Planners of the Future: Dutch Students Participate

by Jewel Bellush*

ETURNING to the Netherlands’ nearly packed urban scene after a R three-year absence, several changes are evident: less place to hide from the consequences of continuing urbanization, increased annoyance with the harsh sounds of bromfiets (motorscooters), smells of spreading pollution, additional automobiles driven erratically as i f they were bicycles, and persis- tent pressure of population movement to smaller hamlets and villages, sug- gesting a subtle, mini-formed suburban sprawl. But the one new happening on the Dutch scene which perhaps attracts the most interest and attention is inspraak-citizen participation-that vague and difficult term which evokes as much emotional furor, exciting opportunity and frustrating feed- back to planners here as it does in the United States.

Increasingly, one finds this new phenomenon of emerging action groups sparked largely by university students. Constituting at times a corps of “urban guerrillas,” they are discussing goals and selecting strategies for community renewal, helping in the creation of neighborhood organizations to represent claims at times neglected by planners. They have also been launching campaigns against locating industrial plants in the Delta region deemed dangerous to the milieu-the substitute term for air pollution. They not only offer the foreign observer a sense of newness, they are also shaking things up. They are attracting increased attention, upsetting the rather tra- ditional environment in which planning decisions have been made for centuries.

The Netherlands has a long and remarkable history of scooping itself out of the sea, of locating its population in tidy rows of small, quaint houses sprinkled picturesquely along endless canals. This inheritance has been made possible in part by the determined will of the Dutch and realized through the skillful and dogged activities of technically-gifted people organized in large bureaucratic systems such as the Waterstaat-the agency responsible for land reclamation-and the world-renowned city planning services in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The ravages of World War I1 facilitated expanding planning programs in the hands of highly-trained, technical administrators. Rotterdam’s spectacu-

* Jewel Bellush is associate professor of political science a t Hunter College of the City University of New York, on leave as guest professor at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. She is the editor of the Books in Review department of the NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW. She was assisted in preparation of this article by Marie-anne Rameyer.

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316 NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW “.Qe lar success in reconstructing its bombed-out center provides a most dramatic example. The port and harbor developments, which have provided much of the nation’s economic growth and prosperity, were likewise the product of a huge, cohesive, bureaucratic operation under the powerful Port Authority of Rotterdam. Of equal importance has been the steady expansion of housing construction for all classes of people, accorded top priority by the national government in post-war planning operations. This history and tradition have served as key factors in developing large, bureaucratic systems of decision making for urban growth and modernization.

Shaping the political contours of these administrative structures and sys- t e m has been the rather widely accepted principle that politics and admin- istration are two separate areas of decision making-the elected officials are politicians and civil servants are the technical men, the experts, untouched by party and pressure-group politics.

Utrecht, the fourth largest city in Holland, approved five years ago a siz- able, private redevelopment plan for an important sector of its downtown center. Aided by public purchase, assemblage and clearance of land, the developer was then granted a 100-year lease. The city permitted a major portion of the responsibility to go to the developer, including economic research, setting of goals, architectural design and execution of the program. The city councilmen, largely nonprofessionals and part-timers, displayed relatively little interest in these decisions. Additionally, little citizen concern was evident concerning the whole scheme, even by the small shopkeepers who would eventually be affected.

Returning to this city in the fall of 1970, the changed (and charged) political atmosphere evoked surprise: demonstrations on the square, crowded public hearings, heated arguments and new pressure-group representatives taking notes at council meetings. And, among these new action groups, stu- dents played a prominent role. These new actions converged on the construc- tion of a Music Center within the confines of the private redevelopment plan described above. A furor developed over the architectural design for the center and the location of a roadway-issues which formerly invited little interest.

In The Hague, the nation’s governmental center, long characterized as a “quiet city” in political terms, one could find in recent months a small action group concentrating in the poorest sections slated for renewal. In Amsterdam, students at the Free University, originally a Calvinist school, are found to be more action oriented. Last year a seminar was created in the Institute of Public Administration to study the urban renewal process. Anxious to know how renewal really works, students are out in the community, involved in helping to organize citizen activities.

In Rotterdam, several groups of students from the Delft University have

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been busily involved in fighting the location of new industries which they feel are dangerous polluters of the air; others have been moving into inner- city areas soon to experience renewal.

The factors responsible for this new type of student involvement in plan- ning emerge from the same kinds of conditions found elsewhere in post-in- dustrial societies: a sense of powerlessness and alienation due to big insti- tutions which dominate life. Participation in the urban communities, so the students claim, offers them an opportunity to get involved in more meaning- ful decision making which affects the lives of citizens. In the Netherlands, plagued neither by Vietnam nor racial conflict, getting into community action shows a bit of the war with society found in the United States. Dutch student activists have had their fling recently (1968-early 1970) with re- bellion against university bureaucracy. They have made prisoners of admin- istrators, threatened professors and participated in building take-overs. But the student actions in the urban renewal areas and their protests concerning industrial location constitute a more mature, thoughtful and serious happen- ing which may in the long run have a more lasting effect on the planning system and public policy formation.

Who are some of these students and what have they learned? Besides harboring students from the usual “society-oriented” disciplines-social work, sociology and political science-a considerable corps comes from the technical schools, including the renowned Delft University. Just a few years back, these students were clean-cut and fastidious in dress, wearing the traditional, typical, tie and white shirt. Now they are far more informal in appearance, with an assortment of well-designed beards and hair styles, obviously revealing their new mood. I t is difficult to imagine, on entering the attractive, newly-constructed Delft school of planning on the edge of town, that one will find on the main floor a special student exhibit, “Marx, Capitalism and Urban Planning.”

Several of these students come from the economic university at Rot- terdam, another technically-oriented institution sharing in a concern about social problems. The participation of these technically-trained students is indeed a new and important phenomenon, especially for the Dutch, since, traditionally, planners have been largely engineers and architects who have not been politically trained or made aware of the social implications of their charts and maps.

Long afternoons were spent, over a period of several months, with groups of these students who are studying, and many living in, neighborhoods (wijks) slated for renewal in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. The following is a short summary of their own reactions to their work and how they feel it relates to their education at school.

Most students can be grouped into two categories: one is made up of

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radical ideologists, with romantic notions of being with the “real people,” i.e., the poor; the majority claim to be “innocents” and non-ideological, but very determined that they want to help people. No matter the basis of their commitment, however, there is agreement on what they are learning.

Most students complained that a good part of their education includes a highly technical preparation for planning careers. While a few admitted to exceptions, they told of hours of study concentrated on physical and design aspects. On coming onto the “urban turf” they felt inadequately prepared to help people in their neighborhoods in the development of ideas for urban renewal. One startling discovery, they claimed, was “the politics of the thing.” li‘hatever research they turned to, some aspect of governmental decision making was also involved. The whole planning process of the city and its impact on “their communities” was of tremendous importance. They felt they had to know how the government worked in the urban program as much as how to research the housing conditions of individual streets.

One student was assigned the technical job of plotting a proposed highway onto a map. In the process, he accidentally discovered that a bitter con- troversy over its location took place between the departments of traffic and public works, and resulted in a compromise which he felt was really not in the interest of “his” adopted community, nor the best “technical” solu- tion. He brought this information to his fellow students working on other aspects of renewal, who spent many hours trying to understand the sig- nificance of this finding. One result was the development of a self-study program on the governmental system and the political process of urban renewal.

I n another action group the students had spent weeks in one of their hottest debates, on whether planning could be comprehensive. Trained to develop coordinated master plans, they found many aspects of the renewal system a process of incremental adjustments and bundles of compromises. LVhen pressed for examples, they mentioned: the area slated for renewal was cut down in size because of financial stringency; the level of intensity for renewal of apartments was changed a number of times because of tenant resistance to higher rents; their area was selected as the first one for renewal not because it had the worst housing conditions but because it was consid- ered “easier” to carry out the project there than in other neighborhoods. They reported that their “bull sessions’’ could only conclude that these facts were evidence that planning was perhaps “more political than technological.”

Another important lesson they shared was that the living experience in the neighborhood enlarged their understanding of the relatedness of social aspects to the planning process. In one community, a group of students de- cided to prepare an urban renewal program as an alternative to the one proposed by the city’s planners. They busily went about the task of collating data on housing quality, community facilities, parking needs and other

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physical attributes. But, as they worked among the people, they gradually found themselves a t a loss. While much of the area appeared run-down, this was more in terms of their own expectations, which admittedly were influ- enced by their (mostly middle class) backgrounds. They also began to notice a network of social activity which appeared alive, exuberant and healthy, with many residents showing a marked pride for their homes. Similar to Herbert Gans (The Urban Villagers), these young men showed concern about preserving this social cohesion which might be rudely destroyed by their “city-beautiful” drawings for a rehabilitated community. They also lamented the fact that none of them had had a course in sociology.

As future planners, they had learned, as a result of this field work, that they had “more hang-ups” than they ever dreamed, many of which were very different from those of the people they were trying to help. When they first began, several expressed the idea that planning, as a profession, was “value free.” Their educational preparation avoids any consideration of values, with the emphasis on technical expertise. After their field experience, however, there was a consensus that much of the planning game was a matter of values: setting standards for determining what was to be con- sidered substandard; the increased rents-who pays, who cannot afford the raise, who is forced to move; the character of the relocation program; alter- native housing opportunities.

One of the groups found that when residents were told that every house had to have, minimally, a full bathroom, including bathtub or shower, which would obviously cause an increase in rents, they simply refused the standard, urging instead that the community’s public baths be expanded. Accustomed to allocating a certain amount of their budgets for rent, they opted for a more traditional approach, the public bath habit. “Wasn’t this,” they suggested, “evidence of a conflict of values between planners and resi- dents?” They concluded what Paul Davidoff reminded us several years ago, that planners are all advocates of some value, i.e., of some point of view. They were concerned as to who would become the “advocates of the com- muni ty.”

A good number of students in these community projects came to their work in the neighborhood with high hopes of getting the people in the area more involved in the whole business of urban renewal planning. Among them, the more ideologically-oriented especially believed that citizen partici- pation was simply a matter of affording the population opportunities for involvement, and, as a consequence of this participation, the right decisions would be ensured.

The community experience was a revelation for most of them. In one neighborhood, after six months of residence, they could not find any evidence of “community spirit.” Research revealed few formal organizations or clubs. There was a community center, but it was largely for sports which attracted

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primarily the youth. “HOW,” they questioned this interviewer, “can we in- volve the community without some form of organization to begin with?” They exhibited great interest in knowing whether there were similar experi- ences in the United States and what techniques or strategies were available to help in such a situation.

Obviously these action-oriented experiences are providing the students with an enriched training for their profession. It certainly is bringing a highly technical, antiseptic view of planning into congruence with the reality of how things happen. All that one can conclude at this point is that these youngsters will constitute a very different breed of planner.

Editorial Comment

(Continued from page 309)

-The positive 1970 actions in Kansas, Maryland and North Carolina which bring to 11 the number of states providing the governor with execu- tive reorganization authority subject to a legislative veto; and

-Annual legislative sessions now in two-thirds of the states.

These developments at least suggest an awareness of the problem. But more, much more is needed. Joint funding simplification (H. R. 6532), which would facilitate the packaging of grant applications by state and local governments, has yet to be enacted. The Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1971 (H. R. 30) also requires early action. Designed to upgrade the administration of categorical programs and to strengthen the position of top policy makers, this measure establishes the framework for bettering intergovernmental fiscal control systems; i t gives the President authority .to consolidate functionally-related categorical grants under procedures com- parable to those of the Executive Reorganization Act of 1949; it extends the congressional review of grants provision of the 1968 legislation and provides a new means of enhancing the grant oversight capabilities of the executive branch; it also stipulates a clear statutory base for a single catalog of grant programs for use by state and local officials.

All of these efforts, especially those relating to improving the management of the grant system, are necessary if policy makers at all levels-the Presi- dent and the Congress, the governor and the legislature, the mayor and the council-are to be strengthened in a fashion that will permit them to with- stand the mounting, parochial pressures that swirl around them. Top policy makers at all levels must be empowered to plan, pass, implement and fund the vital programs that this and future generations of Americans require. If we fail to correct this imbalance in the system, then popular alienation and cynicism regarding governments can only grow.