What does a suburb look like in the famously bike-friendly country of the Netherlands? It’s one thing to inherit historic human-scale cities built before cars even existed, but what can the Dutch teach us about building sane suburbs in the modern era? On our recent trip we made sure to visit some newer, lower density residential developments on the edge of Amsterdam and the Hague to see just how they compare to suburbs back home in North America.
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42 Comments
Grownups own cars.
As a dutch person I think this is little blown out of proportion. Our goverment is shit, we have a serious migrant problem, our healthcare is crumbling, everything is freaking expensive and I can name 10 other things. Not everything is good here.
This is what I've always said. Suburbs do not need to be the enemies of good urbanism, they can be the cornerstone and the flagships of urban improvements. But to do that we have to get rid of both the prejudice against suburbs, and the notion that they must be built for cars above all.
But houses have become expensive now.
Why would you not be able to bring up kids in an apartment? I live in a Dutch apartmentbuilding and lots of people are bringing up kids here. Those kids play with eachother on the playgrounds and grass fields around our apartment buildings.
In my experience, the Dutch sub-urban displayed in this video is not all there is. In the 30 some years I have lived here, I have probably moved more than 20+ times to various places in Netherlands. One of them was a sub-urb in Hilversum. Where the street is an avenue (It is actually called that, Pieter de Hoogh*laan*), wider than the collector road it's connected to. Then there are neighborhoods (above middleclass income) in Laren, Blaricum, or especially in Lelystad (Hollandse Hout, Lelystad-Haven) that more resembles American sub-urb with car centric design, with no bicycle lane inside the neighborhood (only at the edges of it), with practically no public transportation, it even have the typical American cul-de-sac's. It's pretty much assumed you are wealthy enough to provide for your own transportation if you live there, as most house hold there do own 2 or more vehicles, parked in front on their own drive way, some gated, some not.
The Bongerd, my neighborhood
Be honest. You mixed it up with some shots of the old neigborhoods to make it look nice. These new 'vinex wijken' are depressing. Soulless neigborhoods.
Hahaha bullshit media…..
amsterdam was buil by the sane, for humans
That looks awful. Just wait until the some criminals move in….and then you will be demanding space.
Thankfully we won ww2 and allowed our bolshevik brothers to seize control and dictate the direction of western society
For many here owning a single car is not an option, I personally know we couldn't get by on two. We actually have 4 including our kid's, lol. With only one or two parking space where does company park, what about if you have a party or get together with multiple people? So whenever you purchase something you may have to carry it a long ways depending on where your parking is? That would be fun with large purchases, or multiple bags of groceries. These neighborhoods seem to dictate and limit how you can live. Our house is on a half acre in town and I look forward to getting out to our camp only minutes away with over 80 acres, I can't imagine being cramped in by surrounding neighbors like in the video. It would drive me nuts. To each their own but living like a hamster in a cage is not a life I would want.
Look at the blind serfs thinking this is life at its fullest.
SMH.
I used to live in a suburban neighborhood in the Netherlands and it’s true that it’s good for the kids playing all with each other. But I was fortunate to get hold of a piece of land to build a new standalone house on which was in just outside the village and way less bike/kid friendly. Though we choose to buy our freedom and didn’t regret it. The “dense” outskirts are born out of necessity rather than being bike friendly. Ask common dutch folk what they prefer if they had the choice and 9 out of 10 would prefer a stand alone house with a large garden. You won’t believe how much arguing there is between neighbors due to the lack of space so it’s definitely not utopia.
I'm an adult living in The Netherlands and I have never owned a car. I can walk to any place I need for my daily needs, most other things are within biking or public transport range. Generally I rent a car 3~4 times a year. Not owning a car saves me a ton of money.
Sadly, in the last few years stupidly large trucks and suv's have become more popular here as well and I really hope the government comes down hard on them. They are dangerous and a waste of space.
In general less cars is more better.
Dutch suburbs suck. There are no shops. Sleeper cities. What is needed is mixed level building, shops and businesses mixed in, public transport, and entertainment. Otherwise everyone is stuck driving in a column in and out of that precious 'suburb' every day. Really bad planning which means the netherlands has some of the worst traffic for such a small country.
This is not a sane suburb, it's a compressed shit sandwich that tries to force human beings to live under FAR below optimal conditions. I'd go so far as to say it's a fair approximation of one of the outer regions of hell. People too close together, forced to live in close proximity to the low income/high crime segment of the population. What can possibly go wrong? Everythinging.
Our much smaller lots and houses are not a totally free choice: it is a necessity. We simply lack the building space in this densely populated country. We could build larger, but that would cost us either a large share of our nature or a large share of our farming land .
With a shortage of roughly 300.000 houses and virtually no room to build them, we have a huge problem. That's why prices are soaring as well.
I want to speak to the point of "value" when it comes to $ per square foot, which no doubt critics of urbanism will point out as to why getting a 600K 5 bedroom McMansion in some random exurb development in a flyover state is a better deal than 600K for a 1/4 of a townhouse in The Netherlands
I don't think that's the metric we should wholly consider when living. It's a symptom of the North American obsession with "value", often disregarding quantity, and the consequences of excess.
TLDR for the cool story below, more space means more time and money spent on upkeep, energy, and potential feelings of isolation/loneliness as well as potential to fill the space with needless crap.
I grew up in mostly detatched single-family homes, but lived in an apartment as a kid while my family had a huge colonial house built to move into. The apartment wasn't great at all, and sure the house was "beautiful" and I have good memories living there. But, there was so much space for four of us, I can only imagine what my mom went through having to keep it clean, not to mention the energy bills and yard upkeep. Ultimately, they wound up downsizing to a much more modest one floor ranch in a denser neighborhood, which had a lot more character, comfort and was less sterile and isolated than the mansion in the exurbs. I never felt claustrophobic or needing more space and could walk to the strip mall, friends' houses, the library and even from school because I didn't have the patience for the late bus.
Sometimes less isn't more – sometimes it's just as much, or, enough.
It looks nicer than it is. Taxes are very high. And 70% disappears. Nobody knows where it's going. The Dutch government loses receipts. The minister "Mark Rutte" forgets everything. And the WEF interferes in Dutch politics. That is not allowed and is officially punishable. The Dutch government also wants farmers gone. If necessary by force. Tristate city must be built in the Netherlands. Those are cities like China. With the social credit system. Cameras everywhere and no freedom. To work against the farmers, the Dutch government has devised a nitrogen problem. It's not there at all. A farmer in the Netherlands has a nitrogen problem and 10 meters across the German border the nitrogen problem has disappeared. It is also difficult for young starters to buy a house, because many young starters still have student debt or there are no houses available. Asylum seekers will get a house. “ We also think Hugo de Jonge”,he is minister of housing, likes cocaïne:
Socialism being push everywhere. Nothing wrong with North American housing until they start banning single family housing.
Housing opening onto a bike paths would give the local thieves easy access to your house.
as a dutchty i see you only showed more modern streets in the netherlands. this is not even 1% of what most suburbs look like in the netherlands.
2:09 i thought you people were joking in the US/Canada. Where the hell are your paths to walk on? The lawn stops at the street
are those cars i see on those streets.
Damn, if you can't pronounce Dutch words, stop, or try harder. Dislike
You could fit our entire country (Im Dutch) multiple times in Manhatten. This will NEVER work in a huge country like the USA. Stop the circle jerk. This country is not perfect. Not even close.
I'm Dutch and part about the housing prices made me want to vomit.
Moronic cough vid rules locked people inside their home. So with apartments… that literally meant… inside; the communal spaces were seen as public and youths there fine. Those with their own home with backyard could hang out there no problem. That is just one more reason why people don't want to live in apartments.
Yup, new neighborhoods basically have all the homes on streets without any through traffic. That frees up the street itself to play on.
15 minute city dystopia
Watching these video as a dutchman feels like a form of masturbation.
Prices for houses hugely depend on where in the Netherlands you are looking for a house. The 'Randstad', the area around Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht is much more expensive than prices in provinces not part of that area.
'a smaller city like Utrecht or Haarlem' These two are still one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands haha! Especially Utrecht, which is HUGE.
As a Dutchie, I'm surprised North Americans like it. I like the much bigger space you guys have.
From my perspective, everything is small. There's no privacy at home, neighbours are so close you hear them (have sex) and smell them (smoke). Everything is small, parking is tiny which leads to parking damage, and houses are expensive because the small lots are very expensive.
The cycling paths are nice, but when cycling with kids on the small roads cars don't give you much space.
The car density here in The Netherlands is actually very high. On a population of 17m people there are almost 9m registered personal cars.
The Netherlands is not only Amsterdam and The Hague…………. It's the most shitty part of the country.
I love the green bathtub mobile at 7.00 minutes: https://youtu.be/nImFJ7KKjAo?t=420What was it called?
Landelijk does not mean rural. At best it means 'not in the center of a city'. Secondly, this isn't American Urban Sprawl but it's still godawful. Find me the patch of grass that'll let the kids in the neighbourhood @4:22 play a healthy game of football. It's all just tiny afterthoughts of greenery with obscene amounts of space wasted on parking and lawns. I live in an area that's shifted to permit more high-rises and the amount of space kids have to play and grow is orders of magnitude greater than any neighbourhood in this video. This is a lesser evil but still evil.
5 years and it'll be a muslim stronghold that YOU cant visit.
8:41 Wow. An annoying cycle barrier in the Netherlands! Don't see many of those.