Social Cohesion In New Town Dronten

Abstract

Halfway through the twentieth century, the Netherlands started draining the Zuiderzee in the middle of the country, to create the province Flevoland. Flevoland consists of three parts, the Noordoostpolder, Southern Flevoland and Eastern Flevoland, where among others the town Dronten is located. Nowadays, the municipality of Dronten counts over forty thousand residents, though eighty years ago this piece of land was nothing more than a stretch of seawater. Even before the land of Eastern Flevoland was fully reclaimed, designs for its layout were being made. The first concrete plans of building ‘new town’ Dronten started in 1958 and a few years later the first houses were built on a freshly reclaimed piece of land. In this implemented plan, municipality Dronten consists of only three towns: Dronten, Biddinghuizen and Swifterbant. Initially, however, there were other plans where the municipality of Dronten would consist of multiple small towns, in Dutch called kernen, around the centre Dronten. Due to changes in mobility and experiences of other projects, these plans developed.

Creating freshly reclaimed land into a municipality and multiple towns is quite a unique situation. Since this was the case in Flevoland, a new piece of land without any history, people came from all over the country to start a new living environment and community. Starting a new society gives accordingly the opportunity to do things completely different, whether the possibility exist that new residents take old habits and values with them. Therefore it is interesting to gain more insight in how issues such as social cohesion are taken into account by the planning, designing and development of a new municipality and a town such as Dronten. Based on this topic, the following research question for the thesis arises: To what extend is social cohesion recognisable in the spatial planning and urban designs of the period 1950 until the 1980 of municipality and ‘new town’ Dronten?