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Comment by royjacobs | Hacker News Reader

Most photos seem to come from Utrecht, a large city in the center of The Netherlands that has been very busy purging cars from the city center in recent years.

Since you can reach the city very easily by public transport (and is very easy to traverse on foot or by bike) it is quite delightful to be in.

Up until the 1970s there were plans to add a freeway that would cut right through the city. Some of that infrastructure did get built (visible in the photos that now show a canal again) but thankfully they didn't demolish too many historic buildings along the way...

If you are interested in the ways that The Netherlands tries to keep its cities comfortable and reduce car-centricness (car-centricity?) I can recommend YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes".

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Utrecht only the road reverted back to canal. The rest I recognize as Amsterdam or at least not Utrecht.

They did awful stuff there like Hoog Catharijne.

Correct. I grew up in the 80ties in Utrecht. The central station area and its mall (Hoog Catharijne) are / were prime examples of utterly failing city government, planning and architecture. It was hideous even in it's hay day.

Crime, drug abuse etc. were are totally common when I went there to ride my skateboard on rainy days.

Hoog Catharijne is pretty nice these days, I wish we had something comparable in Amsterdam. City centers in the 1980s were not any better in Amsterdam, Rotterdam Den Haag (and I suspect in many other western countries).

I wonder just _who_ were those people making those awful, awful plans. Were they being poisoned by lead? How do they live with themselves.

I think no government is perfect. Probably the people making those awful plans, look now to Netherlands and think about other problems. Maybe people responsible for https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/narco-state-neth... will have problem to live with themselves because of that in the future too..

Someone who might well have met some of those planners once said that "the advantages of privately owned cars are mostly individual, the disadvantages are mostly communal". AIUI in the sixties, city planners in many places tried to bring those advantages to more individuals within their societies. And how do they live with themselves? Well, they were mostly the same people who planned the traffic changes in .nl from the seventies onwards, so I imagine they're mostly quite happy.

It was the new way of thinking. Concrete buildings were modern, old stuff was just old stuff. There was no real insight in what highways would mean, it was all new. In Zwolle similar stuff happened. They tore down an old church for a square concrete building (V & D) and there were plans to have the highway run through the historic centre, which was seen as good for the shops. Luckily that highway was diverted to 100m next to the historic centre. That mayor is now known as the "sloopburgemeester" or "tear down mayor".

It is hard to predict the future, but luckily there is now more thought put into which buildings to preserve. But even then I wonder what whill happen to the ugly buildings of the 1960s, will they all be torn apart, or are there some that we already can see as valuable.

And V&D went bust...

There is fairly sombering website highlighting all the churches that were demolished during these decades in the Netherlands. Often the reason was "stadsvernieuwing" (urban renewal) and at the location of the church, the contemporary church for capitalism would arise - a shopping mall.

http://www.mooistegeslooptekerk.nl/

It’s very difficult to know what will be valued in the future.

In NYC, the World Trade Center was often thought of as an architectural abomination. Two boxes stood on end without soul or character. Once they were gone however (notwithstanding how they were taken down) people had to admit they did have a unique character and were representative of a time and a place.

Again in NYC, the beautiful old Penn Station was destroyed to be replaced soulless office towers and a “modern” sports arena. Train travelers were reduced to a rats nest of a filthy underground station. When the developers came for Grand Central Station the public responded with a hearty “NO!” and it was able to be saved. And yet Penn Station does about double the ridership of Grand Central (and according to Wikipedia is the busiest transport hub in the Western Hemisphere.)

I guess my point is, we’re all trying to do our best — including city planners past and present — and as times change we should endeavor to continue, but cut some slack to the planners of the past and hope those of the future will do likewise with us.

Read The Power Broker. It was Robert Moses who invented the idea of ramming highways through cities, and he did a brilliant job of selling urban planners around the world on his vision (he would wine and dine them at his mansion, for instance).

Another great book on the same subject is The Death and Life of American Cities.

City planning is about managing the interactions of complex functions. It is surprisingly relevant to software engineers!

I hated The Power Broker. It's brilliant, but Robert Moses was SO awful I was grinding my teeth.

Must read, really. But only the once.

Actually for Amsterdam there is a well known example: traffic expert David A. Jokinen, partly funded by the car lobby group Stichting Weg, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan

Fortunately his plans never came to much because of fierce opposition. They are representative of a certain way of thinking at the time though.

I lived in Utrecht, it was nice but I didn’t like how the city is split into two halves via a huge brutalist shopping mall you are essentially forced to walk through. Other Dutch cities can be quite nice and don’t have that same wart.

You can even say Utrecht is split in three - Main city, east of the railway - West...west of the railway - Leidsche Rijn, west of the canal.

I think it's half Utrecht and half Amsterdam. Amsterdam also has been very busy making it's center as car free as possible.

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