“The Bijlmer: the future, as they called it. My past is inscribed in those walls. Yana is me as much as the confine in which my memories are enclosed. I was always interested in the exploration of past and present, of what the word “future” meant for those whom it had been promised to. To me, this future looked bright. It was more than that: at the start, it was hope. It was so different from what I had left in Sofia. I remember… There was a point in which it became clear. It was a loud, invisible crack. In that moment, I knew modernism had died. It had killed itself: I could almost hear its silent “vaarwel”. It wasn’t in the walls, it wasn’t tangible, it wasn’t a gash in the architectural quality of the Bijlmer. It had to do with something that was underneath it all. Monoculture had to be cause of this enormous tear in the social fabric. There was fear… Fear that the world that had been built for us would collapse over our heads. The dream stood: it was holding on to the hope, until there was no hope anymore. When we opened our eyes, what we saw was this enormous void. There was no beginning, there was no end. Modernism was to us just a monotonous collection of repeated entities. Entities: facades, at first glance, but if you looked close enough… there were us. We suddenly found ourselves in the liminal space, whilst what surrounded us now felt like nothing but a deceptive environment. But not everything had been lost: some people still believed in the utopia of globalisation. Some still talk of the multi-ethnic Bijlmer, of themselves as the future. We were estranged, defeated shadows. We were walking on ashes, but we were still standing.”1
1 All extracts of the interview with Yana Dimitrova, Bulgarian artist, are the result of a free interpretation of testimonies provided in regards to her residence in the Estate. She worked on the art project “Future People (‘how modernism killed itself’)” in 2013.
I Love Life, and Life Loves Me 1, Oil on canvas, 25cm x 36cm, 2011
It was during the 1960s that a start was made on what was a daring building experiment. The Bijlmermeer housing complex, inspired by Toulouse’s Le Mirail estates and Sheffield’s Park Hill, was built to ameliorate the post-war housing shortage within Amsterdam. Not only was it supposed to become a model satellite town, it also borrowed the concept-utopia of the “Functional City” from Le Corbusier’s Voisin, which was based on the idea of a separation of the various functions of the city: working, living, traffic areas and recreation. What was going to take shape in the polder land of the Bijlmer was an idealistic car-free city, with 9 to 15-storeys high buildings laid out in a honeycomb grid enclosing open, green spaces. The various types of traffic were designed to be on different levels. There were internal corridors which lead to rooftop car parks and metro channels, there were footbridges and raised roads. Unfortunately, for financial reasons, a number of ideas had to be abandoned, compromising the “quality of life” which was then promised to the future residents.
Inner streets became storage rooms, platforms supported on concrete pillars were placed. Recreational facilities lagged behind the needs, as did public transport links with Amsterdam. In 1968, when the first people moved into the Bijlmermeer, the complex was embraced wholeheartedly both by most media outlets and residents, whilst other critiques saw the new complex as something frightening, of inhuman scale. Soon after completion, it became general belief that the estate’s social problems were strictly linked to its urban design. Structural deficiencies and lack of central amenities led to discredit. Economically weak population groups, including people from Surinam and Dutch Antilles soon replaced the mostly middle-class population living in the “Street of 1.000 Cultures”, as Matthijs Bouw (1999) renamed it. With rent prices rising and the offer of generous subsidies, which were provided in order to deal with continuous rent arrears, the estate became home for those who did not want to live there, but whom had no other choice. The situation worsened with the growth of housing alternatives in the 1970s, with the rise of the so-called suburban “growth nucleuses” and the revaluation and gentrification of nineteenth-century districts of Amsterdam. The Bijlmer faced a tough reality: demand was always exceeded by the supply. Furthermore, community relations, a prerogative of the “functional city”, were discouraged by the continuous inflow and outflow of residents. Critiques and bad press highlighting the high vacancy and crime rates started in mid-1970s, eventually leading, from the late 1980s, to continuous interventions in the built environment. Since 1992, the number of high-rises has been reduced from 95 to 45 percent, and various areas were affected by the processes of transformation and differentiation of building typologies.
It is necessary to ask ourselves whether if it was to the post-war estates' "modernist dream” that the stigma of social failure was to be attributed. Perhaps it's precisely in stigmatisation that we have to seek for answers. The word “Suburbia” was shouted by every newspaper's title, it was hoisted on the residents' head like a flag, whilst all the symbolic negativity and the assumptions derived by the cliché of favelas, of banlieues and American ghettos, with the indestructibility of their meaning, were indelibly being engraved in each concrete slab. Loic Wacquant (1993) talks of a symbolic dispossession: riots, misery, decay, vandalism, crime. Dispossession takes place when your postcode writes your story. Your identity becomes another brick in the monotonous decor of blood-stained walls which host non-identity in the edgy seriality of an architectural plan, which know the exact weight of segregation in the rigid, obsessive geometry of a district with no future. Identity is a related concept, as it reflects the characteristics of a neighbourhood. Kevin Lynch (1960) investigated people's experience of urban spaces and the relation between the appearance of an environment with the concept of identity. Sluis (2003) called identity the way in which different spatial elements in the city differ from each other: the wider the differences, the more landmarks, the more ‘imageability” an area possesses. Postwar housing estates lacked in identity. For Tsenkova (2000), neighbourhoods need an identity of their own, as diversity makes for quality and psychological well-being. Was image change really possible? Was the resolution of a physical problem the way to deal with the intricacy of a problem whose roots were in the invisible fabric of a limping multiculturality? The Amsterdam Planning Department decided to intervene with a spatial renewal. High-rises had to be reduced, with some flats replaced by single-family dwellings with gardens. But failure was still peeking through the enormous bodies of slaughtered Suburbia.
In 1986, alternative solutions were sought. Rem Koolhaas was commissioned a recovery process that did not include a form of demolition, but of “glorification". With irony, he talked of an "aesthetic of tautology: a pedestrian bridge leads to a small hexagonal island in an hexagonal lake surrounded by hexagonal slats”. It was a simple, yet completely new way to see things: OMA decided to preserve that "coldness", the "abstraction" of the out-sized scale of the buildings, the monumental charm of Modernism. Koohlaas' approach shifted the problem's barycentre from the attention to the buildings to the space between the buildings, introducing the concept of “retroactive urbanization” (Koohlaas, 1997) and “archaeological finding”, dodging, antithetically, that of “tabula rasa”. For him, the flaw wasn't to be found in the architecture per se, but in the type of city that is determined by the architecture. It was the enormous void, so extensive and omnicomprehensive, yet so alienated, so poor, so indistinct and impossible to manage. The re-use of Yana's void would have constituted the key to the creation of a functional mixité (Koohlaas, 1995). The new Bijlmermeer foresaw the reuse of infrastructure, the differentiation of public spaces and a new qualitative approach, a diversification apt to intensify the relationship between the parties, the identity, the variety (it was the case of a "typological bombing", with the addition of new residences in towers, patios and ranks). OMA's intuition remained on paper, but it was confirmed in 2002, when the proposed intervention of Greg Lynn was welcomed by Woningstichting Patrimonium. The intervention was based on an increase in the level of urban complexity, on the division of the single block in neighbourhoods and on a differentiation of the housing cuts (Reale, 2012). Perhaps an even better approach can be found in a design which can also directly target social exclusion. If we take into analysis The post-war Hoogvliet estate in Rotterdam, and the approach of the ‘Wimby!’ project (2007), we can see an example of how important it is, for revitalization's successfulness, to give importance to non-material aspect, to the existing mentality and involvement of the residents. The project prerogative was that of reorganizing and enhancing cultural and infrastructural pre-existing conditions, through an analysis and awareness of the “hardware” of the city, therefore of the physical reality, of the ‘software’ (the informal) and ‘orgware’ (the organisation structures). This interlinked communication would help undermining the political substrate of social realities, implementing interventions at a more emblematic, less epidermal level. “There is a compromise between “the informal” and the ambitions of the drawing board, between reality and utopia.”, says Yana. “The Bijlmer was built in the name of something. When it lost sight of it, it lost the battle for its own cause. Architects are demiurges driven by the desire of promoting development, of shaping social relations, but forget about the human nature. When multiculturalism is just ideological, it becomes a metaphor. Sometimes, planners keep it as an ideological reality, and end up not dealing with its consequences. I remember what Mentzel (1989) said: 'The genesis of the Bijlmermeer shows the grandiose contradiction between the values of architects, who wanted to build a city for the future, and the actual demands of residents' ”.