The rape of cities

the disastrous impact of urban renewal

Edición de la obra The rape of cities

The advocates of urban renewal met their Waterloo in the Amsterdam Jordaan district. As recently as 1975, the Amsterdam city council made a serious proposal to demolish the Jordaan, but outraged district residents managed to scuttle the plan. In a structure which originally contained seven apartments, where at least 35 people lived, habits now four people. The district has changed entirely. This illustrates that new uses of a district in no way require demolition. The city's architectural stock is highly resilient and adaptable to changing uses. Not a single canal house is still being used in the same way it was in the seventeenth century. Semi-detached pairs of shops with upstairs flats in the Jordaan are now being converted into very attractive single-family homes. In Amsterdam in the 1970s, no one would have thought such a thing possible. But they could have known. Jane Jacobs's famous book about American cities, published in the early 1960s, chronicled how Boston had transformed itself into a trendy city by restoring its historic houses.