Coloring the Patchwork Metropolis

The contemporary discussion about the city is characterized by the fear of the phenomenon of dispersion. Huge efforts are spent to maintain the city compact and manageable by setting always new boundaries between what was the ancient city and the contemporary territory. What in reality has been achieved, trough this theoretical blindness, is just a continuous growth of the diffuse city. 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 we use to represent what is happening in the contemporary Dutch territory? The methodology used for this study consists in the identification of the main features of the Dutch territory and their re-construction trough a series of graphical representations that relate inhabitant density to land use and morphology. This new territorial representation highlights some phenomena that are usually hidden under the dichotomy urban and rural, like many dense and mixed use areas normally tagged as Green Hearth. A complete territory has been shaped by the interactions between social and economical processes. Instead of struggling in search of new centralities, we could recognize a modern network structure and the emergence of a new model through which we should understand and design the contemporary territory.