Background
One Architecture won the City Alive competition with a proposal for using the 2012 Floriade as a vehicle for transformation. The Floriade, the showcase event for the Dutch agricultural and horticultural industries, takes place every decade in a new virgin location. After the Floriade ends, the location usually forms the basis for a new residential development around a park. The attractiveness of the Floriade resides in its public appeal and its links to both the national character and the national economy.

Our proposal suggested decentralising the Floriade by locating the event in a series of regional projects taking place anyway, linking them through infrastructure. A second component consisted of introducing the event into the urban area, allowing it to relocate a series of bottom-up projects in a loose and optimistic way at a higher level, and providing a more experience-oriented emphasis and new partners. This opens up the way to a generative role in the transformation and regionalisation processes that are taking place. Apart from rethinking the Floriade itself, the proposal suggested a role for the event as a vehicle with the potential to introduce higher-order agendas into bottom-up planning processes.

From a methodological point of view, the proposal addressed the situation in which the liberalisation of planning and an increasingly networked democracy have generated
a meltdown of public-private arrangements, with the various actors still failing to settle on their role a decade later. In this situation, large-scale planning projects - such as the regionalisation of South Holland to establish the South Wing City - are difficult to get off the ground; they are forced to concentrate on infrastructure linking local projects, and are unable to ask the overall cultural questions which are ultimately crucial to their success.

Because the window for proposing this new kind of Floriade had closed, if the implementation of our winning project was not to remain a fiction, we had to look for new territory in which an event could engage a series of disparate projects at a higher level. We found this in South Wing City, which is desperately looking for ways to involve its inhabitants and a USP as a region. We proposed the Eenstad © Building Event (EBE).

Proposal
The Eenstad © Building Event will take place in 2012 at different locations in the South Wing. Including projects that are being developed within the next decade in the EBE helps to reveal the new identity of Eenstad and sets its agenda. Preparations for the projects involve wide-ranging participatory processes. All the projects will be unveiled
in 2012 in a series of events. We worked out this proposal in a short booklet, in which we described the issues facing the South Wing, the essence of its character, the agenda for its future, and the role the EBE can play by formulating a loose protocol, with guidelines based on this agenda, and by providing a framework for action. In addition, we gave a rough description of how specific existing local projects can benefit from the higher-order agenda of the EBE.

Eenstad’s agenda
So far, the development of Eenstad has largely been thought out along the lines of its infrastructure. It is perhaps due to Holland’s permanent amnesia and its belief in the ‘new’ that centuries of tradition of ‘newness’ and the artificial creation of its land have been forgotten. However, if one looks at, for instance, the structure of its economy or the social patterns of habitation, as well as the use of recreational spaces, there is a strong argument to be made that there is a deep, cultural component in the development of Eenstad. In Holland, thinking about the city as a cultural project is not common. In Holland, everything is fluid and influenced by the latest trends, while engineering has become dissociated from the society it serves.

There is, however, a lot of ‘newness’ that can be derived from the Dutch tradition. Many planning issues facing Holland, as well as the world, can be addressed through re-thinking, in a very Dutch way, the relationship between water, agriculture, urbanisation and industry. For example, in order for a region to be globally competitive in a post-industrial world, both a strong identity and ample leisure opportunities, combined in what is now dubbed ‘experience’, are essential. Another example can be seen in the way that the proximity of housing to work promotes a civic spirit in relatively small communities, as expressed through numerous local clubs and organisations. Equally, there is a notion that agriculture and industry have merged in such a way that Holland has become one of the world’s largest food and flower exporters. Thinking about Eenstad as a ‘complete system’ with historical roots, in which water, nature, urbanisation and industry are considered integrally, allows us to transform misconceptions about what is ‘red’ and what is ‘green’ in South Holland. It allows us to discern a ‘regional’ city with a range of variations on these basic components, independent of municipal boundaries. After recovery work and a number of new projects, it will become possible to give this functional and regional ‘daily-urban system’ form and character as a new kind of city: Eenstad©

CITY aLIVE! competition

One Architecture