The urban planner, the architect, the traffic engineer, the public housing official, the private developer and the civil servant – they have all lost the authority they once had. These days, politicians are afraid that the people's discontent about the solutions offered by architects and planners might lead to a rejection of their policies.Footnote 1
With this somewhat self-pitying statement, the 1976 annual report of the Breevast real estate company concisely summarised the societal changes that had affected its field in the preceding years. The reflections hinted at the politicisation of Dutch spatial planning in the early 1970s, during which time power relations between professionals and laymen became subject to no less debate than in other domains of society.Footnote 2 However, the annual report implies more than just the politicisation of society or the loss of authority once exerted by planning experts. It is also an elegy to the high modernist view of the future of Dutch cities, a future that was geared towards the comprehensive accommodation of the automobile age, rapidly growing population and advent of a post-industrial economy aligned with mass consumerism. By the early 1970s this view was discredited by a combination of structural economic and demographic changes, democratisation tendencies and new insights into how cities worked.
The Dutch urban renewal order of the 1950s and 1960s was a convergence of forces typical for Western European urban governance at the time. These coalitions consisted of politicians, civil servants and professional experts such as developers, architects and planners, who together determined and reinforced the reform impulses underpinning national and local urban renewal agendas.Footnote 3 Despite this heterogeneous composition, historians have almost solely focused on the role of planners, dismissing the political interaction between the different stakeholders and the public at large. Historical studies on urban renewal have largely neglected political meetings discussing the run-up to renewal schemes, instead focusing on the plans as they were actually implemented or presented to the public.
Consequently, current Dutch historiography has painted a picture in which an elite of technocratic planners determined the future of inner cities. Architectural historian Cor Wagenaar claims that in the 1950s and 1960s planners thought ‘everything was under control’.Footnote 4 Planning historians Hans van der Cammen and Len de Klerk contend that planners displayed ‘impatience’ to undertake the country's ‘great metamorphosis’.Footnote 5 In similar words, historians Kees Schuyt and Ed Taverne have spoken of a ‘hardly repressed impatience’ to build new and better cities from scratch.Footnote 6
These views are not confined to Dutch historians. Urban historian Peter Clark has stated that modernist renewal schemes across Western Europe were ‘too often authoritarian in implementation’,Footnote 7 while planning historian Steven Ward has described 1960s Western planners as nothing less than ‘confident’.Footnote 8 British publications, too, have tended to blame audacious planners for post-war urban failures, although they have also observed more sensitive attitudes and a loss of prestige from the early 1960s onwards.Footnote 9 Similar observations have been made for West Germany, France and Belgium.Footnote 10
This article will demonstrate that these judgements are largely misleading in the Dutch case, for two reasons; firstly, historians have not taken into account the ways in which planners and politicians experienced the challenges of urban renewal. Secondly, and more importantly, these scholars discuss the planning system as an independent entity operating in a political vacuum. The sources used here allow for a different reading of urban planning, one that is much more about governance and its actors than about the contents of finalised plans. As argued by James Scott, the existence of representative institutions such as city councils was by far the most important barrier to the high-modernist schemes of the post-war era.Footnote 11 In local political arenas what mattered most were consumer democracy and economic modernisation. This was not so much the modernity of the expert but of the voter and, therefore, the local politician.Footnote 12
By taking into account the experience of modernity from an urban governance perspective, in which planners were but one of several groups, this article suggests moving the focus away from plan making to decision taking. The strong alliances that planners, politicians and developers forged in the 1960s to secure and promote local renewal agendas were by no means static. Instead, they were subject to socio-economic change, financial restraint, changing resonances of expert discourses and the alleged public good, which contributed to the doubtful mindsets of elected representatives in particular. Their experience of these far-reaching societal changes was the decisive factor for the acceptance of new ideas regarding the renewal of dilapidated inner city areas, leading to a radical readjustment of Dutch urban renewal agendas in the early 1970s.Footnote 13
First, I will demonstrate that professional and political elites designed and implemented redevelopment schemes not out of utopian aspirations but out of a compulsive need and sometimes even a fear of what was yet to come. Planners and politicians expected the Netherlands to be a fully motorised, overpopulated and densely built-up country by the year 2000. They thought that these dynamics could be facilitated, but not steered – all the more since they were extremely difficult to comprehend. Second, this article will show that the reason most urban renewal schemes never materialised lay in governance practices within the Dutch urban renewal order.Footnote 14 These governance practices disclose interrogations of modernity between a range of actors who frequently displayed feelings of doubt, hesitance and ambivalence about the future, leading to particular political and spatial outcomes.
It will therefore become clear that the political urge for urban renewal should not be mistaken for a belief in a better future. The ambiguous reflexive stance of decision makers reminds us that the experience of modernity is always double-edged.Footnote 15 This will become clear through a discussion of nation-wide planning issues, together with different levels of plan and decision making in section I of this article, followed by a case study of an exemplary redevelopment scheme for the inner city of The Hague in section II. The focus of this article is on the early 1960s, when the most ambitious plans were drawn up and consequently the first signs of ambivalence and doubt surfaced. Although the mushrooming protests against urban renewal are not central to this article's main argument, they are briefly taken into account to understand why the urban renewal order shifted course so drastically and rapidly during the 1970s.
I
During the 1950s and 1960s progressive and future-oriented thinking dominated the field of planning in Western Europe. Economic and demographic growth led to ever-rising ambitions. As society was becoming more affluent, new possibilities opened up for the implementation of urban renewal agendas, which had been formulated long before the Second World War, but had been deemed unrealistic due to political turmoil and lack of funding. Western European welfare states allowed a majority of citizens to share in the benefits of economic prosperity.Footnote 16
The era of high modernism, which was closely aligned with the rise of this welfare state, had already reached its zenith in the early 1960s. By that time, signs of rapid and radical change were discernible all over Western Europe. It was not uncommon for West German planners to envision suburbs of more than 100,000 residents.Footnote 17 In Britain, Labour leader and future Prime Minister Harold Wilson called for the scientific modernisation of British society, with planners playing a leading role.Footnote 18 In the ‘new France’ that president Charles de Gaulle invoked during the Fifth Republic (1958–1969), expansion was the blueprint for the future.Footnote 19
The Netherlands was no exception in this zeal for modernisation. Whereas the 1950s should be seen as a decade of recovery and agenda setting, the 1960s were a period in which the country was actually transformed in fundamental ways. Construction of the so-called Delta Works, which were to keep the country safe from sea flooding, and Flevoland, a vast land reclamation project, were in full swing. The port of Rotterdam and Schiphol Airport were growing at tremendous rates. In the countryside, the government was pursuing a thorough redistribution of farming land.Footnote 20
However, nowhere was the increasingly rapid pace of modern life more tangible than in Dutch cities. Plans were launched for satellite towns with no fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, as well as for the wholesale demolition of nineteenth-century areas surrounding the larger cities’ historic cores to make way for multi-lane expressways, shopping centres and spacious office blocks. In order to accommodate a growing number of cars, increasing amounts of office space and more retail and shopping venues, several Dutch municipalities considered the comprehensive redevelopment of their inner cities, or at least those areas that planners deemed obsolete and out-dated. The inner cities were thought to be in urgent need of redevelopment schemes that would correspond to the large-scale, uniform changes in society – setting in motion a process of creative destruction on a spatially fixed level.Footnote 21
In order to understand how the urban renewal order worked, it should be acknowledged that planners were not merely designing a better future but also responding to contemporary needs and demands on behalf of locally elected officials. These were in turn strongly encouraged to embark on urban renewal projects by the Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and the Environment (hereafter: ‘Ministry of Physical Planning’), which in 1958 pledged their financial support for the comprehensive redevelopment of slums and ‘out-dated’ nineteenth-century districts.Footnote 22 According to civil servants working for the ministry, urban renewal encompassed the searching and striving for the best possible mutual adjustment between the physical environment and society.Footnote 23 This squares with the definition given by Dirk van Laak, according to which planning is a public, process-based anticipation of the future, which aims at securing the spatial and infrastructural configurations of society.Footnote 24
During the 1950s the field of Western European planning was professionalised and bureaucratised through formal education and the establishment of national and local planning agencies.Footnote 25 In the Netherlands this culminated in the Physical Planning Act of 1962. The act discerned three planning levels: the state, the province and the municipality. Whereas the first and second governmental bodies outlined planning policies, local municipalities were given relatively free reign to determine binding land-use plans and indicative structure plans.Footnote 26 Both type of plans were subject to approval by the provincial executive, with citizens given the right to appeal on the national level.Footnote 27
Thus, the future of inner cities was firmly in the hands of locally elected councils and should, therefore, be investigated as such. In the larger cities these councils were made up of forty-five members of political parties, who, after quadrennial elections, would appoint and monitor a municipal executive consisting of five to seven aldermen, of which one was responsible for spatial planning and presided over a department of civil servants.Footnote 28 Almost without exception, all through the 1960s and 1970s the aldermen of the larger cities were members of the powerful Dutch Labour Party, which means electoral change was very limited. Of course, these aldermen were not operating in a local vacuum, reluctantly receiving advice from the Ministry of Physical Planning as well as a wide range of advisory boards, interest groups and independent researchers.
These actors in the Dutch governance structure warned their colleagues ‘on the ground’ that in order for progress to advance successfully, painful sacrifices had to be made. The rise in car ownership, growing population numbers and socio-economic shifts resulted in mounting demographic and economic pressures on inner cities. It was felt that unless decisive action was taken, these would decline and fall prey to congestion, social misery and decay. Large-scale redevelopment was considered the only way to keep central areas viable and safe from the potentially destructive forces of modernity.
During the first half of the 1960s growth figures provoked and permitted the most ambitious plans, which would cast a long shadow over the years to come. According to Dutch historian James Kennedy, this was the time when political and professional elites became convinced that only ‘pragmatic, anticipative and consciously “modern” policies could steer the small, vulnerable and rapidly changing country in the right direction’.Footnote 29 To these elites, being modern was a necessity as well as a moral imperative.Footnote 30
This holds especially true for the way in which the tremendous rise in car ownership was perceived. As Simon Gunn has observed for Britain, policy makers and advisers saw the car as a threat rather than an opportunity.Footnote 31 This was no different in the Netherlands, where the number of cars and commutes by car increased fivefold between 1960 and 1970.Footnote 32 As early as 1963 future Labour prime minister Joop den Uyl argued that it was a democratic right for every worker to have his/her own car,Footnote 33 a statement that signifies how mass motorisation was set to affect lifestyles profoundly.Footnote 34 For planners this posed a challenge rather than an opportunity, to which they responded with feelings of anxiety and resignation. In other Western European countries, too, a stream of publications on the rise in car ownership articulated gloomy and fearful predictions about its future impact on city centres.Footnote 35
Although non-local stakeholders were not always able nor allowed to determine local urban renewal matters, their comments on the mass motorisation of society display the extensiveness of ambivalence and doubt in planning discourse. With regard to car traffic, officials working for the Ministry of Physical Planning spoke as early as 1958 of ‘the possible danger of implementing unwanted solutions out of sheer necessity’.Footnote 36 A few years later civil servants of the same ministry stated that few aspects of modern society preoccupied them the way car traffic did, but warned that its accommodation would be an expensive task requiring an expertise virtually no one possessed yet.Footnote 37
These paradoxical expressions were not confined to governmental bodies. In 1960 the president of the Royal Dutch Touring Club said that he seriously doubted ‘whether we will be able to defy the flood of cars one day’.Footnote 38 In 1961 an independent traffic engineer had a compelling confession to make: ‘we are searching for light in the darkness. And whilst we are searching, the scale and nature of the matter is continuously changing. Consequently, we can't get a sight on it, let alone a grip.’Footnote 39 By no means do these statements resemble the confidence that is often ascribed to the planning elites of the first post-war decades. Although most Dutch city centres retained much of their urban fabric during the post-war era, especially in comparison to the United States,Footnote 40 it was clear that sacrifices were necessary to make them accessible to car traffic, seen as the lifeblood of cities during the 1960s.Footnote 41
Similar expressions of fear accompanied reflections on growing population numbers. According to the Ministry of Physical Planning, there was a direct link between population growth and the necessity of urban renewal. In 1963 the population was expected almost to double by the year 2000, an idea that left them with ‘remarkably paradoxical feelings’.Footnote 42 The non-governmental Society for Demography also focused on the year 2000, which had become common practice for planners in the 1960s, and wrote that it hoped for ‘a quick and bold approach’ in accommodating the millions of new souls.Footnote 43 The compilers of a widely read 1966 booklet about spatial planning, aptly titled A Quest for Living Space, expected that ‘a physical and mental gasping for breath will occur: suffocation threatens. Will we continue this journey until the bitter end, or will we brace ourselves for what is yet to come?’Footnote 44
Although not as tangible as the growth in the number of cars and people, the rising post-industrial economy also proved highly influential for the future of inner cities. On average, the Dutch GDP grew by 5 per cent per annum during the 1960s.Footnote 45 Over the decade the number of newly developed square metres in shopping space more than doubled in comparison to the 1950s, with retail traders scaling up and introducing new selling and distribution methods.Footnote 46 Between 1960 and 1970 the number of jobs in the service industry grew by 220,000, owing in particular to the provision of new financial products by the banking and insurance sectors.Footnote 47 Whereas office workers were thought to need 17.5 square metres of space in 1950, during the 1960s this number grew to 25 square metres per person.Footnote 48 Wage increases led to a full-fledged consumer society, in which citizens would spend more time on shopping and leisure activities.
Planners assumed that this new economy, dominated by business, finance and consumerism, had to find its place and thrive in central urban spaces. Usually, the planning apparatus would designate nineteenth-century working-class districts adjacent to a city's historic core as expansion areas for business, commerce and traffic, mainly because of the poor construction quality of the tenement houses and favourable land prices.Footnote 49 Centrality was key, or, as a 1961 study on the functioning of Dutch inner cities concluded: ‘Besides the architectural and aesthetics elements, being part of life and the ability to witness and experience dynamic change is what makes our city centres stand out from modern shopping centres’.Footnote 50 By replacing run-down tenement houses with the shimmering symbols of a new economy, planners thought they were reinforcing the commercial strength of the inner city.
Obviously, local politicians were not working in a tabula rasa context. In comparison with other European cities, the Dutch urban fabric was relatively close-knit, without many physical interventions dating from the Second Industrial Revolution, and in most cases devoid of extensive war damage. In addition, the nineteenth-century residential areas were not as densely interspersed with workplaces and factories as their Western European counterparts.Footnote 51 Furthermore, making way for modernisation meant eradicating cornerstones of local identity in a country that in the 1960s already had a strong preservation movement, albeit one more invested in the overall look of historic cityscapes than in preserving nineteenth-century tenement houses.Footnote 52 These physical circumstances made wholesale urban renewal less feasible in the Netherlands than in other Western European countries.
II
So far, this contribution has shown that during the early 1960s the arsenal of modernism became fully developed and advanced in a favourable economic context. By investigating a redevelopment scheme for The Hague's city centre, this section will demonstrate how and why local politicians began discussing the downsides of progress instead of self-confidently seizing the moment. Its massive scope and early timing, as well as the interference of all planning agencies involved, makes this particular project an outstanding case study for investigating notions of modernity and governance. Both The Hague's planners and politicians thought that progress was inevitable, but whereas the first were the shapers of modernity, the latter should be seen as its mediators. Due to their public role, politicians were much more prone to openly displaying doubt about their ability to act according to modern wishes and demands than civil servants working for the local planning department.
Like all other Dutch cities in the western part of the country, The Hague was experiencing rapid economic and demographic growth in the late 1950s. Simultaneously, the city's central districts were rapidly depopulating and decaying. The municipal planning department presented a wide range of plans to stop this spiral of dereliction, all of which focused on the comprehensive redevelopment of the working-class districts adjacent to the historic core. Functionalist-style high-rise buildings dominated the schemes that envisioned these areas as the city's future business district.
The most comprehensive and influential vision was the Structure Plan of 1957, entitled ‘The Hague: Rapidly growing city’ (Den Haag: Snel groeiende stad). It was a car-centred blueprint for the inner city's future that envisioned the redevelopment of nearly 1,500 acres of urban fabric over a forty-year time span. As seat of the national government, The Hague had always known a high demand for office space and traffic facilities. By giving in to this demand and the removal of ‘less desirable elements’, i.e. low-rise tenement buildings inhabited by the poor, the planning department wanted to kill two birds with one stone. The planners stated that, as the core of a ‘living, working and traffic apparatus’, the city centre should quickly adapt to the ‘needs and desires of modern society’.Footnote 53 By proposing the redevelopment of huge expanses of the inner city over such a prolonged period of time, they were unintentionally creating an extremely unstable and insecure future. While the plan would act as a guideline for the city's urban renewal schemes, no one really knew by whom and by which means these would be implemented.
Although the 1957 plan was met with great political approval, it set the city's planners and political representatives on a frustrating track of disappointment. After it became clear that the urban renewal process was already running behind schedule in 1962, the municipal executive had to admit that ‘it is useless to phase out the future of the urban renewal process in the long term’. Lasting housing shortages, a lack of space within the municipal borders and financial constraints had jeopardised The Hague's ambitious agenda.Footnote 54 In response to the slow pace of renewal, a city councillor predicted enduring misery and hardship: ‘without a swift and purposeful policy we will see even more neglected, polluted and deteriorating streets over the next ten years.’Footnote 55 Other councillors stated that ‘the year 2000 is already imminently casting its shadow upon us’, and that escalating developments in the inner city led to ‘panic responses’ and ‘insecurity’ within the council.Footnote 56
These reflections were no exception in municipal politics. In a response to the criticism, spatial planning alderman Gerrit Hijlkema showed little confidence: ‘man is not able to look into the future. It is extremely difficult to gain insights into the coherence between the city centre's many strongly intertwined interests.’Footnote 57 According to the alderman, the city was ‘losing its battle against time’ on its way to the year 2000. Although he agreed with the councillors that urban renewal should step up its pace, the question remained whether this was possible at all.Footnote 58 Even the city's planners, over whom Hijlkema presided, exhibited strong feelings concerning the dynamism of the times in which they lived. A rather exhausted planner said that ‘we should stop the inconsiderate and unfruitful emphasising of the “continuous movement of everything” in the field of planning, which ultimately needs solid forms’.Footnote 59
While local politicians and planners were discussing the renewal of the existing urban fabric, new developments on The Hague's outskirts were posing a yet unknown threat to the inner city's viability. In line with processes of suburbanisation and the rise of a car-centred economy, a local developer by the name of Reinder Zwolsman had proposed several shopping centres in the city's expansion areas and suburbs. The brochure that accompanied the developer's plan self-assuredly invoked a break with tradition: ‘historical growth shaped the inner city, creative thinking shapes the appearance of the shopping centre.’Footnote 60 This self-confident boastfulness was typical of Dutch private developers, who in the eyes of politicians possessed the expertise and financial strength to lead modernisation in the right directions.
This new phenomenon triggered anxious observations by city councillors, who feared that the introduction of shopping centres might potentially wipe The Hague's centre off the face of the earth.Footnote 61 Hijlkema, however, found himself incapable of putting a halt to this trend, stating that the Dutch consumer was ‘unconsciously’ determining the ‘unstoppable’ development of modern selling methods and concentration of shopping venues.Footnote 62 Mayor Hans Kolfschoten expressed himself in similar terms. He stressed that in order to accommodate the ‘intangible’ economic, social and demographic incentives for growth, the only thing the municipal executive could do was to ‘create favourable conditions for development, cultivating and trimming the rapidly growing crops’.Footnote 63
Not all urban renewal efforts seemed to be in vain. As the planning department and municipal executive frequently emphasised, they wanted to co-operate with private developers to get their urban renewal programme off the ground. In January 1961 Zwolsman not only presented plans for his first shopping centre but also a vast redevelopment scheme for a centrally located inner city district. After several amendments, the final plan encompassed a 140 metre tall office tower of glass, concrete and steel, a six-storey parking garage and a 400-bed hotel, as well as several catering, entertainment and shopping facilities. The Hague's municipal executive was delighted to outsource urban renewal to the local entrepreneur, notwithstanding hesitance from the city council. Soon after the presentation of the plan, the alderman and his planners joined forces with Zwolsman to evict local tenants and tear down the area's remaining properties.
This remarkable eagerness can be explained by the fact that the municipal executive, disappointed by years of discussions about the feasibility and desirability of sudden change, thought it could outsource urban redevelopment schemes to the market. As the planning department explained, cooperating with Zwolsman was intended to ‘gain experience’ with the new phenomenon of private developers, who were expected to expand their activities if the redevelopment of the Spuikwartier proved to be successful.Footnote 64 The municipal executive even exclaimed that they were fortunate to see Zwolsman take over much of the redevelopment of this particular inner city area, in which his multifunctional plan was considered to be a milestone.Footnote 65 Despite the huge interests at stake, neither the municipal executive nor the council objected to leaving the field of urban renewal open to experimentation, hereby giving Zwolsman carte blanche in determining his Spuikwartier scheme.
Although the district was already earmarked for redevelopment due to the construction of an inner ring road, several planning procedures had to be set up before work on the Zwolsman scheme could commence. After more than three years of evictions and haphazard demolition works, accompanied by frequent protests from lawyers and local inhabitants, in May 1964 the provincial planning commission, the advisory board of the provincial executive, advised against the redevelopment scheme.Footnote 66 The main reason for this was not the well being of locals, but rather the expected growth in car traffic in which the project would result and the height of the office tower, which at 140 metres would be the Netherlands’ first skyscraper. Subsequently, an intense debate erupted between the city's planning department, municipal executive and city council on the one side, and the provincial planning commission on the other. The Hague's urban renewal agenda became subject to fierce political contestation. The arguments used by opponents and proponents give us important insights into how the plan was perceived as a symbol of progress, despite its underlying ambiguity.
The provincial planning commission stated that the redevelopment project would be ‘disastrous’ for The Hague because of its violation of the city's skyline and an expected straining of traffic due to the 3,000 office clerks who would commute back and forth between the inner city and the suburbs every day.Footnote 67 Frits van der Sluijs, head of the city's planning department, by contrast was furious and said it was ‘incomprehensible, unacceptable and heinous’ that outsiders were interfering with the ‘undeniably spectacular characteristics of this project’. According to Van der Sluijs, a stretch of the inner city that should ‘bustle with activity’ had been pronounced dead.Footnote 68 The provincial planners replied that The Hague's planners had no clear thoughts on the future of renewal areas and that they did not take into account the inner city's liveability,Footnote 69 a notion that from the mid-1960s onwards was frequently used by opponents of urban renewal to challenge the policy's growth-centred approach.Footnote 70
The municipal executive supported Van der Sluijs's reasoning by stating that ‘structures and buildings from the past cannot always prevail over our contemporary needs, present-day levels of technical advancement and modern lifestyles’.Footnote 71 City councillors went along with this argument, arguing that the provincial planning commission ‘was turning back the hands of time, especially when one considers what is going on in cities such as Düsseldorf, London, Copenhagen and Brussels’.Footnote 72 In August 1965 the provincial executive ruled in favour of the city of The Hague, disregarding the advice coming from its planning commission: ‘the city skyline is just as well defined by power plant chimneys, gasholders and recently office blocks, of which we can expect more to come: the silhouette of all modern cities is changing.’Footnote 73
Eventually the march of progress was botched anyway, when in 1968 the provincial executive reconsidered appeals against the height of the office tower.Footnote 74 As a consequence of the painfully slow decision-making, the renewal area had begun to deteriorate even faster, leaving an urban wasteland right in The Hague's city centre. This prompted a councillor to mourn that ‘the path towards the city of the future leads through a jungle’.Footnote 75 When Zwolsman finally withdrew his commitment to urban renewal in early 1970, the city was left with a huge swathe of undeveloped land.
Still, the municipal executive felt the need to develop the area into a central business district, despite changing ideas on the workings of inner cities.Footnote 76 A new redevelopment scheme for the Spuikwartier area was launched; however, it differed from earlier plans by its call for flexible planning. According to its authors, it was merely a collection of ‘informal thoughts that may be interpreted according to one's own insights’.Footnote 77 Despite this open call, the scheme did not attract sufficient private investment to make implementation profitable.Footnote 78
Once again, dreams of a swiftly and comprehensively redeveloped inner city were dashed. The Hague's municipal executive and planning department were frequently overtaken by events during the 1960s and early 1970s. They realised and openly admitted that the modern city was perpetually reinventing itself rather than simply existing, with new constantly replacing old, and human agency only facilitating – not steering – the inevitable march of progress.Footnote 79 Eventually The Hague's redevelopment scheme for the Spuikwartier was implemented only in part. Soon after the presentation of the ambitious 1957 plan, local politicians and planners realised it was wholly unfeasible. The same forces that drove their urban renewal policies would diminish any belief that the future was foreseeable and malleable. As the open-ended scheme for the Spuikwartier area exemplifies, during the early 1970s a more flexible and fragmented urban renewal policy replaced the long-term plans of the early 1960s.
Local politicians did not change heart overnight. Their ambivalent mindset was defined more by continuities than by ruptures. The spatial planning alderman who was appointed after the 1970 municipal elections, which are considered a turning point in the city's history,Footnote 80 had always been doubtful about future developments. As early as 1966 he had stated that ‘smaller, practical and affordable measures need to be taken’,Footnote 81 a statement in line with calls for flexible planning. Two years later he said that the average city dweller did not dare to hand himself over to dreams about the year 2000: ‘the dread of risk and adventure are peculiar to The Hague's citizens and their politicians. Being modern is a courageous adventure.’Footnote 82
The developments in The Hague demonstrate that politicians themselves were highly ambiguous about the ways in which they facilitated progress. Moreover, they frequently considered the modernisation tendencies that required urban renewal to be outside of their control. They were by no means brave men envisioning a bright future for the inner city. Still, when a private redevelopment project came into reach, an informal pro-growth coalition surfaced. After all, during its early years the redevelopment of central districts was a highly capitalist enterprise – even in Western European welfare states. Cooperating with private developers posed no problem for local Labour politicians, who initially believed that the former worked in the public interest.Footnote 83 Zwolsman was thought to be able to coordinate and steer The Hague's urban society towards the collectively defined objective of an economically sturdy and car-friendly inner city. In the end his plans were cancelled due to a combination of financial mismanagement within his own organisation and the continuing interference of state planning agencies.
From a governance perspective on urban politics, looking beyond state institutions it becomes clear that the planning mechanisms through which local actors such as developers, aldermen, councillors and planners coordinated their actions and resources were the framework in which the experience of modernity was negotiated.Footnote 84 When a proposal such as the 1957 Structure Plan or Zwolsman's redevelopment scheme was up for review in the planning process, political actors could exert their influence and ultimately repurpose the future of The Hague's inner city. These were the moments when differing beliefs were expressed – underlining the importance of investigating governance practices instead of just plan making.Footnote 85
Ultimately, it is the most local of political cultures that shape our cities, with outcomes at least partially contingent upon the ideas and decisions of municipal policy makers.Footnote 86 At the same time, the post-war professionalisation of planning introduced a new type of urban governance, in which politicians had to engage with formally trained planners.Footnote 87 The story of urban redevelopment in 1960s The Hague demonstrates the interplay of, and latent conflicts between, municipal politics and new forms of professional expertise.
III
The standard image of the Dutch urban renewal order is one of unequivocal technocracy. This article, however, has proposed a much more complicated picture. It suggests that the positivist view of linear progress and absolute truth was the exception rather than the rule. Drawing on the yet underexamined political and professional discussions that preceded the redevelopment schemes of the 1960s, with The Hague as a prime example, it has been shown that this mindset of ambivalence and doubt was present at the national as well as the local levels. It seems as though this was a typically Dutch phenomenon, stemming from the desire of political and professional elites to adapt flexibly to changing times. However, in the field of urban renewal their continuous struggle with the juggernaut of modernity was more often dominated by feelings of resignation and despair.
The most far-reaching consequence of the reflexive stance of politicians was their swift adoption of a more flexible mode of urban planning. From the national and The Hague case studies we can conclude that, in the first instance, neither politicians nor planners necessarily wanted to adapt inner cities to the future; they simply thought they had to. This was seen as a complicated and decade-long task. The combination of a compulsive need for, and doubtfulness about, modernisation explains why the power municipal executives were willing to grant significant influence to seemingly knowledgeable and self-assured private developers. These developers were deemed capable not only of facilitating but also of steering processes of urban modernisation.
As theorists of modernity assert, experiencing modernisation tendencies is always characterised by paradoxical feelings and contingency. Dick Sweeney points out that those definitions of modernity are most apt for exploring the making of the social order that stress ‘conditions of flux’. Modernising political projects stemmed from, and simultaneously sought to, (re)order such unstable conditions.Footnote 88 The theory of reflexive modernisation, which is a joint effort by sociologists Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash, is particularly helpful in this regard. It postulates that in recent decades modernity has not vanished but rather has become increasingly problematic due to a proliferation of modernisation's side effects.Footnote 89 Consequently, the inability of experts to steer processes of modernisation has become ever more apparent.Footnote 90
The notion of ‘reflexive modernisation’ can be usefully applied to the Dutch urban renewal order in the 1960s. While planners thought they were acting in the public interest, their plans had far-reaching and often unintended consequences, including an increase in pollution by car traffic, a loss of living space and a democratic deficit in the decision-making process. Immediately – hence ‘reflexively’ – after highly visible redevelopment schemes had been implemented, these side effects appeared and became politicised due to the contrary interests of planners, decision makers and affected populations.Footnote 91 Because politicians and planners were aware of the rapid emergence of trends and conflicts, they began to doubt their own knowledge of how cities actually function and develop. This gave The Hague's municipal executive the inconvenient feeling of having embarked on an enigmatic journey to nowhere. Some efforts were rapidly and decisively undertaken, but widespread ambivalence and insecurity remained.
In the latest monograph on post-war urban planning in the Netherlands, the 1970s paradigm shift is attributed to exogenous factors, mainly the rise of urban action groups and turning economic tides.Footnote 92 This article has offered a broader view by showing that beneath the surface of plans and their outcomes a widespread insecurity about the dawn of the modern age was ever-present, significantly contributing to the shift of urban renewal towards notions of human scale and liveability. The extreme growth in population and number of cars, the emergence of a full-fledged consumer society and the transition to the post-industrial economy of the 1960s drove politicians and planners to extremes in envisioning the future of Dutch inner cities. These constraints of reflexive modernity led to a more flexible and inclusive urban order in the 1970s, which was facilitated by political and professional self-doubt.
