Dutch Land-use Planning

The Principles and the Practice

Barrie Needham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317147541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Dutch planning is widely known and admired for its ambitions and its achievements. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive description and analysis in English of its full range of policies and practices. It gives an up-to-date account of the principles - written and unwritten - behind the planning, and in addition shows how the practice sometimes ignores those principles in order to achieve better results. It describes the content of the policies, the measures taken to realise them, and the successes and failures. The book is not uncritical of Dutch land-use planning, but the author values its strengths and believes that planning in other countries could learn from them. These strengths arise in the continuing tension between the high ambitions of the Dutch planning, and the ingenuity and pragmatism exercised in order to realise those ambitions.

1 Setting the Scene The Underlying Land and the Underlying Attitudes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315578262-1

1.1 Why this Book has been Written

1.1.1 Land Use and Land-use Planning

It is called, prosaically, ‘land use’, and we see it all around us. We see that land in one place is used for housing, in another place for shops, in another place for employment. We see streets, pavements, planting, parks, schools. We see land used for agriculture, for horticulture, for woodlands, for nature reserves. And we see how those separate land uses are related to each other. The housing is in big estates of all the same type of house, or there are different types of houses mixed together and interspersed with shops, offices, workplaces. We see that the countryside is open and unbuilt, with all urban land uses concentrated into towns and villages, or we see sprinkled over the countryside houses, firms, fun parks, hamlets new and old.

Some important aspects of land use we do not see, or not easily. We do not easily see whether poorer people are decently housed. Nor how people travel to work, to school, to visit family. Housing segregation – people of one social group or income living segregated from people of another group or income – is not always visible. If people with certain skills cannot find work except by travelling long distances every day, that also is an important aspect of land use, but not easily seen. Other aspects we hear or smell rather than see: traffic noise, polluted air, silence.

Yet other important aspects of land use can easily be seen, but the significance is not always clear. If, for example, in a country with a high population density like the Netherlands, there is a sharp division between town and country, this signifies that there is an effective policy for restricting building in the countryside. If, such as in the Netherlands, there are few out-of-town shopping centres, then those who know that in similar countries such shopping centres are common, can interpret what they see in the Netherlands as: there is an effective policy against out-of-town shopping centres. The person who sees that Dutch town centres are lively, even in the evenings and on Sundays, will not always know that that signifies a strong policy to support town centres.

If the residents of a country think that the way their land is used is important, they will introduce and support a public policy for influencing that. That is land-use planning. It is often called spatial planning, especially when referring to land-use planning at a more abstract level. This book is about land-use planning in the Netherlands. It aims to describe, analyse, and explain it.

The relationship between the way land is used and land-use planning is complex. Professional planners – for example those visiting the Netherlands and looking around – have a propensity to conclude that what they see is the result of Dutch land-use planning. Foreign planners in particular, when they see some exceptional developments in the Netherlands, admire them; and they assume that those developments can be attributed to the planning law and the planning system. In reality – this is one of the messages in this book – the achievements of Dutch planning are often the result of the way in which the formal planning system has been used informally.

This book will describe the formal planning system, also how it is used – often informally – to achieve the land use which the Dutch want. But we do not want to give the impression that the land use is determined only by land-use planning: there are many other factors which affect it. These include the soil and water (superficial geology and hydrology), the structure of the building industry, how property developers are organised and how property development is financed, the public and semi-public developers and land managers such as housing associations and nature conservation organisations, the way the public administration is structured. This book cannot describe all those factors and analyse their effects on land use, but it will mention the most important.

The land use today has come about over a very long period, so a satisfactory explanation must take account of the influences not just today but also in the past. This book does that selectively: it goes back about 30 years and mentions important influences before then only when that is necessary. There is a history of Dutch planning which goes much further back, written in English by van der Cammen & de Klerk (2012).

1.1.2 The Analytical Stance

The position from which Dutch spatial planning is analysed in this book should be made explicit.

About the theoretical position we can be brief, with a reference to Needham (2006) for a more detailed exposition and explanation. The starting point is the statement that the way in which land is used is the result of very many people deciding how to use their land and buildings, where to go and how to get there, where to live and work, and so on. Those individual decisions are taken within a context, part of which consists of formal and informal rules (institutions). The formal rules include the laws for how people should interact with each other (private or civil law, such as tort law, contract law, property law) and the laws which state agencies require us to follow (public or administrative law, such as building permits and environmental permits). The informal rules include the ways in which state agencies use their powers and responsibilities: passively or actively, rigidly or flexibly, creatively or mechanically, and so on. In this book, we study the formal rules in the Netherlands concerning the way people use land, and the informal rules about how the formal rules should be applied.

It makes no sense to analyse the effects of ‘government intervention’ by asking the question: how would land be used if there were no government rules? For many of our actions would not take place without the certainty offered by some aspects of those rules, such as the knowledge that the actions of our neighbours are restricted by the rules governing permission to build, and the knowledge that if a partner reneges on a property deal she can be taken to court. Similarly, it is an illusion that it is possible to identify what ‘the market’ wants, and to judge spatial planning by the extent to which it facilitates or ‘distorts’ the market. Spatial planning must be evaluated, in the first place, by the extent to which it succeeds in meeting the goals set for it by the politicians responsible for spatial planning – that is, by its effectiveness. Whether those goals are desirable is a political question. Whether those goals are feasible is a question, partly, of how people (which includes ‘the market’) react to the measures taken to realise the spatial plans.

We take the normative stance that spatial planning should be evaluated in another way too. It is not just the results of spatial planning that should be evaluated, but also the process by which it is carried out. State agencies have been given powers over their citizens – including powers for spatial planning – and the citizens can expect that those powers be exercised responsibly. This book studies Dutch spatial planning in this respect too.

1.1.3 The Structure of the Book

This analytical stance has determined the structure of the book. The next Chapter (2) is about how the Dutch want their land to be used: that is the content of Dutch spatial policy, including agreements and disagreements about that. Then (Chapter 3) the planning agencies are described, the formal powers that they have for planning, including the relationships between the agencies.

Then we go over to a consideration of the formal powers which those agencies have been given for realising those plans (Chapter 4) – building permissions, compulsory purchase, and so on. In comparison with many other studies of Dutch planning (in particular those written for foreigners) we pay much attention to the means for realising plans and less to the plans themselves. The reason is that the citizen – for whom land-use planning should be carried out – is interested in the results of that planning on the ground (literally), rather than in plans, visions, and policies. The link between the two – what is built and what is planned – is made by planning permissions and investment decisions, so they get the attention here. It is for the same reason that this book is more about planning at municipal level than at the provincial and national levels.

The following chapter works out that concrete level in more detail. The formal powers described in Chapter 4 are felt by many Dutch people to be inadequate for realizing all the ambitions, so the Dutch practice pro-active non-statutory planning (Chapter 5). In Chapter 6 some examples are given of projects which have been, or are being, realised by pro-active planning: these are the kinds of projects which attract attention and followers, nationally and internationally.

We want to assess Dutch spatial planning in two ways. The first is: does it realise what it sets out to achieve? The preceding chapters provide the information for that assessment. The second is an assessment of the processes by which government bodies pursue their spatial planning. That requires consideration of the relevant administrative norms: these are described in Chapter 7.

The assessment is given in Chapter 8.

1.1.4 The Underlying Land and the Underlying Attitudes

Dutch land-use planning is carried out by Dutch people for their country. It follows that that planning is influenced by the cultural characteristics of the Dutch people and by the physical characteristics of the Netherlands. These are the topics of this first chapter. We start by considering the land which is the country of the Netherlands, and how that land is used.

1.2 The Occupation of the Land

1.2.1 Land use

The country of the Netherlands has an area of 37,357 square kilometres, of which 3,574 square kilometres are inland waters (14,424 square miles and 1,382 square miles respectively). ¹ Much of that dry land remains dry only because of the dikes and the pumps: they protect against floods from the rivers and from the sea.

1 These are figures for 2000, and exclude the coastal waters of the Waddenzee, the IJsselmeer, the Oosterschelde and the Westerschelde. Source: statline.cbs.nl (Historie bodemgebruik vanaf 1970–2000). We are not talking here of the ‘Kingdom of the Netherlands’ which includes some of the former Dutch colonies.

The area vulnerable to flooding includes the land – 24 per cent of the whole country – which is below sea level, ² and that includes all of the west of the country, where most of the people live and where most of the goods and services are produced. Most of the low lying area has peat as its subsoil. For thousands of years, that area was the delta of the Rhine and the Meuse, and a vegetation of reeds established itself and formed bogs. When the land was drained, the underlying peat began to oxidize and shrink. So that land is not only low, it continues to sink, and it gives poor conditions for building.

2 www.waterland.net

Figure 1.1 Areas vulnerable to flooding

Source: own drawing

Table 1.1 How land is used in the Netherlands, 2000

	Proportion of all land	Proportion of dry land
Housing	5%	6.5%
Industry	2%	2.5%
Other urban uses	0.4%	0.5%
traffic	3%	3.5%
Total built up	10%	13%
Half built up	1%	1.5%
Recreation	2%	2.5%
Agriculture	56%	69%
Forestry and nature	12%	14.5%
Total rural	70%	85.5%
Inland water	9%
Dutch coastal waters	10%
Total area	100%	100%
Source: statline.cbs.nl (Historie bodemgebruik vanaf 1970–2000)

That use is changing rapidly: the built-up area has increased by 50 per cent in the last 30 years. ³ The growth in the area used for industrial estates is particularly striking: 350 per cent increase in that period. It is no wonder that many Dutch people complain that their land is ‘becoming full’. The wide horizons painted by the Dutch landscape artists and which, for most people, still represent the ideal of the peaceful countryside are becoming rare. It seems that everywhere you look, you see yet another housing development or industrial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Setting the Scene: The Underlying Land and the Underlying Attitudes
• 2 How the Dutch Want Their Land to be Used: The Content of Dutch Spatial Planning Policy
• 3 The Planning Agencies, their Land-use Plans, and How They Use Them: The Formal System for Land-use Planning
• 4 The Statutory Powers for Realising those Land-use Plans: And How They are Used
• 5 Realising the Land-use Ambitions in Practice: Pro-active Planning: Making Things Happen
• 6 Pro-Active Planning in Practice: Examples of the Types of Projects being Realised in this Way
• 7 Obligations on Planning Agencies: And How Those Agencies Take Account of Them
• 8 An Assessment of Dutch Spatial Planning: How Good is Dutch Planning?
• List of References
• Index