Adieu compact city. The Dutch case study and the discovery of the patchwork metropolis.

In 1989 the young Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings, who had just left the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, was called to develop a project for the area in between Rotterdam and the Hague that was going to face, in the next years, a huge increment of population and activities. This part of the Dutch territory is located in between two urban areas but, on the same time, it is located in the middle of another construction kwon as the Randstad, in which the explosive growth of urban or suburban phenomena has led to a singular blurring of the distinction between the city and the countryside. In this context Neutelings proposed his reinterpretation of the urban form called ‘De Tapijtmetropool’ or ‘Patchwork Metropolis’. Starting from a six pages long article published in the 1991, this paper will try to deconstruct the work of Neutelings, analysing the context and the sketches and reconstruct them in a more comprehensive model of urbanisation. Moreover a reinterpretation of the territory will try to understand if the Neutelings’ prevision has found a real effect in the contemporary Randstad territorial configuration.