In February 1953, an extremely powerful northwest storm surge combined with spring tide led to serious floods in a number of countries around the North Sea. No country was hit as badly as the Netherlands. In the southwest of the country, dozens of dikes were breached, leading to over 1,800 casualties. At the time of the 1953 disaster, a government-appointed committee was working on an advisory report about the desired future spatial development of the most urbanized western part of the country, a region largely below sea level. Responding to the 1953 disaster, the committee discussed whether urban development in deep polders should be avoided. The conclusion was that what is best in terms of the desired urban morphology should prevail. This is indeed what happened when the government had to make a choice about where to develop new towns (1960s–1980s) and, in the next stage, where to locate new housing estates in and around cities (1990s–2000s). Near floods along the main rivers of the country in 1992 and 1995 opened a window of opportunity for a series of major changes in flood risk management and in spatial planning and design, respectively. A massive program called Room for the River was carried out, which included more than 30 projects designed by multidisciplinary teams of civil engineers, planners, and spatial designers. Parallel and follow-up programs were carried out in which spatial design again played a role. The concept of risk was redefined in law, leading to more stringent protection norms for densely populated areas—again, a spatial turn in flood risk management. When flood risk management started to take a decisive spatial turn in the 1990s, spatial planning began to change as well, becoming more sensitive to issues related to water management and flood risks. One of these changes involved the mandatory use of a water test in (local) plan making. The continuation of the trend to give greater weight to flood risks became interrupted as the multilevel arrangement of planning in the Netherlands started to change from 2010 onward. This was largely the result of the neoliberal ambition to decentralize and deregulate planning. One main effect was that the government no longer took a leading role in locational choices regarding where to build new housing estates outside cities and towns. By the end of 2021, the government-appointed Delta commissioner issued a stark warning that over 80% of the houses that will be built by 2030 are situated in less desirable locations. This and other effects of the downscaling of planning competencies made the government decide to start a trajectory to partly recentralize planning. There are two contradictory objectives, however, claimed by different government departments: the production of new homes as quickly as possible and the ambition to make water and soil leading in future choices. Bringing flood risk management and spatial planning together means that locational choices and the spatial design of localities have to move in tandem.@en

Competence for planning usually rests with more than one level of government in a country which creates multi-scalar or multi-level governance for spatial planning. The majority of the 32 countries in the ESPON COMPASS study had three levels of government, though some have two or four. The distribution of competences differs and there is much change which often involves the abolition or creation of administrations. There are several trends underway: decentralisation or devolution of competences, for example, in Germany and Croatia; regionalisation where there is devolution to sub-national governments, for example, in the UK and in some ways Greece; and concurrent centralisation and decentralisation, for example, in Denmark and Lithuania. Most countries have some competence for national-level responsibilities for planning, even in federal states where the competent bodies are at sub-national level there is cooperation on some issues for the whole country. Spatial planning across functional regions or soft territorial cooperation areas is increasing, most commonly in metropolitan regions, where there are varied arrangements including the creation of metropolitan-level administrations, inter-municipal agreements and voluntary cooperation.@en

Like other countries with large ports, the Netherlands developed a policy narrative to acquire a key position in global value chains starting in the 1980s, through the spatial development of its hinterland logistics complex. The negative environmental effects of logistics, such as landscape transformation and congestion, have increasingly come to be seen as spatial policy problems. The literature on policy narratives emphasizes the importance of balanced trade-offs and learning from alternative views. In this paper, we discuss why the ‘Gateway to Europe’ narrative has remained in place. This paper systematically reviews spatial planning documents, advisory reports and academic papers between 1980 and 2020 to develop a chronology of logistics planning concepts pertaining to economic and technological milestones. It also maps policy influences, aiming to identify underlying causal policy theories on logistics development and its spatial-environmental effects. We determine that critical reports have been structurally ignored, challenges have been outsourced and advocacy coalitions have been unbalanced, increasing path dependency and risking a spatial-economic lock-in. Looking at the ‘Gateway to Europe’, we point to pitfalls in the policy narrative and the policy-learning process, enabling policymakers to avoid them in the future.@en

There is an abundant use of visualisation in spatial planning. This chapter is particularly concerned about planning on the regional level and beyond. On these higher levels of scales maps form the dominant visualisation mode. To fully comprehend and evaluate the content of these maps this chapter first discusses a set of theoretical concepts and considerations under the heading of maps as constructs. This is followed by the main part of the chapter: a discussion about the techniques which map makers seek to use. The main objective of this particular section is to provide a number of tools to interpret and assess the stories told by maps and to look beyond the visual style and seductive image of maps. We round off with the conclusion: the unity of text and maps in (supra)regional planning.@en

Een polycentrische stad, een geheel van keurig afgebakende steden rond een groen hart. Dat is de gedachte achter de Randstad. Hoogleraar Wil Zonneveld laat zien dat het concept Randstad alleen kon functioneren met een nationale overheid die zich actief bemoeide met ruimtelijke ordening. En nu is het te laat. “Zelfs als het zou komen tot een minister van Ruimtelijke Ontwikkeling, dan mag daarvan de eerste jaren niet veel verwacht worden.”@en

Column - In veel landen wordt geworsteld met de bestuurlijke aanpak van regionale ruimtelijke vraagstukken. Moet de bestuurlijke indeling worden aangepast? Zo ja, moet dat voor het hele land worden gedaan? Of zou een nieuwe bestuurlijke indeling zich kunnen beperken tot die regio’s waar de ruimtelijke samenhangen het sterkst zijn, zoals de grotere stedelijke regio’s met hun verstrengelde woningmarkten en intensieve mobiliteit?@en

Column - Werkend aan de afronding van een reader over de Randstad, samen met Vincent Nadin, kwam als vanzelf de vraag op of het Randstad concept vandaag de dag nog enig nut heeft? Bij buitenlandse collega’s is de Randstad behoorlijk bekend, deelsdoor achtereenvolgende edities van The World Cities van Peter Hall en het werk van Andreas Faludi over de Nederlandse planning doctrine. De OECD droeg ook aan deze bekendheid bij door een tijdlang in studies data op Randstad niveau te presenteren. Steden als Rotterdam en Amsterdam, verscholen achter het label Randstad, konden opeens serieus de vergelijking doorstaan met echte wereldsteden als Londen of Parijs. Hier in Nederland, bij veel binnenlandse collega’s en in het Rijksbeleid, is Randstad inmiddels louter een plaatsnaam geworden. Het label world city, gemoderniseerd als metropool, zou enkel op Amsterdam van toepassing zijn. Althans, dat beweren sommige, in deze vestzak metropool loslopende planologen.@en

Column - Bij het onlangs rigoureus opruimen van mijn vakbibliotheek moesten soms harde beslissingen worden genomen. Maar hoe doe je dat? Bij twijfel stelde ik mij telkens twee vragen. Heeft dit boek ooit voor mij betekenis gehad? Ga ik dit boek ooit nog eens gebruiken? En zo moesten, door gebrek aan ruimte, meters boeken het veld ruimen. Het voelde eigenlijk best goed.@en

To address regional development effectively, integrative strategies are needed based on interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary thinking. To prepare professionals for this task it is crucial to look at higher education, in particular regional design education. Three key disciplines which have become separated need to be re-coupled: planning, design, and social sciences. To assess whether regional design education is capable to do so, this chapter first presents a method to make such an assessment possible. This is followed by an application of this method through an analysis of two regional design courses at Master’s level from TU Delft and TU Munich, specifically looking at the underlying pedagogical principles. Two main outcomes of the analysis are: 1) it does not seem to be necessary to have consecutive Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in order to understand and steer regional development; 2) it is necessary to prepare a variety of students from various disciplinary backgrounds for co-creation and cooperation. This leads to a number of follow-up questions, in particular in relation to the admission of students and the assessment of interdisciplinary learning.

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This chapter seeks to unravel the history of the Randstad planning concept and focuses on the national level as a lot of the thinking about the Randstad has been carried out within national planning organisations and trickled down to provincial and municipal planning. It begins with a short section about the very first visualisation of the Randstad which was created in the early 1920s. The chapter explains the gradual marginalisation of national spatial planning from the 2000s when comprehensive spatial planning gave way to project-based planning in which there was less interest in spatial concepts like the Randstad. In spite of the sensitive relationships with sectoral departments, it was the West which became the focus of national planning at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. Efforts to plan the development of the Randstad were seemingly over with the finalisation of the growth centre policy in sight.@en

The climate crisis has grown worse, with impacts more severe, widespread, unpredictable, and what’s worse, not dealt with globally in a meaningful way. The devastating wildfires in Australia in late 2019 and the western United States of America (USA) in 2020 seemed to underscore that consensus, with tens of millions of acres, thousands of homes burned, many lives lost, including an estimated one billion animals. As humans and our constructions - roads, infrastructures, buildings - destroy and invade formerly intact habitats across the globe, species of all kinds interact in new ways. As cities have grown into metropolises, megacities, and city regions, people witness the increasing urgency to plan and manage these behemoths so that their residents can lead healthy&prosperous lives, sustainably. The contribution that regional design makes to resolving these conundrums is to highlight the relatively new arena of governance that comports with the actual spatial scale of urban phenomena now and into the future - the region.

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Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons-as a key strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanization that result from the convergence of several factors highlight the need for spatial strategy formation and application at supra-metropolitan scales. These new conditions include globalization, climate change, booming urban population, increased mobility and interconnectivity, and new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanization today and into the future play out at the urban scale, which is increasingly encompassed in the city-region. The solutions to the impacts and problems that these forces cause must be dealt with by a strategic urbanism at a scale that matches. This scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design. To justify these claims and to understand the origins of regional design and its relevance today and into the future, the master strokes in its history are presented next. After that, we discuss current concepts and practices in regional design. In conclusion, we offer answers to the question: why a resurgence of regional design?.

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The most dominant form of visualization in regional design is mapping. This chapter seeks to unravel why and how maps are used in regional design and what sort of techniques may give maps agency. The chapter seeks to explain how the textual and visual languages of regional design are interconnected, in particular through the use metaphors. The chapter also discusses what may be called ‘cartographic anxiety’: the deliberate search to define a region through clear and exact perimeters. Claiming that this is a sort of dead-end street, the chapter presents various examples of how regions have been mapped and in what way maps have contributed to the acceptance of (new) public norms about ‘possible or desirable futures’. The overall claim of the chapter is that in regional design maps form the hinge between institutional and spatial design. It is for this reason that in discourse analysis there is a need to integrate a proper analysis of the sometimes bewildering visual language of maps.

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This chapter focuses on the nature and powers of governance arrangements in two Dutch metropolitan areas, both situated in the Randstad: the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (Metropoolregio Amsterdam) and the Metropolitan Region Rotterdam The Hague (Metropoolregio Rotterdam Den Haag ). It considers the power of process by analysing the actor network and relations. The chapter deals with an overview of recent international trends in metropolitan governance. It then presents a summary of trends in sub-national governance in the Netherlands. Territorial governance is being redefined in the light of important societal challenges, new powers and responsibilities and new attempts to increase the societal relevance of planning. Metropolitan governance bodies – bodies aiming at organising responsibilities among public authorities in metropolitan areas – are extremely common in most OECD countries. Amidst the economic recession of the 1980s cooperation between the three Randstad provinces picked up again in various domains from 1985 onwards, including spatial planning.@en

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how specific advantages given to cities, for instance trading and taxation rights in medieval times, had a clear influence on the economy of cities and through that, on population growth. It also shows how so-called interaction environments, places for personal encounters and for the exchange of persons, goods (including cultural ‘goods’ like music, theatre or museological productions), capital and information, are today scattered over the Randstad (together forming the Holland Cluster), while at the same time concentrated in the main cities, spilling over in ever larger areas, in particular in Amsterdam. The book concludes that the reputation of Dutch national spatial planning of being effective in containing urban sprawl is unwarranted, or at best only partly justified.@en

The Randstad and polycentric regions generally are not only vehicles to create critical economic mass. The geography of the Randstad is unmistakably deltaic, with expanses of flat open land crisscrossed by watercourses and historic windmills that remain from a former network of more than 10,000. The development of extensive physical and soft infrastructure has since the seventeenth century gone hand in hand with the growth of the economy and international trade. In 2017 the Randstad was the fourth largest metropolitan economy in Europe, after London, Paris, and the Rhine-Ruhr (also polycentric), and before the COVID-19 crisis was experiencing reasonably good growth throughout the later 2010s of about 2.5% per year. The idea of the Randstad as a polycentric metropolis is a consistent feature in the modern history of Dutch spatial development and planning, but there have been many twists and turns. This chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.@en

This chapter discusses the organisational setting of regional design in the realms of spatial planning and territorial governance. As a starting point, it argues that rules on how imagined design solutions function in an abstract, simplified ‘planning world’ are an important regional design product. When focusing on these rules, regional design practice resembles discretionary action. As such, it aims to improve planning decisions by judging the implications of planning frameworks when applied to particular situations. This implies that the involvement of actors in design practice requires careful consideration. As in any form of legitimate rule-building, a critical distance between those who initiate practices and conduct design, and those who judge the quality and relevance of design outcomes is essential. On the basis of these considerations the chapter investigates regional design practices that occurred between the 1980s and 2010s in the context of Dutch national planning. It shows how they transformed from being a form of professional advocacy, criticising planning, into a practice that was pragmatically used to implement a national planning agenda. The chapter concludes by discussing this institutionalisation of a creative practice in the Netherlands, reflecting upon the implications of these outcomes for territorial governance in particular.@en

Wat is schoonheid nog in ons land waar ruimte schaars is en waar de zorg voor een veilige, gezonde leefomgeving met een goede omgevingskwaliteit wettelijk is vastgelegd? Wat is dan goed? En is het goede wel mooi? Door de toenemende complexiteit van opgaven lijkt schoonheid steeds meer impliciet, verborgen in de noodzaak uiteenlopende doelen te verenigen. Niettemin zijn honderden landschapsarchitecten, stedenbouwkundigen en architecten lid van een ruimtelijk kwaliteitsteam of een commissie ruimtelijke kwaliteit. Speelt schoonheid nog een rol in het kwaliteitsgesprek?@en

The objective of this case study is to investigate EU Cohesion policy performance and communication and the impact on citizens’ attitudes to the EU in Limburg, the Netherlands. The case study also contextualises comparative COHESIFY research findings and provides more in-depth insights into the performance and communication of Cohesion policy. The selection criteria for the Dutch case studies included Cohesion policy eligibility and financial intensity, programme types, governance system, European identity (also related to the specific geographical features and experience of cross-border cooperation), and Cohesion policy implementation setting and performance.@en