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The Europeanization of Dutch National Spatial Planning: an Uphill Battle Wil Zonneveld
Dr. Wil Zonneveld is senior lecturer at the OTB Research Institute of the Delft University of Technology. His research covers the area of strategic planning on the national, transnational and European level.
Abstract: The Netherlands has been part of the European integration process from the early days. It has an open economy and has benefited greatly from being a “natural” entrance to North-West Europe. It should not come as a surprise that Dutch spatial planners, mostly officials of the National Spatial Planning Agency, have played a major role during the past decades in discussions on a European planning agenda. They contributed greatly to the making of the European Spatial Development Perspective. Local and regional governments are enthusiastically participating in the various EU programmes on cross-border and transnational cooperation in the field of spatial planning. But how does this relate to domestic spatial planning policies? The country is maintaining one of the most elaborate and sophisticated systems of national spatial planning and policy. One would expect, knowing the participation in European policy programs and discussions on territorial governance, that Dutch national spatial planning policies do have a strong European inclination. This is not the case though. This paper examines to what extent Dutch national spatial planning is influenced by changes at the international level, especially on the European scale. It also seeks to explain why Dutch national spatial planning is constantly returning to domestic planning issues, mainly on urban form, which play themselves out at lower scales than the national.
Introduction A couple of years ago it seemed a European dimension would start to dominate Dutch national spatial planning. The government issued a new policy document on spatial planning – the fifth, the first being issued as early as 1960 – opening with the following sentences: “The Netherlands is changing. Foreign influences are being felt everywhere” (MVROM 2001: 5). In a semi-official document – Spatial Perspectives in Europe – an even more radical statement could be found: “European decision-making has finally penetrated the field of spatial planning” is the jubilant opening sentence of the annual report published by the government agency usually
preparing any official government policy document on spatial planning, written when work on the Fifth Memorandum was already underway (NSPA 2000: 3). In 2002, before the parliament could discuss the Fifth Policy Document according to the statutory procedure of Key Planning Decisions the reigning center-left coalition government fell. Currently there is a new memorandum on spatial planning simply called National Spatial Strategy (MVROM 2004; see also MHSPE 2004), prepared by the present centerright government. It bears the meaningful subtitle Creating space for development. One of the main purposes of this new policy document is to ease the restrictions on urban development imposed by previous governments in order to protect the countryside and combat the growing use of cars. These issues are considered less important: in order to boost the economy “spatial obstacles to economic growth” have to be removed (MHSPE 2004: 3). In the past supporting economic development was already a goal of national spatial planning policy. However this goal was combined with other goals like protecting green belts (especially the Green Heart in the middle of the economic core area of the Randstad; see Faludi, Van der Valk 1994) and combating the growing use of cars. So the current aim of relaxing the planning regime comes close to a turnaround in policy objectives. A major effect of this development is that the location of future urbanization is – again – the main subject of the National Spatial Strategy: where to build and what limitations are acceptable at which places? The maps of the current Spatial Strategy also look different compared to the previous Fifth Policy Document. The makers of the latter document made the choice to depict the countries and regions surrounding the Netherlands as colorful and bright as the interior. The makers of the Strategy only used bold colors for the interior and faint colors for the exterior. It is a detail, but a meaningful one. The main differences can be found in the text of the Strategy though. The outside world is only present in the emphasis on economic competition coming from abroad and the attention paid to the spatial effects of European legislation, mainly legislation putting restrictions on development
(Nitrate Directive, Bird and Habitat Directives, Air Quality Directive). At first sight this inward looking perspective of current national spatial planning seems odd. As one of the six founding nations of the European Community, the Netherlands has been part of the European integration process from the early days. It has an open economy, largely due to the fact that it is part of the RhineMaas-Scheldt Delta. The Netherlands has benefited greatly from being a “natural” entrance to North-West Europe and has developed, amongst other things, a strong position in the international distribution sector. It will therefore come as no surprise that the Netherlands (i.e., the National Spatial Planning Agency, one of the directorates-general of the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment) has been a strong promoter of transnational spatial planning in recent decades (Fit, Kragt 1994; Faludi, Waterhout 2002; Faludi 2005). Efforts undertaken were mainly in one direction however: to convince others (European Commission, other countries) that territorial strategies above the level of the national state are necessary. Efforts like this were already undertaken as early as the late 1950s (see below). Right up to the present day the department of spatial planning has been willing to accept a major role in boosting the discussion on some sort of role for the European Union on matters of territorial development and territorial governance. Recently the initiative was taken to organize an EU ministerial meeting on this issue which took place in Rotterdam in November 2004. The efforts of the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency resulted in the acceptance of a European agenda for the years to come (see Faludi, Waterhout 2005). So there is a large gap between what ministers and officials are trying to achieve on the European level and the content of the domestic spatial planning agenda. In this paper we analyze the European dimension of this agenda by investigating the national planning memoranda, the first one of which was published in 1960. At the national level Dutch spatial planning is strongly “conceptual” and the powers for implementing a national planning memorandum are limited and often in the hand of sectoral departments. By “conceptual” we mean that planning relies strongly on the communicative qualities of spatial concepts (see for instance Faludi 2004: 162). But it is exactly for this reason that national memoranda on spatial planning play an important role in the Dutch system. These contain the principles of spatial organization, which other levels of
government are encouraged (and partly forced) to use as a frame of reference. Through a complex system of formal and informal arrangements these memoranda “frame” the context of other spatially relevant policies. An elaborate set of formal and informal procedures, characterized by checks and balances, links the memoranda with the more detailed zoning of land at regional (provinces) and local (communities) level. The national policy domains, which are spatially relevant in terms of land, such as infrastructure policy and housing, are also linked to memoranda. As the current National Spatial Strategy is prepared by four ministries instead of only the ministry responsible for spatial planning, there seems to be a higher degree of policy integration and consistency. That said, it should be made clear that the memoranda do not form the apex of a hierarchical planning system, because the lower tiers of government still have important discretionary powers (CEC 1999a). In three sections we shall analyze all national planning memoranda including the current National Spatial Strategy. We shall specifically examine to what extent Dutch national spatial planning is influenced by changes at the international level, especially on the European scale. As will become clear, each memorandum is the product of the ongoing debate on the content and instruments of spatial planning and, at the same time, sets the agenda for a new period through the introduction of new goals, new instruments and, above all, new spatial planning concepts. In the conclusion we try to explain why Dutch national spatial planning is constantly returning to domestic planning issues that play themselves out at scales lower than the national.
The North-West-European Megalopolis: a Cause for a European Spatial Strategy 1950s and 1960s: Urbanization as the Prime Transnational Issue The First Memorandum, dating from 1960, marks the end of the post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands and the start of the emerging Dutch welfare state. The memorandum foresees a vast expansion of urban areas in the west, already the most heavily urbanized part of the country. Because the Netherlands is located in a delta area – at the mouth of the most important European inland waterway, the Rhine – the port areas in the west of the country, especially Rotterdam, were accorded a pivotal role, includ-
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The spatial structure of North West Europe
Canals Central places of the highest order
Other large industrial areas
Port cities with important industrial function Metropolitan green belts
Bathing areas Open spaces within the sphere of influence Motorways of major urban agglomerations Other major traffic axes Navigable waterways
Planned canals Major railways Oil pipelines State boundaries
Urban agglomerations based on coal and steel
Large scale recreation areas
Fig. 1: A 1960’s vision on the urban structure of the NorthWest-European megalopolis. (Source: Ley 1967)
ing the basic industries (oil refineries, chemical plants, steel factories) located here. A twin policy was formulated, which would dominate Dutch national planning policy for most of the coming decades. First, the urban areas of the west were considered as one coherent urban ring, the Randstad, which would have to expand outwards in order to safeguard the Green Heart in the center. In addition, the individual cities should not merge into one continuous megalopolis but would remain separate from each other through designated buffer zones. Second, an important part of the vast industrial growth of the Randstad was to be diverted – “decentralized” – to the periphery of the Netherlands. This would not only take the pressure off the Randstad but stimulate economic growth in the remote, backward regions as well.
Behind the scenes of the First Memorandum, members of the Dutch Spatial Planning Agency were playing a vital role in the organization of a genuine planning community at the level of North-West Europe. This was the Conference of Regions in North-West Europe, which was established in 1959. Within this – standing – conference, emphasis was placed on the necessity or even the inevitability of cooperation between countries and regions, a necessary complement to the European cooperation that was then taking off in the form of the EEC. At this stage, this planning community did not have an outspoken program of urgent issues to be the object of a common, transnational spatial planning policy. The fear of random urbanization of North-West Europe was deeply rooted in the mindset of the “transnational” planners and resulted in a gen-
eral plea for a scaling-up of national urban policies, such as the one drawn up at this stage by the Dutch Spatial Planning Agency (at this stage bearing a slightly different name). Although Dutch civil servants played a crucial role in the emergence of a modest NorthWest European “community” of planners, their political leaders did not heed their pleas. For the Dutch government the storyline of transnational spatial planning was far too vague. Also, the future course of European cooperation was too uncertain to warrant the establishment of cooperation mechanisms in spatial planning. The viewpoint had not changed since three years earlier in 1957 when the Dutch Planning Minister rejected the request of senior members of the Spatial Planning Agency to convince his ministerial colleagues that the Dutch government should argue for a spatial planning title in the emerging EEC treaty. Dutch planners were deeply disappointed that the treaty did not contain an article stating that the six EEC members would also cooperate in spatial planning. Rapid urbanization and suburbanization in combination with a vast growth in the population and prosperity led to a Second Memorandum on spatial planning within a period of only six years. Its optimistic spirit, clear conceptual messages and colorful maps and charts all contribute to its status as a milestone in the development of the planning policy domain in general and the profession of planning and urban design in particular. Although the policy scope of the Second Memorandum was still national, the Dutch territory was viewed as part of an internally coherent North-West European urban domain for which a set of maps was designed, to some degree discussed with the neighboring countries. The keyword here was North Sea Region, envisaged as the European counterpart of the American megalopolis, which was labelled the Atlantic Seaboard by Jean Gottmann. Key concepts of Dutch spatial planning were scaled up to this level. This meant that vast green belts would have to segment this European megalopolis to provide recreational areas and to prevent a massive urban conglomerate that would subsume the city dwellers (see figure 1, a map prepared by German colleagues of the Dutch planners). How to turn these ideas into practice is something on which the memorandum is almost completely silent. The memorandum section on policy measures lacks any reference to concrete cooperation with neighboring countries, even though this is mentioned in the analytical chapter on The Netherlands in Western
Europe. This chapter contains a brief presentation of the early cooperation with Germany and Belgium, but it makes no mention of a role for the EEC. Clearly, this was still a bridge too far for the Dutch government. But behind the scenes and on other stages, the Dutch Spatial Planning Agency was still advocating that the European Economic Community should involve itself in spatial planning. This time, the Minister embraced the idea. At that stage a free (i.e., politically non-binding) discussion within the Council of Europe took place. Dutch planners, including their minister, took the viewpoint that this period would have to be followed by more effective negotiations within the EEC. Also, the smaller territory of the EEC would fit in better with the Dutch interest in the North Sea Region as the Spatial Planning Agency concluded. Not surprisingly, the Spatial Planning Agency was bitterly disappointed when it became clear, in 1968, that Germany preferred the Council of Europe as the institutional framework for discussions on European territorial – the preferred adjective in those days – planning. One of the main reasons for this strategic choice was that several countries bordering Germany were not member states of the EEC but were, indeed, members of the Council of Europe. Besides, within the context of the COE, spatial planning would not be subordinate to economic policy, which would probably be the case if the EEC were to embrace it. Dutch planners had to concede to the inevitable and started to work faithfully for the Council on an expanding (especially in the 1970s) work programme.
The 1970s: Domestic Urban Issues Dominate the Planning Agenda The 1970s saw a dramatic change in Dutch spatial planning policy. In the first part of what would be a memorandum of several voluminous reports, the government severely criticized its own current spatial planning policy (MVRO 1973). Inner city problems were high on the political agenda. The revised spatial planning policy focused almost exclusively on people’s daily living environment and issues such as the battle against suburbanization and the growing use of the car. The European scale disappeared from the new Third Memorandum. On the policy maps the neighboring countries were entirely white like the terra incognita of the nineteenth century. But behind the urban and rural policies, which were backed by most of the Spatial Planning Agency, a small group was still advocating that the European Economic Community
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should assume a planning role. At the end of the 1970s, some officials, led by the DirectorGeneral, even went on a European tour, visiting the Danish, German and Belgium governments and the European Commission. The proposals were more or less vetoed, so the delegation went home disappointed. According to one of the delegates, all that remained was the memory of a fine lunch somewhere in Brussels.
Europe Again on the National Agenda The Late 1980s: At Last Initiatives Within the European Community In about a decade the situation was to change drastically in many ways. Dutch spatial planning policy made another U-turn in the form of a Fourth Memorandum (MVROM 1988a), putting “Europe” firmly and literally on the map. Serious discussions started in the European Community on what was initially called “territorial planning”, and was later rechristened “spatial planning” in proper Euro-English (Williams 1996: 10). Since 1989 the EC (later EU) ministers responsible for spatial planning have met at least once a year. In 1988 spatial planning even crept into EEC rules, or to be more precise, into the regulations on the European Regional Development Fund (see Faludi, Waterhout 2002: 32). So, at last, the Dutch spatial planners got their way. The Dutch wanted to go even further. The Dutch government felt that as so many EC policy domains had become spatially relevant, spatial planning should become an identifiable part of one of the portfolios in the European Commission, as was stated in the Fourth Memorandum (MVROM 1988b: 48). This stance clearly reflects the aim of the Dutch spatial planning system to balance the territorial claims of both public and private actors, which is confirmed by the claim that the Dutch system pursues a comprehensive, integrated approach (CEC 1997).
Dutch Planning Policy Looking Outwards Be that as it may, the Fourth Memorandum added a new approach to the traditional task of influencing the pattern of land use. The memorandum was one of a string of documents for various policy fields, most of which were published in 1988, and all of which left behind the traditional role of central government as the guardian of a welfare state. The Spatial Planning Agency had already been seeking a new identity
for its policy earlier in the 1980s. There was a general feeling in the agency that national spatial planning had lost one of its prime functions: the generation of inspiring visions and spatial concepts. The economic recession of the 1980s led to the conclusion that spatial planning could contribute considerably to economic recovery by rethinking what was called the “main spatial economic structure” and by using this as a foundation for an array of new spatial concepts and images. With the Fourth Memorandum, boosting the competitive position became the predominant goal of spatial strategic thinking for more than a decade. The basic idea was that the main spatial economic structure was made up of the Randstad and the urban regions of the adjacent provinces, which together formed the Central Netherlands Urban Ring. The mainport became a key spatial concept, underlining the essential role of the Port of Rotterdam and Schiphol Airport in the Dutch economy. This meant that substantial investments needed to be made in mainport development and infrastructure in order to attract new foreign businesses. The Fourth Memorandum could be seen as a successful effort to align planning with the strong interests represented by the Departments of Transport and Economic Affairs, tapping their resources in the continued struggle to impose its own conceptual images on government policy (Hajer, Zonneveld 1999). This interpretation is persuasive as it can be shown that the very idea of a mainport strategy – and especially the idea of a priority area for economic development: the main spatialeconomic structure – originated in the Spatial Planning Agency. So, the Fourth Memorandum invested Dutch spatial planning with an international, European and even global dimension. In actual fact, however, Dutch spatial planning was merely looking at the outer world from the inside (i.e., Dutch territory). For instance, no detailed analyses were made of developments and trends in neighboring countries. No attempts were made to find out what kind of spatial developments were taking place there, or which policy choices were being made and whether the emphasis was placed on the same economic sectors, transport and distribution, and services, as in the Netherlands. So, in terms of spatial positioning the Fourth Memorandum did not do very well. Crucially, the outside world was not seen as a partner in cross-border spatial issues but rather as a rival in the battle for international companies. But behind all the official language and doctrine, planners from the Spatial Planning Agen-
cy were cooperating with their foreign counterparts within the context of the emerging European spatial development policy. This led to the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999 (CEC 1999b). As in the past, the agency was showing specific interest in North-West Europe. This is proven by the publication in 1991 of a research memorandum called Perspectives in Europe, which was to pave the way for a stronger collaboration with the countries in the North Sea Region: Denmark, Germany, France, Great Britain and Belgium (NSPA 1991). Belgium was rather reluctant to participate owing to the fact that there is no such thing as a Belgium planning system and that the Flanders system is not considered strong or mature enough. The preparation of this elaborate scenario study of North-West Europe ran almost parallel with the preparation of the Fourth Memorandum. This memorandum does not make any reference to this study, which was undertaken by a small group in the Dutch Planning Agency, mainly because most of the other members of the agency considered this project irrelevant to the Fourth Memorandum. Sector departments – officially coproducers of any spatial memorandum – were probably not even aware of the agency’s scenario project. During the latter half of the 1990s the Spatial Planning Agency also supported the making of the Second Benelux Structural Outline, albeit not with heart and soul: the Benelux area does not fit into what geographically constitutes North-West Europe, and the Benelux Economic Union is seen as an institution from the past (for further reading on the Benelux cooperation: see Zonneveld, Faludi 1997; De Vries 2002). The transnational cooperation in the North-West Metropolitan Area (NWMA), based on the Community Initiative INTERREG IIC and started in 1998, was considered highly useful, though the area itself was seen as far too extensive – encompassing, for instance, the whole of Great Britain and the Irish Republic. Also, INTERREG IIC draws a boundary in a macro-region, which the agency sees as spatially coherent: Denmark, Northern Germany and even the northern part of the Netherlands are part of the NSR (North Sea Region) cooperation area. Again, as in the past, the Dutch Spatial Planning Agency had to resign itself to the inevitable and enthusiastically participated in projects to elaborate transnational spatial visions, projects to be finalized in 2000 (NWMA Spatial Vision Group 2000; NSR Spatial Vision Working Group 2000; for a critique on these and other transnational visions see Zonneveld 2005a,b).
The Current Revision of National Spatial Policies The Dawn of a New Century: an Ambitious European Agenda … When the Spatial Perspectives in Europe mentioned in the introduction – not to be confused with the 1991 scenario study bearing almost the same title – were first published in Autumn 1999, the Minister of Spatial Planning was so enthusiastic that he decided that the whole publication should be translated into English. This was totally unprecedented, as usually only single thematic chapters were translated. However, internationalization was second nature to this minister who had been responsible for Development Cooperation for many years. So, it did not come as a surprise when he readily accepted an important internal strategy document claiming that the Fifth Memorandum should be categorically international in its scope. The content of this document can be summarized and paraphrased in the following five recommendations: First, whilst the Fourth Memorandum sees the international context only as a setting for national policy, the time has come to develop a genuine international planning policy. Second, instead of generic approaches and spatial concepts for the entire country, region-specific policies should be developed and integrated in transnational policy frames, like those developed for the North-West Metropolitan Area and the North Sea Region. Third, the national government should agree a limited number of key policy actions at European, transnational and cross-border level and search for relevant partners at all these levels. Fourth, the content of the Fifth Memorandum should be discussed beforehand with foreign partners – border countries plus regions like North-Rhine Westphalia and Flanders – instead of afterwards, when internal negotiations have been taking place on a national basis and there is hardly any scope left for influence. Fifth, international and interdepartmental policy-making should be guided by the European Spatial Development Perspective. A novel methodology for structuring the content of the Fifth Memorandum had already been accepted by the Agency and the minister. This is the idea of layered spatial structures. The first and most stable layer is the ground layer, which is formed by the soil, the water systems and nature. The second layer is formed by networks: the physical networks of railways, roads and waterways. The third layer is formed by the pattern
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Fig. 2: The various map frames used in the Dutch Fifth Policy Memorandum on spatial planning: an indication of the international mindset of the makers of this memorandum. (Source: MVROM 2001)
of land use. Inspiration for this layer approach came from various sources within and outside the domain of spatial planning, amongst others the work of Ferdinand Braudel and especially his notion of “la longue durée”. The methodology was motivated by several reasons: a) to make complex policy issues transparent; b) to be instrumental in breaking down entrenched “partitions” between policy sectors; c) to overcome the traditional emphasis in spatial planning on housing and its locations; and d) most important for our discussion: to make the case for transcending national boundaries intellectually and politically (see NSPA 2000: 111). In Dutch planning the layer of occupation is much more important than the ground layer and network layer. The layer approach could be instrumental in changing this. Because policies in relation to the ground and network layers are almost by nature transnational – given the size of the Netherlands – spatial planning in turn would become transnational; at least this was the assumption of the protagonists of the layer approach.
… Which Only Partially Materialized Reading the Fifth Memorandum and looking at the impressive map-making (see Figure 2), the more analytical parts of the document look
promising. The actual sections on policy, however, only pay limited attention to cross-border, transnational and European issues. Especially striking is the complete absence of the layer approach, which so clearly dominates the analytical part of the memorandum. This is rather odd in a supposedly coherent and consistent policy document. One would expect the entire document to consist of a device to unfold the policy issues. There are several explanations for this omission. First, there was a lack of consensus within the Agency while the Fifth Memorandum was being prepared. A large group, including influential “authors” of the Fourth Memorandum, was opposed to the layer approach. They claimed an important characteristic of spatial planning would be lost, namely, the struggle for comprehensiveness. A layer approach is simply a matter of putting sectoral policies on top of each other, which is not what spatial planning is about, so they claimed. This argument was rejected by the adherents of the layer approach, who said that by looking through the layers, key policy issues spring into view. This professional dispute – somewhat sharply presented here – has not been solved yet, either inside or outside the ministry, although the layer approach is taken up in numerous provincial and local plans. But there was an even more im-
portant reason for omitting the layer approach from the policy sections of the Fifth Memorandum: it was impossible to carry it through because large, spatially relevant policy domains are not part of the Fifth Memorandum or indeed any spatial planning memorandum. Although a policy memorandum on spatial planning officially sets the framework for all spatially relevant policies, there are large areas that are subject to other strategic policy frames. This means, for instance, that the network layer could not be addressed in detail by the Fifth Memorandum since it is largely the object of another, separate policy memorandum. Instead, the Fifth Memorandum in its policy sections turns to the hard core of Dutch spatial planning throughout the decades, namely urban containment especially in terms of the location of housing. In doing so, it reverses the order of thought advocated by the adherents of the layer approach and presents an inward-looking, strongly national perspective. One of the key instrumental concepts of the Fifth Memorandum is exclusively on the level of occupation. To prevent urbanization from encroaching on the countryside, the Fifth Policy Document states that so-called “red contours” have to be drawn around all built-up areas to demarcate the outer edges of urban expansion. This meant that all twelve provincial authorities in the Netherlands would have to add contours to their spatial plans. An enormous amount of energy in the public debate on the Fifth Memorandum focused on the proposed contour policy. The effect was that the international dimension of the memorandum was almost automatically pushed to the background. The planning officials emphasizing the importance of this dimension were unable to get their message across in this heated debate. In theory a determined policy directed at urban containment could very well be combined with a “genuine international planning policy” as promised by the strategy document on the international dimension of the Fifth Memorandum mentioned at the beginning of this section. But this did not happen. A token of this is the interpretation of the spatial concept of urban networks, in itself an open concept through the use of the metaphor of the network. The previous, Fourth Memorandum is more or less built around the concept of the compact city. According to this policy principle new, large housing and industrial estates have to be built on sites within the city perimeters or on sites adjacent to the city perimeters, preferably in high densities. The Fifth National Policy Document marked
a remarkable shift in government policy, for it abandoned the concept of the compact city. According to the new creed, urban networks emerge at a regional level in a constellation of “urban centres and nodes” (MVROM 2001: 179 ff.). These networks form integrated and self-contained housing and labor markets with excellent internal connections thanks to a welldesigned system of regional public transport. The new element, which marked the Fifth Policy Document as a watershed in nearly three decades of national urban policy, was that, from now on, the entire territory of the urban network would form the search area for new urban developments. The watchword was no longer “concentric” urbanization (the “center” located in individual cities). Moreover, the urban network as a whole – rather than individual major cities – would be self-sufficient in terms of urban functions. So much for the novelties. The Dutch government took the view that urban networks could only develop in explicitly designated areas. So, decisions had to be taken on which cities would be included and which did not. The network concept was also combined with the concept of red contours mentioned above. So in many ways the urban network is a concept on urban form instead of urban processes taking place on many different intertwining spatial scales. On top of that, the world outside the borders of the country is seen as hostile in the sense of being in competition with the Netherlands and the country’s urban regions, much the same as was expressed in the Fourth Memorandum. Nevertheless and in contrast to its predecessor the Fifth Memorandum also contains a small agenda of cross-border and European cooperation under the heading of “The Netherlands as a European region” . In this sense the memorandum is more elaborate than all previous national policy documents. Something similar counts for the process of political consultation. The statutory process around national policy documents foresees in a mandatory consultation of provincial governments. In the context of the making of the Fifth Memorandum the regions bordering the Netherlands have also been consulted, that is, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and the Walloon and Flemish Regions in Belgium. This consultation resulted in the final listing and wording of the cross-border and transnational policy agenda. Nevertheless the Fifth Memorandum is to a great extent not the long awaited – by part of the planning community and some within the National Spatial Planning Agency – opening of Dutch spatial planning.
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Fig. 3: One of the statutory maps in the National Spatial Strategy showing urban networks and urban concentration areas which more or less isolates the country from its international context. (Source: MVROM 2004)
The National Spatial Strategy: at Least One Step Backwards April 2002 saw the collapse of the center-left coalition government. By then, the Fifth Policy Document was about three-quarters of its way through the statutory procedure of Key Planning Decisions. It only awaited a parliamentary reading and a formal decision on the wording and maps. In the Netherlands a fallen government usually rounds off any current business, but it leaves the controversial issues to its successor. The new national spatial policy was just such a controversial issue. The Dutch Parliament deferred the reading of the Fifth Policy Document and, in effect, sounded its death
knell. The new, center-right government, which took over in 2002, decided to unite two spatial planning key procedures, the other one being the Second National Structure Plan for Green Areas. A new philosophy of governance was also introduced, giving a much smaller role to national government and a much larger one to provinces and municipalities. In Spring 2004 the government finally issued its policy document on spatial planning, the National Spatial Strategy. It now turned out that not only the philosophy of governance has changed, but also the content and aims of the policy. As said in the introduction, the government no longer wants to force provincial and local government to be very strict on zoning regu-
lations in terms of where it is allowed to build houses and new industrial estates so it dropped the idea of drawing red contours around cities and villages. This does not mean that the traditional aim to concentrate urbanization is obsolete, but the local and provincial governments have to follow societal demands more carefully and will have more discretionary powers of their own. It is not necessary here to discuss this policy change in detail. It is important to underline, however, that when it comes to the European dimension of national spatial planning policy the Strategy returns to the thinking of the Fourth Policy Memorandum of 1988 in which international competition and the competitive position of the country played a major role. The elaborate chapter in the Fifth Memorandum about international spatial developments has been cut to a brief section (Waterhout 2005). Due to criticism in the House of Representatives this section has become somewhat larger (MVROM 2005). Compared with the Fourth Memorandum spatial concepts have however changed: instead of emphasizing the enhancement of the competitiveness of a limited number of cities the current strategy looks more at regions and urban networks accepting the regionalisation of urban and economic relationships. The vision of the world outside the country though is again phrased in terms of competition. There is no mention of a common planning agenda with the countries and regions surrounding the Netherlands. There is also no mention of a strategy towards the European Union and its policies although there is one as such as discussed above. All statutory policy maps are inward looking (see figure 3 for an example). So in terms of a Europeanization of the domestic national spatial planning agenda the Strategy clearly marks at least one step backwards.
Conclusion Although the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency – including its predecessor in the pre1965 period, the Agency for the National Plan – has always been in the forefront abroad, advocating a planning framework on the European level, little of what this could mean for Dutch national spatial planning can be found in the various planning memoranda, published since 1960. This is because these memoranda are not the sole responsibility of the agency or the department of which the agency is a directorate-general, and other departments, who had a
stake in the decision procedures, were apparently very difficult to convince of the benefits. Of all the memoranda published since 1960, the Fifth Memorandum has the strongest emphasis on issues transcending the Dutch national territory. Compared with its predecessor, published in 1988, the context has changed considerably, making this an obvious change in policy. Issues like globalization, scale differentiation in the territorial choices made in society and the Europeanization of planning issues are far more pressing than, let us say, ten years ago. So the partial reorientation of Dutch spatial planning advocated by this memorandum makes sense, also taking into account the small size of the Dutch national territory and the fact that the Dutch economy has always been an open economy, and nowadays is even more so. The makers of the Fifth Memorandum have not been successful though in carrying through the strong international character of the analytical part of the memorandum into the policy section of the document for which we have given several explanations. Not only did they have to face criticism and a lack of interest from their colleagues from their own directorate-general, they found that their negotiating partners in other ministries were indifferent or even hostile. Most attention in the public debate went to issues of urban containment, which is basically an issue of local and regional relevance. As a consequence the core of the Fifth Memorandum is made up of proposals for a new urbanization policy. Although the concept of urban networks marks a clear break with the past, moving away from the idea of confined, more or less self-sufficient cities, the Fifth Memorandum is still a long way away from the acceptance of scale dynamics and scale differentiation, issues which are intrinsically part of the metaphor of “networks” . In terms of a Europeanization of the domestic planning agenda the current National Spatial Strategy stands at least one step behind. The absence of a vision, or at least an assessment, of the consequences of European integration, notably the enlargement of the European Union is striking. The repercussions for agriculture, still the largest land use category in the Netherlands, are potentially vast. Also missing is a thorough analysis of the spatial developments in neighboring countries, and the policies pursued there. Are these policies in line or conflicting with Dutch policies? Also do we see the rise of one integrated North-West-European megalopolis as forecast by older generations of spatial planners and now again emphasized but dubbed the Urban Delta (Lambregts, Zonneveld
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2003), UNICITY (Boelens 2005) or the Interconnected Metropolis (Modder 2004). The new territorial strategy of the Dutch national government has difficulty incorporating elements of the international context other than the issue of economic competition from abroad. A major reason is that it is very difficult to break with the tradition of a strong role for national government in spatial planning matters, which are essentially regional and local. National spatial planning was and still is preoccupied with the issue of where urban development is allowed to take place. In spite of changes in the philosophy of governance and the current, slightly more liberal attitude towards urban containment this is still seen as a major task for national government. The Dutch parliament, having a final say in the content of a document like the National Spatial Strategy, has forced the government to put tighter restrictions on their urbanization policy and, by doing this, also changed the philosophy of governance in a more centralized direction. As long as Dutch spatial planning is locked up in a city versus countryside doctrine and continues to be preoccupied with the preservation of the character of the Green Heart there seems to be little room for Dutch national spatial planning to focus explicitly on transnational and European planning matters. As long as this is the case there remains a large gap between the core of domestic national spatial policies and what some representatives of the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency are trying to achieve on the European level. The new Spatial Planning Act (Wet ruimtelijke ordening), presently under discussion in parliament, will do away with Key Planning Decisions and will introduce other instruments to influence local and provincial spatial planning. At the national level the new Act introduces the notion of spatial visions that are only politically binding for national government itself. This gives rise to an opportunity to fully direct national spatial planning to issues which really matter at the national level. This could give a Europeanization of the planning agenda a bigger chance. This depends however on the question of whether the government is genuinely interested in this. The present government basically is not.
Acknowledgement The author wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Dutch government through the Habiforum Program Innovative Land Use and Delft University of Technology through the Delft Centre for Sustainable Urban Areas.
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Dr. Wil Zonneveld OTB Research Institute Delft University of Technology P.O. Box 5030 NL-2600 GA Delft
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