- Private Initiatives in Housing Developments in The Netherlands and the Role of directed urban Design    274 kb by    Tisma, Alexandra & Bijlsma, Like & Dammers, Ed | tisma@rpb.nl    Short Outline Private initiatives in housing developments are a growing way of building in the Netherlands. During the last 100 years municipalities and developers have determined how the houses should look like - hence these changes lead to procedural complications. Abstract The Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research conducted a study about the growing private initiatives in housing developments, which is a development where individuals own the land and decide with which parties they will design en build their own homes. Until the end of the 19th century the physical structure of the most historic city cores as well as rural settlements were determined by this way of building. However, in the twentieth century private housing developments became a marginal way of building, especially in the big cities. The main reason lies in the increasing dominance of real estate developers. Since the end of the 1990s however, private initiatives in housing development are growing, due to government programmes to stimulate these initiatives. This form of building offers dwellers possibilities to better fulfil their own particular wishes. At the same time there is a strong tradition in the Netherlands to control urban developments. For this many laws, regulations, procedures and instruments are applied by municipalities and their services in order to guarantee citizens certain level of environmental and aesthetic quality. The interaction between the common and individual interests has lead to specific local organisation forms of building procedures, which we refer to as ‘directed urban planning’. This paper presents three cases of private initiatives, each of them being different in the extent and the way the developments were directed. Those are a part of the Borneo island in Amsterdam, Garden city “De Vijfhoek” in Deventer, and the collective private housing developments in the municipality Bladel in the province of North Brabant. Keywords private housing, directed urban planning, Borneo Amsterdam Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper