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For decennia, the rim city metropolis of the Randstad and its green agrarian heart counterpart have maintained planners and urbanists head locked over conservation and urban development issues. The need is for an all-encompassing vision that addresses this synergy issue. The metropolis and its agrarian core balances the needs for sustainable growth of the whole region, one cannot exist without the other. Randstad is already self-sufficient in areas like water management, drinking water facilities, energy, and food production, this mosaic of high standard living and working conditions characterizes the further development of the region.
The vision for the master plan Hollandstad addresses the main ecological dilemma’s that have recently gained scientific interest, and combines the needs for economic and infrastructural growth, formulating a new approach in sustainable urbanscape. In this brand new future, water bound transportation and fresh water basins gain a predominant role functioning as catalyst for revaluating the green structure and strengthening the co-existence between city and landscape.
A vertical corridor is drawn up at the center of the master plan. The wet axis, a culmination of fresh water lakes and sacrificial seasonal flood water storage basins, opens up new waterways between all the urban dense areas within the Randstad. The intervention will result in a new balance between growing transportation demands and water management concerns constituting a shift of the logistic network inside the green heart. At the barycenter of these new infrastructure resides the WExpo (Wet Exposition): a new center for the knowledge industry, logistics and production.
The emphasis of the Hollandstad master plan lies in strengthening the concept of the inverted metropolis. In order to understand this concept, a comparison needs to be drawn to the conventional metropolis that typically comprises of a dense urban core and agrarian production at its periphery. Whereas the metropolis of the Randstad which is made out of the four major cities in the Netherlands, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, follows an rim shaped cordon signaling the borders of the resulting agrarian landscape. Hollandstad represents the new synergy between different types of landscapes, agrarian land becomes diverse providing leisure, tourism, workspaces, and production. The inverted metropolis becomes fully self-sufficient while maintaining a high standard of living for all its citizens.
Big city traffic problematic becomes alleviated by the introduction of the wet axis promoting commuters to take their business further into the heart of the metropolis using sustainable means of transportation and encouraging the development of the WExpo. This will be facilitated by the introduction of passenger ferries that run alongside the road and railroad infrastructures. Intermodal transfer stations near transportation hubs will permit a smooth transition to other means of transportation enabling a thorough public transportation reach.
Hollandstad offers an alternative view to the outcome of the perpetual struggle of the Dutch in preventing habitat loss to land prolapse and soil salination. Re-introducing water to the age old reclaimed land may seem as an un-Dutch approach, co-existence with nature has always prevailed in the country and is proven to be the best line of defense against the elements. In this respect, Hollandstad offers a window view to the varied forms of landscape adaptation facing its rural communities. Finally, the urban intervention of the city of Gouda functions as a work case scenario for different communities that will gain a new waterfront.
Functie Parallel Cases – International Architecture Biennale 2012, Rotterdam
Team PAN Architects, Fontys Academie voor Bouwkunst
Status Winnaar
Jaar 2012
No Made | Prijsvraag | Winnaar