

Together Alone

<28> The modernist space of the 1950s was ultimately inclusive: it was a single, undivided space inhabited by different social groups. This can be seen everywhere in Nieuw-West. So-called ‘doctors villa’s’, designed for the upper middle class, are standing next to flats with dwellings for the working class and the lower middle class; blocks with apartments for families are placed alongside houses for elderly people. The buildings are part of the same visual space, as to communicate that the members of these different social groups inhabit the same social space—they all have, to paraphrase the title of Groenman’s aforementioned sociological study, “their share in the space”. If the space in Nieuw-West is designed to be inclusive, the space in New-Nieuw-West is predominately exclusive. Space is being “domainized”, as it is called in the official reports (Far West, 11). Such terminology is planners’ lingo for a reorganization of space, in which the borders between private, collective, and public space are being redrawn with the intention to create a safer and more ‘livable’ environment. Often, these statements are made without further argumentation, as if their meaning is indisputable and needs no clarification. What “domainization” means in practice, becomes clear at the Heemstedestraat and at countless other locations in the neighborhood where the open city has to make place for new urban islands taking shape with the aid of architecture—for instance the reanimation of old typologies: the closed block with an enclosed courtyard—but also with the aid of technology, as I will demonstrate further on.

<29> The new housing development schemes resemble what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described as “chains of thinly, but widely spread mini-utopias consolidated into realities” or “an archipelago of pre-fabricated islands of pre-designed order”. In search of stability in an increasingly unstable world, the privileged use “barrier strategies”, writes Bauman: “Safety, like all other aspects of human life in a relentlessly individualized and privatized world, must be a 'do-it-yourself' job” (Bauman 2001, 112). These islands symbolize the retreat from the street, from the public sphere, says Bauman. “Rather than struggling to reform the street, let’s cut ourselves free from its hazards, run for shelter and lock the door behind” (Bauman 2003, 25).

<30> This is already aptly illustrated by the first redevelopment project in the Nieuw-West area, Noorderhof (1999), designed by the office of the Luxembourgian architect Rob Krier. The choice of architect is significant. Krier acquired his reputation in the 1970s with his book Stadtraum (1975), an attack on the principles of modernist planning. Indeed, commissioning Krier was framed as a polemical gesture; the project developers expressed the wish that his design would sound the death knell for “the cold and impersonal city planning of the late decades”. Noorderhof had to become the opposite of everything that typifies the ‘open city’ surrounding it. Even the street names are brought into action to communicate that this neighborhood does not belong to the modernist planning tradition, but to an alternative bloodline: they are named after notorious Dutch anti-modernist architects from the past, such as M.J. Granpré Molière, G. Friedhoff, A. Evers, en A.J. Kropholler.

<31> Noorderhof is an odd, chimerical village-in-the-city organized around a church — an urban typology with an anachronistic feel. The church, and the adjacent parsonage are the only remainders of the 1950’s building ensemble that Krier’s village replaced. Starting from the central position of church (designed by the aforementioned Granpré Molière), the architects seized the opportunity to create a traditional village heart with a ‘Brink’, a funnel-shaped main square from which the streets fan out. The streets and squares are irregularly laid out. If we are to believe the architect, the picturesque street plan is “not the result of the vagaries of mood”, but the logical consequence of the desire to design ‘around’ the existing stock of trees (Krier, 206). Yet the connotation of organic growth, of historical development, is not to be underestimated. The suggestion is raised that the street plan evolved out of goat tracks or social lines, while in fact Noorderhof was built on a tabula rasa. This is a good example of the traditionalist paradox of design mimicking evolution. The eclectic pallet of quasi-historical styles in which the brick facades of the 250 buildings in this faux village are executed, can be understood in the same way. Most of these buildings are two stories high, but the ensemble is enveloped by long four-storied volumes that evoke the image of city wall. The message cannot be misread: the wall-like buildings, with their architecturally pronounced entrance gates, form a metaphorical line separating an inside (the village) from an outside (Nieuw-West), the ‘community’ from the ‘outside world’.

<32> Whereas in the Noorderhof it is predominately an image of seclusion and shelter that is constructed, in more recent projects the image of openness is upheld, while with the aid of technology and smart architectural design an almost invisible cage is constructed. Façades look transparent and space appears to be fluid, while in fact the borders between private and public are very definite, and control and security measures are integrated artfully into the design. I will confine myself to only one example, deMeester in Slotervaart (2004-2009). The quality of the architectural design by the firm SeARCH is undisputable, but the building does clearly display some of the problems we want to address here. From a distance the deMeester looks like a compressed ensemble from the 1950’s, with six independent slab-like volumes that differ in height. The volumes are all stacked on top of one horizontal volume, that comprises an indoor parking space, commercial spaces in the plinth, a few maisonnettes and the entrances. The roof of this volume functions as a collective “living deck” that is only accessible to the inhabitants. The “real” public space can be completely circumvented. You enter the building by car, a moving capsule of privacy. The gate—so subtly designed that it is almost invisible—closes behind you. Once you made the ascent to the deck, you are outside again. The space has no perceptible borders. If the weather is nice, your neighbors might have put the chairs outside to have an afternoon drink together, while the kids are freely running around. It’s easy to forget that you’re in a carefully pasteurized environment, designed to shut out everything that is unknown. The fact that the governing principle in the architecture of this building is protection against intrusion from the outside world is successfully camouflaged by good design. Essentially, deMeester is a gated community. The community feeling catered in the building, does not refer to the abstract but (more or less) inclusive notion of community from the 1950s, but (to cite Bauman again) to a “community of similarity” (Bauman 2007, 87). Community in these cases refers to sameness, “while 'sameness' means the absence of the Other, especially a stubbornly different other capable of nasty surprise and mischief precisely by reason of their difference” (Bauman 2001, 115).

Urban Space Wars

<33> The cause and the impact of the so-called domainization can perhaps best be explained by looking deeper into Bauman’s ideas about the city and what he names “urban space wars” (Cf. Bauman 1999). At the core of Bauman's recent writings lies the thesis that we moved from a 'solid' to a 'liquid' modernity. In this diagnosis the (Western) world is in a state in which solid social formations (structures that predetermine individual choices; institutions that construct routines and patterns of behavior) melted into air, and are replaced by formations which emerge and disappear with a velocity that makes them hardly visible. It is telling that society nowadays is often regarded as 'network' (think of Manuel Castells' famous The Network Society), rather than a 'structure'; as a matrix of random connections and disconnections rather than a fixed firmament of truths (Bauman 2007, 3).

<34> Instability and uncertainty are intrinsic features of the economic, social and political textures of our times. This terminal state of flux is felt by everyone, but some of us are better equipped to ride the waves of constant change than others. In line with ideas voiced earlier by Castells, Bauman makes a distinction between an upper tier that is connected to global communication and to a vast network of exchange, and a lower tier connected to “segmented local networks, often ethnically based” (Bauman 2003, 16). Members of the upper tier, whose relations and responsibilities have become 'extraterritorial', are no longer convicted to a habitat, a place with specific coordinates. But their mobility is a privilege; people belonging to the second group are “doomed to be local”, as Bauman puts it (17). They carve out identities that may have been modeled after examples from far away, but are in the end homespun products, deeply entrenched in a concrete territory.

Photo: Taf Hassam

<35> These two life-worlds are segregated but exist in close proximity of each other—both are present in Nieuw-West. However, in these distinct worlds ideas such as fate, future and responsibility take on distinct spatial forms. Members of the mobile class are ‘in a place’, but not ‘of that place’, as Bauman paraphrases the famous biblical saying. For them, there's always an exit strategy at hand: “If things get too hot for comfort ... and the space around their city residences proves too hazardous and too difficult to manage, they may move elsewhere—an option not available to the rest of their close or not so close neighbours” (20). For members of the immobile class, the condition of the living environment is of existential importance, for it is on this stage that the rest of their lives will unfold. “For them, it is inside the city they inhabit that the battle for survival and a decent place in the world is launched, waged, won or lost” (17).

<36> Domainization is the result of an attempt to repopulate the Nieuw-West with people belonging to the upper tier. Their default mode is disengagement with the locality—although this disengagement can be converted into voluntary engagement. This disengagement is manifested in the segregation of space and architectures aimed to set themselves apart from the surroundings—to separate their “‘voluntary ghetto’ from the many enforced ones” (29). With a feeling for drama, Bauman calls this ‘mixophobia’, “a highly predictable and widespread reaction to the mind-boggling, spine-chilling and nerve-breaking variety of human types and lifestyles that meet and rub elbows and shoulders in the streets of contemporary cities” (Bauman 2007, 86; Bauman 2003, 31). Mixophobia presents an alternative exit strategy that doesn’t require departure from place. It is a domestic escape option—fleeing inside and barricading the door.

Death of Public Space

<37> As I explained above, public space is an important ingredient of city planning from the 1950s, as is illustrated in all the green space surrounding the building slabs and in the vastness of the public squares. Now the surplus of open space is regarded as a potential cause of problems; hoodlums hanging around, crime, vandalism. This development from a functioning public realm to a ‘dead’ public space can be described as a vicious cycle, where increasingly fewer groups orient themselves to the public domain (Hajer, 45). The recent fixation on the fortification of the home goes accompanied with the deterioration of the public space, following a logic that Bauman described as a fixation on the “oases”, while “the world between them looks and feels more and more desert-like” (Bauman 2003, 25-26). The experience of openness turned into an experience of emptiness, and the promise turned into a threat, to paraphrase a recent author (Van Winkel, 39). “In many places, the surplus of public space creates a feeling of insecurity,” states one of the many official reports about the neighborhood. Some specialists have concluded the same. The sociologist Arnold Reijnsdorp stated in 1996 that, whereas in the past the public space seemed to belong to everyone, today it belongs to no one (qtd. in Hellinga, 32). Jacques Thielen, the director of Far West, a conglomerate of various social housing corporations that are active in Nieuw-West, says: “Fifty years ago, the excessive open spaces in the area generated a feeling of freedom. Nowadays they, by and large, create fear and a feeling of insecurity” (qtd. in De Graaf, Hulsman, Van Oeffelt, 18).

<38> One of the responses is drastically scaling down existing public spaces. Part of Plein ’40-’45, one of the main squares of Nieuw-West, is replaced by a huge shopping mall with an internal street, with all the main shops aligned. During the day, this is public space, but at night it is closed off. The space is pulled inside, into a controllable interior, a specially tailored commercial space; oikos camouflaged as the agora. Another response is the re-colonization of the public sphere with the aid of technology. The infamous Slotervaart riots from 1998, in which around 150 boys, mostly of Moroccan descent, came to blows with the police, were a catalyst for the implementation of a repressive security policy. A year later, the local cinema on the August Allabéplein, the primary site of the riots, closed its doors because it could no longer guarantee the safety of the visitors, according to newspaper reports. In the aftermath of the 1998 upset, Slotervaart unofficially became a laboratory for innovative monitoring and security measures. In 2000, the August Allabéplein became the first test site for camera surveillance in Amsterdam. In the following years, the focus of the authorities gradually shifted from the Allabéplein in the heart of the neighborhood, to a smaller, somewhat hidden square one block away: the Mondriaanplein. In the late 2000s this became the ‘operating base’, to phrase it somewhat bombastically, of the ‘Mondrian group’, a group of young hoodlums, some of whom were in possession of a criminal record for shop raids or auto-related crimes. Equally overdrawn, it seems, the police deemed the Mondrian group a criminal organization, thus legitimizing experiments with new surveillance techniques. Remote-controlled cameras capable of revolving and zooming were hence installed at the Mondriaanplein and the Allebéplein.

<39> Possibly the most controversial measure taken by the district council was the installation of a ‘Mosquito’, a device meant to discourage hoodlums from loitering through the emission of a high pitched sound that can only be heard by people under the age of 25. Ignoring the objections voiced by the minister of Interior and Kingdom Relations, the device was installed on the Mondriaanplein in 2009. In 2011 the new mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, called it “undesirable” to fight problems with “contra-noise”, and agreed that the Mosquito had a certain “discriminative” component to it. Yet the device is not only still in place, but has been installed at various other locations. Shops in the neighborhood were equipped with another novelty: the call-your-neighbors-system (burenbelsysteem). When a retailer sees something suspicious in front of a neighboring shop, he can press an alarm button that will activate the cameras in the street. These cameras can zoom in on every individual shop front to monitor potential danger. All these technological measures are backed with a hardcore law-and-order police strategy, culminating in the deportation of two Moroccan-Dutch brothers, members of the Mondrian group, to Morocco in 2009.

<40> The Mondriaanplein and the Allebéplein are examples of what Bauman, following Flustry, calls ‘jittery space’—“space that cannot be utilised unobserved due to active monitoring by roving patrols and/or remote technologies feeding to security stations” (Bauman 2003, 31). In the areas waiting to be torn down, an interesting new form of control management has appeared in the last few years. Compared to the high-tech technology implemented in 'jittery space', this form is almost charmingly analogue and low-tech. Temporary interventions vamp the public space into what Bauman and Flusty call ‘prickly space’—“space that cannot be comfortably occupied, defended by such details as wall-mounted sprinkler heads activated to clear loiterers or ledges sloped to inhibit sitting” (30). While the buildings slowly decay due to minimal maintenance, the public and semi-public space has been carpet bombed with objects that are meant to defend the crumbling architectural hardware against crime and misbehavior. Electricity boxes, garden sheds and garages are adorned with metal crowns of thorns. Walls and entrance halls are buttressed with barbed wire and serrated metal security strips. The green yards between slabs are fenced off in fear of hoodlumism, and thus denied the possibility of use.

<41> In my view both forms of controlled space—high-tech jittery space and low-tech prickly space—effectively suck the public life out of the neighborhood. Whether this is intentional or not is irrelevant; by nourishing the state of emergency, the need for drastic architectural and social change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Together with the dilapidation of the buildings, these tokens of distrust beat the path for future large-scale redevelopment programs. In turn, redevelopment generates fear of displacement and destabilization of the living conditions of the present inhabitants. As such, the protection mechanisms that on a superficial level seem to be aimed at the eradication of insecurity, may actually stimulate uncertainty (cf. Zinganel). All these interventions are directed at what is now seen as the true enemy: the inhabitants themselves. That is to say: the earlier generations of inhabitants, the ones that are not yet relocated or replaced by newer models.

Removing the Rash

<42> As New-Nieuw-West is steadily emerging within Nieuw-West, the metamorphosis of the ‘open city’ into the ‘city of security’ is approaching its final state. Those who can afford it move into an enclave, shut themselves off from a world that is associated with danger, animosity and inconvenience. Or, in the words of Peter Sloterdijk: “The individual bubble in the living-foam forms a container for the self-relationships of the inhabitant, who settle into his housing unit as the consumer of a primary comfort: the vital capsule of his living quarters serves as the scene of his self-coupling, the operational space for his self-care and as an immune system in a contamination-rich field of ‘connected isolations,’ also known as neighborhoods” (Sloterdijk, 118).

<43> Perhaps the biggest loss in this process is the loss of a functioning public space. Domainizing, mixophobia and spatial segregation are not medicines against urban insecurities, merely palliatives. The urban renewal program in Nieuw-West seems to make the mistake of “removing the rash while mistaking it for the cure of the illness” (Bauman 2007, 92). In fact, I tend to follow Bauman in his assertion that this proposed cure itself is pathogenic and makes the problem deeper and less curable. Fenced-off habitats remove personal responsibility, undermine our relationship with the surrounding environment take away the “continual, almost subliminal interaction with strangers which is part of healthy city life”, as Anna Milton recently diagnosed. “The consequence is that people are left far more frightened when they do have to confront the unexpected that can never be entirely removed from daily life” (Milton, 33). In other words, mixophobia leads to more mixophobia.

<44> Ironically, the ruthless urban renewal apparatus that produces these changes, is marketed as a way to revive the public realm by encouraging demographic diversity. This way of advertising a complete make-over taps into the fact that no-one can oppose the proclaimed goal to transform neighborhoods like Amsterdam Nieuw-West, ignored for so long, into lively, mixed neighborhoods, by encouraging social-economical and cultural diversity. But while paying lip-service to open society, it establishes the opposite, namely an archipelago of private islands for the have’s in a sea of have-not’s — “and never the twain shall meet”.

Acknowledgements

Kind acknowledgment is made to Project Goleb in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, where I was in residency while writing the first draft of this essay. This essay develops ideas put forward earlier in essays published in Kunstlicht, AWM and Open, and is partly based on paper presented at the Low Countries, Big Cities ALCS 9th Biennale Conference in Sheffield, 3-5 April 2012.

Notes

[1] The word 'stempel' or stamp, was already used in the 1950s to describe the way in which the clusters of buildings are organized in space.

[2] Internationale Revue i10 was an international avant-garde magazine connecting influential figures from philosophy, literature, art and architecture, such as Menno ter Braak, Jan Romeijn, J.J.P. Oud, Mart Stam, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

[3] The influence of the this amalgam ideology, which combined ideals from the liberal and socialist traditions, was substantial, not in the least on urban planning discourse. Most significantly, it resulted in the development of the “wijkgedachte” (the neighborhood idea), a sociological model that was based on the neighborhood unit idea that Clarence Perry popularized in the 1920s, but was introduced by Mary Parker Follet in her 1917 book The New State. In the Netherlands the neighborhood idea took root thanks to a study group organized in Rotterdam by the head of the Rotterdam Department of Public Housing, A. Bos. The ideas of Follet and Perry were translated into the somber Dutch experience of reality (war, devastation, verzuiling), but upgraded with a generous dash of personalist-socialistic belief in the future.

[4] To echo Deleuze”s famous diagnosis that we are moving from Foucault”s “disciplinary societies”, with fairly straightforward mechanisms of surveillance, to “societies of control”, with “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” (Deleuze, 4).

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