Series of columns: How do you see the future of the Dutch polder landscape?

1 - The Polder Model

Aaron Betsky (Director of the NAI)

They stretch out from here to the next row of trees, farms and sheds in elongated planes. The polders are now so extensive and normal that we hardly notice them. Only the infrastructure of highways and railways that crisscross the rectangles of grass and water occasionally remind us that there is a rhythm and a beauty to this landscape.

Where we do not see this order, but where it has influenced our daily life enormously, is in the built up urban centers. In the West of the Netherlands most of the cities are situated at hubs of water-related infrastructure such as dams, locks and other sites where the flow of water is controlled. These cities were conceived around and have grown hand-in-hand with the water infrastructure. That infrastructure lies at the heart of the city and still determines the intersections and the boundaries, the transition between city and countryside and the rhythm of urbanization.

In the city you can still trace the history of the polder in the widths of houses and the scale changes from street to street, as well as in the streets' names. Although the dam on The Dam in Amsterdam is no longer visible, the city's form is still defined by that moment of human intervention in the waterlogged landscape. The long streets and canals define the image of Amsterdam that we all know. But even further North and South of the city, the struggle to make land where there was once water remains visible in the dimensions of the housing blocks and the geometry of the streets. You can see the same rhythm everywhere in the historic city centers and villages of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Zeeland and in parts of Utrecht, Brabant, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen.

The polder continues to define the landscape beyond the city as well. Urbanization jumps from one polder to the next and, apart from the periods of the late nineteenth-century urban expansions and the post-war reconstruction when that landscape was obliterated by large-scale planning, the dimensions and rhythms of the polders continue to define even the new residential neighborhoods. The best urban planners have ensured that the original landscape remains visible as much as possible so that you can understand that a row of houses, a block of flats, a park or sports ground fits within the geography of man's battle to keep the water out or within strict limits.

A new aesthetic is now on the rise. The mighty highways that cut through the landscape are increasingly becoming autonomous lines flanked by noise barriers and industrial parks. From the air the landscape becomes a patchwork of open space, buildings, greenhouses and pastures. Now the HSL is about to disconnect our experience of the land even more radically from the pattern of the polders. The landscape will turn from geometry into a loose collage of disparate elements. As we tear along the dikes and under the rivers we see the polders more and more for what they are: fragments from the past, an order that has defined our reality, but that we maintain only because we believe this heritage has something to teach us and that we can and must live with it. We create new nature, we exaggerate the pattern of land in water, and we fetishize the character of the Dutch city surrounded by polder as the essence of this part of Europe. In order to be convincing, however, this political and cultural vision demands a social, economic and political infrastructure. We shall see how long that structure remains visible.

Aaron Betsky