The post-industrial city

2018
Amsterdam- NL

Frame
Academic project

Tutors
Jandirk Hoekstra, Niké van Keulen

Every year, 10,000 new housing units are required to meet demand in Amsterdam. The protected natural areas surrounding the city inhibit its expansion, so it is necessary to reconvert and densify the existing city. These transformations will soon reach the outskirts of the city.

What if we, as residents, politicians, or developers, broaden our perspective to the metropolitan scale? The port is one of the last areas to be reconverted. It is a unique space where multiple areas are already interconnected. For example, to the north of the IJ, numerous industrial and port areas date back to the last century. The size of the buildings, the different atmospheres, and urban typologies form a diverse and rich fabric of meaning.

It is these qualities that I preserve to transform the industrial port of the Archtersluispolder into a new living space connected to the Amsterdam metropolis: a post-industrial city. Its raw industrial and port fabric already has the capacity to accommodate 9,000 inhabitants, and it is also composed of a multitude of open spaces.

For this project, we start from the block: the existing industrial fabric is preserved, transformed, and requalified into living spaces, while the structure of the blocks is rationalized, delimited by new buildings. At the neighborhood scale, it is the network of public spaces and streets that will link the spaces together. Finally, at the metropolitan scale, it is the surrounding landscapes that cling to and infiltrate this transformed fabric, from street corridors to urban or natural public spaces, reaching even into the interior of the blocks.

Landscapes and urban frameworks strategically come together here over time to form a multitude of connected spaces where remarkable buildings, mobility axes, parks, and squares link and punctuate a part of the city that has managed to retain and elevate its industrial past identity.