What I want to do today is to frame ‘light urbanism’ – and that means that part of our society, which is actually less heavy than we thought. I want to explain that, and later say how it could be combined with those zones in our urban environment which are considered heavy.

If you look at our current societies, then you can speak about an endless mediocre tapestry. A tapestry made by numerous ancestors, which is actually not that interesting. It’s perhaps all over the world; Paris touches the Randstadt, and so on; always with a kind of redefinition of Nature, namely that it’s part of that endless tapestry, part of our urban behaviour. Both in combination with agriculture, which seems to become more a kind of factory which produces all those elements we need in order to survive. It turns into one endless zone, around the world.

What are we going to do with this? Especially as welfare states have a tendency to grow in this direction. Everything is pretty moderate; and it all becomes one continuous stream of sameness. There's almost no differentiation based on individual demands and desires. Maybe the virtual domain is actually adding to that spread and sprawl of indifference, which some people call generic. Conferences are often mainly about acceptance; but maybe before we agree to this kind of free fall of generic-ness, we should take a moment to reconsider: is this really what we want? And what are the other possibilities?

In this respect, differentiation seems an interesting tool for a discussion of generic-ness. It raises the possibility of an alternative world of contrast, of extremities.

I’m here as an architect, so I want to discuss how we should approach our building production in the light of the differentiation operation.

A diagram from one of our books three years ago shows the behaviour of the welfare state in terms of the density-floor area ratio. From this you can see that although Holland is one of the world's most densely populated countries, its urban development is at a moderate level, and it's very uniformly distributed.

So maybe change should be the core of the operation. Acceptance of change should perhaps be in our built environment as it is in so many other domains at the moment, philosophical or virtual domains. So how can we apply the commonsense of other domains to this more or less heavy matter?

And it echoes a scheme of about fifty years ago, when Le Corbusier suggested this for Paris – but too early! It was a bold plan, but ahead of its time. Now though, half-a-century later, maybe it’s time to echo that suggestion, and find out what can come out of it.

And there are of course, lots of examples of it. Detroit, for example, which is now a third-generation version of itself. Such examples show that we should not be afraid of this kind of change. Yet countries – especially those with a long history – have a tendency to keep what they have, and even to declare that anything old that has been built is a monument, is monumental.

Is that true? We asked ourselves a while ago in Rotterdam, which (because badly bombed in the war) is maybe the ultimate example of a certain kind of liberty, compared with historic citries like Brussels or like Amsterdam. Fifty years after the bombing, this type of typology has appeared in the very centre. But where should we start the discussion? How relevant is a building? How valuable is it? How economically viable is it? And at what moment could it change?

So I made a kind of comparison with other economic goods. The computer has an economic value of about 2-3 years; a car, say 6 years; the facade of a building 10 years; a house has a value of 24 or 25 years, depending on the country. And an office block, the structure itself, not more than 40 years.

That means that in 30 years, actually another kind of ideology could have reached our current cities. And it would open up, not only for our generation, but for generations afterwards, a kind of possibilitiy, that in the heart of even heavy constraints, you could imagine altering it to something else within one generation. That definitely opens up the discussion about monument status.

As for how we define a monument – sometimes the motivation is purely nostalgic, sometimes it’s economic and sometimes it is emotional. So it gives in that way space to discuss the heaviness, on one hand, of urbanism, and it opens up maybe a framework, or tool to advocate a lighter way of dealing with our hardcore matter.

Besides the already existing, I think it’s important to look at new production as well. And over the last 20 years, not only here, but in other countries as well; we see an incredible increase due to economics, due to our welfare, due to a higher degree of consumption, an enormous amount of extra construction going on.

One could say that over the last 50 years, The Netherlands has totally renewed itself. Production from say, year zero up till 1950, is actually the same as what we have done since. That means that we should advocate differentiation in our production as well, in order not to fixate in the near future, the things we produce. You could say that, simply because of an economics, if we make too much of this kind of matter, then after a while demand will go in other directions.

If we declare for instance, half of the next production light, or lighter than heavy, then maybe we could find the tool to change our countries even faster in the future, to change our cities and urbanism faster and to examine upcoming ideologies or demands, within society.

How do we do that? Looking at this diagram, on the left side is the current package, housing and so on. So looking at the current package, what could be done to activate the lightness which is actually behind this stuff? We could reduce the economic value of lots of things: we could get rid of water pipes, for example, letting the water go straight into our gardens. That would solve a lot. The 'heavy' part of our urbanism is not so much the houses themselves (although we think that they are), but the infrastructure: sewerage systems, which have an economical value of about 80 years; metro lines, 160 years.

We can reduce the economic value of housing by adapting the water system, or the energy system – say, no gas pipes, but only solar elements. And instead of telephone lines, lets use mobile systems. And instead of heavy foundations, a kind of unit-based foundation system.
And instead of metro lines, maybe only call buses or call taxies.

And straight away, you reduce the economical value of this whole urban package, to the level of the house, 24 years. Maybe slightly lower when you make it out of wood, 20 years.
And that would change two things.

Firstly, new zones could be positioned in a kind of changeable urbanism, and in that way urbanism becomes similar to landscaping. It echoes what we did in the Middle Ages, when land was always divided into three plots: one for crops, one for cattle and one for nothing, rotating after a year to establish an ecologically and economically sustainable system. Maybe urbanism could look like that, so we could say, 'Right now Paris needs to be encouraged,' and do it by reducing matter in Denmark or the Spanish coast.

Secondly, it would change the perception of real estate, which is now part of an investment strategy. People will move around more. In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of house moves per life was about two. Now it is already 11 or 12. The acceleration of this would lead to other kinds of demands and possibilities, say more experiments, in the consumer zone and in the architectural zone.

What else could it mean? Would it have a communal, say public, manifestation? With this kind of lighter dwelling, costs are reduced. So for the same package deal, you need less money. You could spend more on land, as a large individual domain that would help as an anti-claustrophobic device. Or it could lead to a common ground, people could buy more land and turn it into something else, a forest, a lake, a park. Into all those things which are beyond the world of the individual.

Let’s go into more detail on that, concentrating on housing – I’m not going to look at offices right now. What kind of public money could you get out of different types of houses? Villas give quite a substantial amount of money, tax-wise – ground tax and income tax. When you compare that with the market demands and possibilities for this light urbanism, you see that somewhere in the middle there’s quite a potential. And when you compare that with an apartment, say in a high-quality apartment building, which is slightly bigger than this kind of phoenix element, you see the tools to find out a common ground, or an extra kind of investment in it. And more importantly, how it actually behaves in terms of density.

When you combine this kind of villa development with the amount of space it needs, in this case, in hectares, you see that with this light urbanism where you reduce the individual ground to a minimum, a plot size, which is surrounded by Nature, or by a public domain, there’s a high amount of economic effect.

That would lead, on a bigger scale, to other kinds of countries. We could declare the Netherlands a city, because with 16 million people it's not much bigger than Cairo, with a slightly bigger surface than Cairo. In terms of the ecological footprint of a city, the Netherlands is too small, we use Germany and Belgium to survive in terms of carbon dioxide and in terms of food production.

Every municipality want it’s own housing developments, it’s own mini-forest, it’s own office domain, it’s own Ikea and it’s own concert hall. This is ridiculous. It consumes almost everything. It leads to the sameness and it forgets about those resources we 'borrow' from other countries.

So I would like to suggest a reinterpretation of the Netherlands, through these two projects: for Brabant and Rotterdam.

The first is a project for the province of Brabant, the Atlanta of the Netherlands. It’s considered as the 'backyard for the Randstad', but it's growing very fast. The city of Brabant has two to three million people, so it’s one of our bigger cities: a city made out of villages in a kind of dalmatian way. On the one hand, it wants to be natural: it wants to tempt people to live there because of its forests; but also because of its road and infrastrure connections to Antwerp and Germany as well as the Randstad.

Can’t we use both features – nature and connections – in order to activate another kind of Brabant? Can’t we use both to maybe see it as a test domain for that kind of change I was describing? When you look at the development of Brabant, you see it’s our Disney World – living in a sort of farm environment, in the middle of new villages. The production of the last five years has centred on endless interpretations of a nostalgic farm-based life.

Are we happy with this? Looking at Brabant, you can see that, due to the effect of competing municipalities, you get this super sprawl: actually Nature is reduced to small plots. You can’t record them on a map of Europe, they're too small. But if we want to preserve Brabant's Nature (and leisure possibilities) as well as its accessibility, we should maybe declare it a kind of 'park city', and make a kind of program.

Initially, when we asked the province authorities, ‘What do you want?’ They said, to preserve the nature areas, make the most of them. Not a bad idea we thought. We can’t do that though, because we have a sad provincial system in the Netherlands, compared with the Canton system in Switzerland, or the State system in the US. But let’s calculate how much it would cost, if it were possible.

To buy the whole of Brabant would cost 260 billion guilders (about one-third of the Gross National Product of the Netherlands). So if we work hard for three or four months, we can buy the province altogether, including the cathedrals, the monuments and so on.

So let's imagine that you've bought Brabant. Then you declare it a Nature Zone. You turn your dunes into Super Dunes, your swamps into Super Swamps. It costs something to buy the ground, to turn it into something, to design it, to make it, about one-tenth of the former operation – around 21 billion guilders.



So you would have this kind of park, but how to pay it? Different tax systems – if you tax by dwelling, you need only half a million dwellings to pay it off. The Netherlands is talking about building one million houses over the next decade, so Brabant could undertake to build one-third or a quarter of these. It could combine lightness with grandness.

So here you see one of the municipalities: it’s occupied by 15,000 inhabitants and 100,000 pigs. How to alter that? Those little dots are the pig farms. So if this municipality were part of the operation, what would it look like? Well, we'd need 15,000 houses and about 40,000 new inhabitants to make it part of our park city. You could turn this into one Super Heather Field, surrounded by a new ring road.

Same with Den Bosch, the capital of Brabant, which is (partly) beautiful. It has a Medieval core, superimposed on, or connected with, this marshland. Wheras the rest has become so generic that there’s nothing to say about it. So tmaybe it would be nice to make it a capital of Nature, of leisure, in that zone.

It could turn into something like this – this is a project we did for Oslo. Gradually we could alter the typology of Den Bosch, or Olso, step by step. Over time, you'd get a strong combination of more city and more park – with say, new lakes, which benefit the urban program.

So, moving on to Rotterdam. A city of one million and a major port, its most beautiful feature is the sea. Could we concentrate the city so as to increase lightness in other zones? At the moment there are one million houses, sewerage systems, roads, mini nature areas, factories and all the other stuff you need for a city: could this be turned into a 3-dimensional matter? So, on the left side you a calculation of the cost of making a town of one million, compared with a town of about 400 metres high (with the same substance). What kind of ecological and economical costs are involved?


The 400-metre-high city is more compact – it occupies one-tenth, or one-eleventh, of its existing floor space. Due to the compression involved, the city would maybe be more culturally-rich. This could lead to a kind of urbanism where more levels of publicness are found, and in that way, claustrophobia can be conquered, and a kind of airy city can exist, where not everything is on sterile ground. And with that balance, that kind of structural law, I hope to frame this discussion of lightness within urbanity.

Thank you very much for your attention.