Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

City Plan for Amsterdam

In this paper I will discuss city planning in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in an historical and cross-cultural context. For those of us who have certain unconscious assumptions about what cities are, and can be, based on our acquaintance with our own urban areas, studying urban planning trends in Europe and elsewhere can be a revelation.

In a nutshell, the dominant influence on American city planning (or lack thereof) has been the automobile. "It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots" observes James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (quoted in Walljasper 2005).

While Europeans are focusing on making their central cities places for people of all walks of life to not just visit, but to live in, the dominant tendency in America is the extension of urban sprawl, the widening and constructing of more roads, and the building of housing affordable only for the upper middle class and the wealthy, and the razing of old buildings and removal of their tenants. And when urban areas are revitalized it is primarily according to the gentrification model, in which the urban poor are scooted out and existing buildings are torn down to make new office, commercial space and housing for the upper classes.

The result is a ring of suburbs surrounding decaying or gentrified central cities, with ease of access by car being one of the prime considerations in nearly every step of the planning process. "a[S]uburban living often means cnuntless hours in the car, cruising down endless miles of pavement, passing ceaseless stretches of new subdivisions and strip malls, all of which depend on limitless supplies of land, fossil fuel, lumber, and other environmentally scarce resources" (ibid.).

It is important to remember that all aspects of human culture, including city planning, are matters of choice. But the choices a given city makes in how it changes and expa...

Page 1 of 7 Next >

More on City Plan for Amsterdam...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
City Plan for Amsterdam. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:55, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694350.html