IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The Amsterdam Eastern Docklands is an internationally acclaimed harbor regeneration project that includes realizations by West 8, Diener and Diener, Jo Coenen, Sjoerd Soeters, and Neutelings Riedijk. Its urban design reflects various sustainable considerations, integrating not only environmental but also social and economic concerns. Although the success of this redevelopment is commonly attributed to these designers, this paper will highlight the important (and overlooked) role that the area’s residents played in putting sustainability on the agenda of urban politics and design. Operating amidst three socio-political forcefields that in the 1970s and 1980s were closely interwoven – namely an energy-economic crisis, a social crisis, and a raised environmental awareness – Amsterdam residents brought forward concerns of energy conservation, urban conservation and regeneration, environmental stewardship, participation, and the right to housing; together often referred to in Dutch as leefbaarheid (livability). Only from the 1990s onwards the Dutch term for sustainability, duurzaamheid, would become used more frequently, usually to indicate ecological preservation and energy conservation. This paper examines the effects that the ideas about leefbaarheid held by these civic society actors had on the early design phases of Amsterdam’s Eastern Docklands. In doing so, it will provide an account of a site in transit: from urban fringe occupied by marginalized communities to a completely developed new district mostly for the (upper) middle classes and highlight the shifts that occurred in the approach to urban design in the Netherlands, from livable (leefbaar) to sustainable (duurzaam), that may contribute to current understanding of the global sustainability debate and its evolution.