Inner Core of Cities: Reimagining the Urban Form – Inaugural Lecture
A Report on Lecture by Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman
A webinar on “Inner Core of Cities: Reimagining the Urban Form” was organized by the Department of
Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal on 31-08-2021 from 2.00 p.m. onwards. The
webinar was held on the Microsoft Teams platform as a part of five-day online workshop series. The event
witnessed the participation of urban design students from the University along with the teachers.
The speaker focuses his lecture beginning with the reference to other speakers and introduces the
concept of reimagining the urban form in the eyes of learning from Dutch inner cities.
Speaker Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman starts with open discussions with academics from other
backgrounds and his presentation about Dutch cities. And Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman has been to India
and thought it was a fascinating place to be. But professor denies pretending to have any deep knowledge
of Indian cities. His proposal then is that the professor presents narrative stories about Dutch inner cities.
And then after that in the Q and A, we will discuss what this implies for Indian cities, what the speaker can
learn from the webinar, and maybe what the speaker can give through this session. So the speaker tried
to formulate a set of conclusions that are more generic and which also in the form of questions so that he
thinks they should at least function as a departure point for a broader discussion for an exchange of
experience. Starting with the presentation about learning from Dutch and the cities professor starts to
explain a bit more about Dutch inner cities.
The speaker shows the pictures of inner cities and the historical core. The density of buildings is very
important. The mix of functions and the picture at the right-hand bottom. It's not a spacecraft that has
landed on this particular density, which is also the post-modern design of a museum that they have
inserted in this particular city. Now there's a mix of functions. There's density, there's a historical core.
There are key amenities like museums, also for leisure. Speaker tried to frame this in a more general way
when he delved into deer trajectories of the Dutch inner city. So what are all offers today? First,
formulating and explaining the basic conditions for livable cities. And again, that's not just for cities in the
Netherlands, but also cities elsewhere in the North, in the South. Position the inner cities in the
Netherlands. So what makes them special? Speaker explained with some pictures and to do visualize what
is the key to put Indian cities and maybe could broaden it disappears to western European cities. The
discussion starts with two cases- the case of little C Rotterdam and the case of the Singel park in Leiden.
Which contain important lessons for planning, the order will be different. Speaker starts with the
Singlepark in Leiden and then he explained a bit more about the Rotterdam case. As it was mentioned,
the speaker will try to draw some conclusions and end with questions that should be a basic audition for
Livable cities in the 21st century.
People sometimes tend to forget that public safety is key for developing any city and also a set of basic
accessible amenities that people can have all the amenities people like, but if they are not accessible for
large parts of the population, then citizens are in trouble anyway. So basic accessible amenities like
education, healthcare, infrastructure, leisure, these very much becoming a challenge now to develop not
just a competitive urban economy but also a circular urban economy which of course ties in with the
debate about environmental sustainability. The way all intertwined are all interrelated, so there also has
to be a level of social equity and that is also very much context-dependent in a country like Sweden that
they would not accept the level of income or wealth inequality that they have in the United States. So
there is also a contextual part of this. There should be some kind of a particular level of social equity, both
in terms of income and which is often forgotten that which has now been highlighted by Thomas Piketty
also about wealth and then what he thinks, there's work by Henderson only imagined community to make
the city tick to be able to achieve this kind of values.
There should also be a sense of shared destiny, a sense of an imagined community. For instance in the
city of Rotterdam, which is a very much involved cultural city with people from many regions of the world
but they don't always identify themselves as Dutch citizen. They do identify themselves as a citizen of
Rotterdam and in many cases, they have absorbed there is a particular Rotterdam identity and they are
also proud of being in Rotterdam which is very important. This is shared destiny, the sense of a shared
destiny imagined community also makes collective action for government much easier and there should
also be competent reliable transparent urban governance. These are very much basic conditions and there
is much no new to that, but still, it is important. As the speaker has been to Delhi and Mumbai and
remembers in the Inner City in Delhi, there was a particular historical setting But as the speaker knowledge
of Indian cities is very modern, so Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman stick to his knowledge in this case of
reduction in cities that inner cities in most parts, not just in the heavens with the most parts of European
countries because they do have similar history when it comes to Urban Development, they exemplified
key urban characteristics, so density is their proximity and diversity, so that's what you find in a city, in
Europe, in its most Outspoken is most articulated way, so indifference is quite different from that
suburban parts off. It's not just classic urban trials, but it's also a locus of important public functions. So
there's governance is education, healthcare, Legion sensitive looking, retail, there's leisure. There's usually
a kind of central square where people can meet where people can demonstrate where people can do the
promenade can be seen and people can look at each other. Author Salman Rushdie may make this point
also in one of his novels. These are cities as a balance is, there are visible traces in the built environment
of the past up to the present and in many Dutch cities, you can get it. It is quite easy to see the 17th
century forward quite a few of those cities that have been quite well preserved, that is the pre-industrial
era, but they're also rebuilding from the industrial era. And now also like the museum which was
presented showed the postmodern museum. In cities where there are also post-industrial artifacts in the
built environment.
The Netherlands was not that early with urbanization. There is only a very small number of cities with
Roman roots, that were the west part of the Roman Empire. After thousands of years, there was an
urbanization boom and then it took off and people started getting together in cities. Cities were growing
then and another pandemic of very different kinds of size took place-the black death-and that caused a
lot of stagnation in urbanization. The return to growth was quite rapid. There was a very rapid growth of
urbanization after 1400 BC and then around 1500 BC, Netherlands was one of the most urbanized parts
together with Florence which is adjacent to the Netherlands and the northern part of Italy. There are
many interrelated medium-sized cities, and there is a kind of division of labor. But there's no doubt about
the top city. And that's this works though Became part of a colonial empire, a global node of traits Also
slave trade, finance, diplomacy, science, arts, Rembrandt, for instance, part of that. Science was also very
much important and the cities are pushing traders or the organization was quite concentrated in the
western parts of the provinces of Holland and Utrecht, where they were all located in the delta after the
Rhine and Meuse river, so it's a very wet area as a former swamp for the Meuse. So there's what doesn't
make it quite different from Indian cities that are there. Water is all over the place and the cities have to
deal with water in the sense that they have to protect themselves against the water. There are a number
of cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, Gouda, Haarlem, Delft, Dordrecht and Amersfoort. These are
all cities that have an inner-city to some larger than others. Amsterdam and Leiden at the largest in inner
cities, but they all have inner cities with the characteristic of brick houses through three or four stories
high usually, a central square with the church, cafes, the city hall. It is quite easy to come up with a more
general format for these kinds of cities.
There are also cities outside the western part of the Netherlands, which do display kinds of formats of
soul and where the post-modern museum has been constructed. Leeuwarden, Groningen, and some of
these cities for instance are much less dominated by water than the cities in the west south. That was a
much-bolted history of Berkshire inner cities. There is a map of the 17th century which then had opened
access to the North Sea, and one can see that it was a walled city. Cities were still very much part of the
defensive system. They were defensive units themselves being located in an area where there was a lot
of water. It was not just a city wall, but there were always canals that were constructed to strengthen the
city. That could be seen in the case of Amsterdam. There was very much a situation that should have been
around 1640 or maybe a bit earlier. Most Dutch cities do have a circular pattern or a radial pattern, but in
Amsterdam, it is much more like an onion cut in half with different layers like the peels of onion and at
some stage here was growing so fast earliest together with and work in Venice very early Global kind of
cities with loads of connection migrants and then the pink part was what they planned. It is UNESCO
heritage now and so it was where some of the other cities grew and more in an organic way but enhanced
them. The organic part on this map is very much the red part and the green part was what they planned
to accommodate with the year would be at that time, the huge growth of the city of Amsterdam.
The right side is a very brief simple map that shows the distribution of urban centers in the Netherlands.
It is Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam and just to the north of the lake there is a red circle and that
slide and speaker explained more about Leiden when discussing one of the cases that have selected to
look at interventions in the Dutch inner city. There is a common format of cities and there is a radial
pattern with the specific trajectory of urbanization, where cities indeed were very much of a defensive
unit in them. It is also a radial pattern because it grew organically, so there was a center and then it
gradually spread outwards. After 1700 the economic development of the Netherlands stagnated and it
was a blessing from a heritage point of view because in many cases the 17th-century fort was quite well
preserved because there was no money to change it. In Dutch cities, many cases are a quite visible rupture
between the 17th-century core and then one can see where the walls used to be. In many cases more or
less in open space with parks a little bit more about it, when he discussed the Leiden example. Then comes
19th-century neighborhoods both forming working class and the middle class have further out to the 20th
and 21st-century neighborhoods and what we're seeing now is what is now being added.
The Rotterdam example will show that this is not very much part of the Dutch housing tradition. There is
now a construction boom which includes a lot of high rise in housing, but that is a different kind of
intervention that takes mostly places outside of these inner cities.
Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman started with enumerating the basic challenges for cities such as Dallas, but
that's very much on the global scale, and brought them down to the economic, social, and environmental
issues. Planners and architects need to address them in a context-sensitive way, so these problems are
interrelated. Before planning anything one has to go strict as one must be aware of the specific context
of historical cores. In this case, the more general characteristics of these inner cities are the dense mix of
functions. Also, there is a factor that there is not much space in Dutch cities usually. There are only very
small plots where one can construct something new because it's part of a heritage which many people
appreciate. Also, there are many people still living in Dutch inner cities and there is an intense political
contestation. Even if one wants to paint a house in a particular core, there will be contestation. The basic
challenges for cities and explained a bit of the history of urbanization in the Netherlands. After some
remarks about what kind of characteristics Dutch inner cities share and there are two, which the professor
thinks are very important cases of spatial interventions in touch in the city.
They are very recent so both of them have only been completed this spring. There is still a lot of research
to be done on their short-term impacts, let alone on the long-term impacts. But they already offer a new
kind of aurora, a glimpse of a new kind of urban planning which he claimed as implications that go far
beyond Dutch cities, Netherlands and Europe.
The first things that were discussed are the Leiden Singlepark, the city where Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman
lives, as a professor at the University of Amsterdam, which is a small country, and analysis of the size of a
postal stamp. Leiden is about 30 minutes by train from Amsterdam being good to have also cycled from,
from Leiden to Amsterdam. So it's a very small country and these are all within commuting distance
anyway.In Leiden, there have been specific interventions about the insertion of green spaces. In the 17th
century in the city, this is very much an important example of urban green infrastructure planning and
which can also be seen or can be harnessed to strengthen ecosystem approach due to combat climate
change. The other one is Rotterdam Little C. It is the name of the project and is the insertion of a new
high-rise dense neighborhood in Rotterdam, and it integrates density greening and quality of public space.
Leiden Singelpark is a recently completed park that is officially open to the public. It has a very strange
circular shape and the park is built on top of the now-demolished city defensive walls. It follows where
the walls used to be of the 17th-century city, so it has a length of 600 kilometers and in that sense, it is
the largest or the lowest city park in the Netherlands. It is not the largest city park in terms of square
meters, but it is very large in the sense of its length. Interesting thing is that Leiden Singelpark is a
collaboration between a put-down and bottom-up planning that integrates nature into a compact urban
fabric.
This is the map of Leiden Singelpark. The green is where the park is and it is a more or less circular
structure. So you can do a tour, start somewhere and then come back to the same place. Because you
bought this circular park and what they did so as you can see, the blue stands for water and there are still
a lot of canals in Leiden called the single. The single is a label that is used for the canals which surround
the city. So they were part of the defensive system, so the Singelpark is the part which is located close to
the Singel which was the canal component of the Dutch of the urban and defensive system in the 17th
century. Some phases were already green parks, especially to the western part of the city, but in the
eastern part in the northern part of the city of his own. So there was already a large botanical garden
which is eye-catching.
This beautiful botanical garden has a part that was already green, but some part was not green and so
they had to change the function of these areas. That was light in the industrialized in the 19th century and
de-industrialized in the 19th century. So these were very much brownfields. These were empty plots and
also maybe not so much no go areas, but there were liminal spaces or marginal spaces where also things
were happening which could not stand and at some stage people in Leiden that also shows you the
relevance of a shared destiny of a sense of community people in Leiden. Why don't we connect all these
green spaces or whether we collect these spaces and turn them into one large park and then they propose
it to the municipality? At first, it was very enthusiastic and kept on pushing. Eventually, the municipality
followed their view. What they did then, was construct a bridge somewhere over there. It was not just
that they had to change or to refurbish the areas where there used to be factories, parking places...etc.
But in many cases there were factories, so they had to change them into parks and also had to connect
them, which of course required a lot of public investment and they did that. In the Rotterdam example,
they did that with a sense of quality. They asked architects to come up with a specific design for the bridge.
They also asked the citizens to engage in a debate about the function of the park. So the park over there,
the botanical garden, is quite huge and it has an academic function and also leisure function. But it is a
very different kind of function. Then, for instance, some part which is dedicated to sports and there are
all kinds of other amenities for doing sport. That is very much of a children's playground and people sitting
in the sun and enjoying the view of the canal and some area located near a set of cultural amenities.
So they asked the Leiden citizens to come up with ideas to create some kind of division of level between
the different components of the park. They also meant that not all people were agreed during the
discussion and also not after the decisions, but it also made people participants in the parks at an early
stage and which also created a sense of
ownership. So people are also required a lot of residents in line and are proud now of the Singelpark. They
claim it in the sense and want to keep it clean. They pick up little and are active in maintaining it. So it is
not just the municipality was seen as responsible for maintaining, but also very much a citizenship issue.
In the Northern part of the Singelpark where you can just sit and have a picnic over here, this is a used to
be a factory that closed somewhere in the 50s and this is one of the places where the park is not able to
follow the sink that insides the 17th-century parameters. So you have to go to the left and then pick it up
later on. There were two crucial planning issues in Leiden Singelpark. At first, how to insert green spaces
in a dense compact inner city. Especially when the pandemic broke out in March 2020, the presence of
green spaces nearby became such overriding importance. It gave relief to people and they were able to
walk there, sit there...etc. Green spaces in inner cities are crucial. You can have the parks in the outskirts
of cities as much as you like, and you also really need green spaces in the inner city which are accessible
and do have different functions. So there was an issue of how to organize a collaborative planning process
and involve citizens.
Three main goals were shared by both the citizens and municipality. One of them was to enlarge the green
spaces, improve the quality of the places and connect them and how we're able to create this from existing
green space. Use brownfields which were imaginatively emerged after depreciation and it connected
them in an iconic way by just not obstructing a rectangular modernist bridge but by using bridges that
convey a very specific identity, not just to the bridges themselves. The buildup areas are now also
integrated with the park and refurbished to make them greener. That is also part of this general plan. The
municipality had to get used to ideas that came from the city and the very traditional way of working.
Instead of a top-down show, these citizens were able to come up with bottom-up solutions. They had a
view and in some states, they were almost able to force the Municipality. Later on, they were able to
gather so much change among the population of Leiden. There was a lot of competition among these
people who were coming up with these plans, but they didn't have the resources. Then we get this
conversation between the municipality and the citizens and it all went by itself. It took a long time to
finally realize it and complete it.
So the bottom of the initiative, they had an organization called the ‘Friends of the Singelpark Foundation’.
They were able to put pressure on the planning authority. It was not just the friends of the Singelpark,
because you could also see that as a kind of hung guard or the elite of the Leiden population, which was
able to get in touch with a municipality to speak to them in a meaningful way to share plenty vocabulary
with them. But they also asked the citizens, this is to come up with a different area. The playground, the
sports area, alphabetical park were already there. They were able to visualize the different options of the
city of Singelpark and also to show what kind of quality particular parts of the Singelpark were able to
acquire. It is not just that they were able to talk to the municipality in a meaningful way, but they were
also able to visualize it in a meaningful way so that residents could discuss and get their views on it.
A second very recent intervention in the inner city is called Little C Rotterdam, and Rotterdam is a bit of
an outlier in terms of inner cities in the Netherlands. They have a very large 17th-century core but that
was bombed in the second world war by the German air force. So there is only very little left. The only
17th-century court was destroyed in the Netherlands. Still, the key characteristics of the inner city,
density, proximity, diversity are also very much there, whereas the lighting example was an intervention
of trying to create green spaces in a compact city. In the Rotterdam case, we see an example of creating
high-quality urban living in the inner city. Like in Leiden, they were using spaces whichever was quite
marginal, but where this particular project is located there was a very much no-go area, so it was
dangerous. There were a lot of street walking, heroin users, so it was very much an inner go area.
This is an award-winning project and the architectural practice which was responsible for the design called
info-not a very exciting name-but they were able to come up with a very exciting design. There is also a
sense of quality. To come up with these bridges and pay attention to create something of a high quality
which can see and it is very much reflected in the steel bridges and the balconies.
The little sea park, port city, there used to be a huge port here, but now because of these ships have
become larger, the port has moved to the West closer to DC itself and here you can see that this is a very
different kind of inner-city than the city of line. There is a bridge between the University hospital and the
building because they do have put it kind of bed and breakfast here in this building for parents, relatives
of children who suffer from cancer so they have to be with their children as much as possible. They can
easily cross at whatever time to their loved ones.
This is a part very dense close to the water, by the way also close to a green area. The population has been
growing quite rapidly. It means that there is a huge demand for housing and there are also limits to
building and constructing new housing in a green field. Increasingly new housing has to be constructed in
cities and also in inner cities. This particular approach shows an innovative way how they can realize high
density. You are aware of Le Corbusier's designs which I think were not very helpful for creating a good
urban atmosphere, but I think this is an example where you can see that high density and also high rise
can go together with high quality also of public space.
The architects have based themselves on the historical example of the British Village in New York City. It
is a type of collective planning, thus they have used customer panels. In addition, they used the nearby
University Hospital to have this hotel where the variable children were able to stay as a result they were
actively involved. It also ties in with what happened in Leiden. In Leiden there is a sports park, botanical
garden, playground for children, but here are the family apartments, much smaller two-person
apartments, co-working spaces. In that sense, it normally shows like pre-industrial cities which also grew
organically, and by growing organically, it was possible to achieve a high level of differentiation. The
differentiation was very much planned in this case. High-quality public urban space also invites residents
to be outside and because of global warming, it's not much easier to sit outside for a longer period of the
year than it used to be 20 years ago. That also goes together with this case, with the blurring of the
boundary between private and public spaces.
Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman found even in not-that-good weather, people were sitting outside and in
front of their apartment enjoying and nicely appropriating space, with increasing attention for
biodiversity. Cities have to contribute to biodiversity which directs us to the importance of green patches
not just at the park level, but also at the micro-level. It also enhances the aesthetic quality. The
Netherlands showed an integrated approach to creating green spaces at the micro-level right from the
start. People are now attending these micro gardens in front of their houses within the center of the cities
in small patches and they're maintaining it. The buildings are connected with bridges and it does not only
have an aesthetic effect, but they were able to minimize the number of elevators and therefore increase
the density of the population. People were already bearing in mind the subject of blurring in time and
space between work, leisure, and care even before the pandemic. There is a great mix of functions in
these buildings which we would not find in modernist planning.
In conclusion, Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman shared his perspective that he thinks it is not possible to
actively involve all users and residents initially in a city project because there will always be people who
have more resources, more time, more knowledge to be part of the discussion. It is very important to
visualize the plans and then discuss them with people, not only because it is more democratic, but also
people will be much more inclined to claim ownership and maintain the area, preserve the area, protect
the area. It also shows the importance of an integrated approach where you include social and green
issues. The basic challenge for livable cities right from the start has been the appreciation of the value of
aiming for quality. The British made an effort to create something beautiful.
Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman concluded by raising some questions as part of the general conclusions he
made towards the end of a lecture. To what extent are these more general conclusions that we just drew
are also relevant for planners in India? How can we postpone the lessons of successful projects to other
contexts? If we are going to do that, which dimensions of difference are key to take into account? What
kind of characteristics of the context of a city in India or China or Africa, are crucial to take into account?
We should be able to use these lessons and also come up with a new kind of collaborative green planning
in other places. What kind of discussion should we have to address these issues, so how can we benefit
from the knowledge that we have? How can we benefit from each other's knowledge and what kind of
discussion should be organized to facilitate that?
Prof. Anand Wadwekar thanked Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman for the lecture and opinioned that there is
a lot to compare, learn and exchange from the European perspective of cities. Prof. Anand Wadwekar
requested participants to express opinions in terms of what has been mentioned in the lecture.
Kajal from the participants asked, We have seen a trend in European cities which many of them are
fortified and some of them are designed with the help of canals having a particular border in the cities.
What are the issues these cities face? As compared to Indian cities we do not have a defined border with
them and these borders are expanding due to various reasons.
Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman replied, that if he understood the question correctly, then Indian cities do
not have these defined borders. With canals, these borders are quite prominent and they are still there,
in some places they have filled these canals. There are clear demarcations of the 17th century in a city
that distinguishes it from the other parts of the city. In several Indian cities, you have an increased density,
proximity, and diversity in a central part and also that the central part is very much a recognizable
historical core. Suppose someone would walk from the outskirts of an Indian city towards the center of
the city, the person would be aware of an increasing density, increasing number of historical buildings,
and increasing proximity diversity. Then people might refer to city parts when they talk about it. They
would say "I'm going to the city center" or "I'm leaving the city center". In that sense, the demarcation of
the borders might be first and foremost in people's heads, related to particular characteristics in the built
environment.
Kalyan from the participants thanked Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman for the presentation. He added that
he is very much concerned about his city and identified the main problem is that nobody responds towards
the blue-green infrastructure which creates a very much pathetic situation there. Bringing in the modernday infrastructure in an old core area results in the depletion of green and blue areas and people will not
very much complain about this because the infrastructure is going to be like road widening things. Kalyan
said he is inspired and will try to help his city to improve that blue and green infrastructure.
Prof. Anand Wadwekar thanked Prof. Dr. Robert Kloosterman once again and concluded the session