Planning doctrine and post-industrial urban development: The Amsterdam experience

Urban planners have to develop a planning doctrine (Faludi and Van der Valk 1990). This concept stands for a body of thoughts concerning (a) spatial arrangements within an area, (b) the development of that area; and (c) the way both should be handled. To be successful, they need a planning community (planners, top officials and sub-national establishments for political support) that nurtures it. The planners of the Amsterdam General Extension Plan (1935) developed a doctrine that covers three levels of functions and activities: (1) Amsterdam is a regional centre, a closed functional system, an orthogenetic city. (2) a monocentric urban form and (3) homogeneous neighbourhood communities around a common neighbourhood centre (church, school, medical services, shops). Since the early 1970s Amsterdam has become (1) an international centre, a heterogenetic city, part of a network city system, (2) has developed into a polycentric urban region, and (3) has been acquiring ethnically mixed quarters, divided communities losing their basic function as common neighbourhood centres and even as 'control areas' or 'domains' (Hagerstrand 1970). So in Amsterdam the planning-doctrine was not particularly successful.