Planning Amsterdam

de Allard Jolles, Erik Klusman, Ben Teunissen

"Soon after being founded in 1928, the Town Planning Department within Amsterdam's Department of Public Works started working on the General Extension Plan (AUP) for the city. The AUP is considered the first structure plan for Amsterdam. It established the guidelines for municipal policy on the physical and spatial development of the city, thus expressing a forward-looking urban vision. The future is the focal point during the process of drafting a plan, as well as in the envisaged scenario that the plan represents. However, in retrospect, structure plans reveal a great deal about the era in which they were produced. This is also true for the eight structure plans produced since the AUP. The most recent plan -- 'Opting for Urbanity' -- was completed in 2003 by the Physical Development Department (DRO), which on 1 January 1980 became the successor and heir to the erstwhile Town Planning Department." "Seventy-five years after the AUP was drafted, the leading concerns in the design and layout of space continue to be residential functions, economic and employment factors, traffic management and recreation. The way in which space is used and filled continues to form the basis for discussions about tackling and steering urban dynamics. Building something new, whether a residential neighbourhood or a business park, is always at the expense of something that existed already. This book therefore concentrates much more on a 75-year span in Amsterdam's spatial and physical development, rather than discussing only Amsterdam's structure plans. Alongside essays and illustrations, this book presents a specially produced series of maps, as an aid to tracing the development of Amsterdam over the last 75 years -- in the city centre and the garden suburbs, in the intensification and expansion of the city, for traffic and transportation, and with green and recreational amenities. Book jacket."--Jacket.