Housing in Harbours in Holland

Abstract

With harbour activities vanishing from the centre, the Dutch harbour cities have acquired a vast amount of redevelopment land, where the first projects started in the 1970s. The article describes the evolution of conceptional and political attitudes from the 1970s to today, reflected and illustrated in a number of urban and architectural projects in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Gradually it becomes obvious that providing housing in harbours is the key to urban revitalization, but that sustainable harbour neighborhoods can only produce a true form of urbanity when they have a carefully developed mixture of functions that also consider the existing structures and activities. To achieve this, a sensible organisation of stakeholder management is indispensible as well as a phasing concept, in which private investment runs parallel and complementary to public investment.