Making space and preserving Space

Making space and preserving Space

Verbrugh, T.A.A.

Van Dooren, E.J.G.C. (mentor)
Gremmen, B. (mentor)
Vanstiphout, W. (mentor)

Architecture and The Built Environment

Architecture

Design as Politics

2014-11-04

In six years from now the Netherlands will change. After decades of economic growth and decline, the labour force will decline as a result of the aging of the Dutch society. The decreasing labour force means a stop on the demand for office space. This is in itself not a problem, however the Netherlands has a heritage of vacant office space about four times the country of Monaco. In the meantime parts of the Netherlands are shrinking, on the borders of the country and in the South, and other parts are booming, especially the Randstad. In the Randstad this means a decline in labour force (apart from Amsterdam) and a higher demand in housing. In a land filled with vacant office space this could be the first chance to grow the city within it’s borders instead of ploughing acres of greenfield for a new VINEX-neighbourhood. The practice, is unfortunately, different. On the one hand companies, developers, architects and contracts are building new offices in the centres of the Randstad and on the other hand municipalities are still ploughing acres of land to house their inhabitants. Politics, money and land policy propels this process. This thesis proposes this system and tries to take advantage of the now useless vacant space. Furthermore it shows that with less investment than ploughing acres of green-fields, the Netherlands can house it’s inhabitants without loosing the quality of living in a new house with a garden. To analyse this current short-sightedness of planning in the Netherlands, the municipality of Rijswijk is selected as a case study. With the mono-functional business park the Plaspoelpolder and the plans to build a new neighbourhood for 3500 homes 1 km away from the business park, it gives a perfect example. Through a multi-disciplinary research a (spatial) strategy is applied that focuses on the rejection of Rijswijk-Zuid, the reuse of the vacant load-bearing structures and the quality of the dwelling within these vacant structures. The aim is to provide a different perspective on how Dutch municipalities cope with the question of housing and, if they are, with the (spatial) problems of vacancy in office space.

preserving space

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4dd5efd3-b66c-42fe-8190-92d0f7751e3a

2014-11-04

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Verbrugh, T.A.A.