The Patchwork Metropolis 1989-2014

The contemporary discussion about the urbanization in the Netherlands is characterized by the fear of the phenomenon of dispersion. Huge efforts are spent to maintain the cities compact and manageable by setting always new boundaries between what were the ancient cities that compose the Randstad and the contemporary territory once called Green Hearth. What in reality has been achieved, trough this theoretical blindness, is just a continuous juxtaposition of new patches. Job and population density data clearly show that the Netherlands cannot be represented anymore as a series of medium size cities located in an open landscape. Perhaps there was a period when red and green on topographical maps could be interpreted as each other opposite, but today the Randstad cannot be simplified with this opposition, too many exceptions, in fact, are appearing in the territory in between and too many important elements would be cut out. If this is true, which model or structure can be used to represent what is happening in the contemporary Dutch territory? Due to the process of intensification of the use of the territory, particularly evident in a quite small and very populated country as the Netherlands, the different functions has been developed separately, trying to capitalize the used land. In the light of this phenomenon the Randstad is evolving towards an extensive carpet of patches, every one with his own program and specific spatial structure, as conceived in 1989 by Willem Jan Neutelings. “In this heterogeneous field the contradiction between city and landscape is abolished” (Neutelings, 1989). A complete territory has been shaped by the interactions between social and economical processes. New housing developments, parks, glasshouses agglomerations, old cities are laying side by side in a new territorial structure populated by a series of “wide relatively homogeneous areas that differ from their surroundings” (Forman, 1995). The methodology used for this study consists in the comparison of the territorial condition of the Randstad during the late eighties, when Willem Jan Neutelings proposed his personal reinterpretation of the area in between The Hague and Rotterdam, called “Tapijtmetropool”, with the evolution of the Dutch territory over the last 25 years, trying to actualize and understand the consequence of the Neutelings prevision.