A Dutch City Makes Room for Its River and a New Identity | Hacker News Reader

A Dutch City Makes Room for Its River and a New Identity

citylab.com

66 pointssolidangle26 comments

One thing I noticed and admired in many European cities is a sense of their place in history - not just awareness of the past, but appreciation for the future. I've never felt that in the cities of my home country Australia, where projects always feel like they meet a current need but will require re-doing in the future.

The best example I saw was the Plaza Mayor (town square) in Salamanca, Spain - there were commemorative plaques on all four walls of the square to great Spanish figures through history, but rather than fill all the spaces many were left blank for great figures from the future.

This project feels to me that it's taking a similarly long-view for the town.

Your comment about leaving empty spaces for the future reminded me of the ANZAC Parade war memorial in Canberra, Australia -- empty spaces have been left there for possible future wars.

(See e.g. the "north-to-south" table of memorials in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANZAC_Parade,_Canberra)

And the new Snowden, Assange, Manning statues in Berlin: http://m.euronews.com/en/305239/

Although this one is more explicitly symbolic.

Note, that's Alexanderplatz; there's all kinds of stuff there all the time, but none of it is permanent.

"The epic film “A Bridge Too Far” was about fighting in Nijmegen. [...] a local university that specializes in research. [...] The Waal is Europe’s busiest river, [...]"

Nice article, but hat's not its strongest paragraph. The bridge in Nijmegen was one of the goals of operation Market Garden, but the "bridge too far" was 15 km or so further North, in Arnhem.

Also, a "university that specializes in research"? Don't all universities do that?

Finally, some context for those who wonder why they haven't heard about "Europe’s busiest river": if you gave people a map showing the delta of Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt that doesn't show names of waterways and told them where the Rhine enters the Netherlands, I bet most would guess the Waal is where the Rhine flows because over 70% of the Rhine's water enters the Waal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhine%E2%80%93Meuse%E2%80%93Sch... has a fairly good description.

Thechnkcally, the Rhine flows to the North Sea over the 'Oude Rijn' (Old Rhine). The Wikipedia page doesn't even show what fraction of the Rhine's water flows there because the river Rhine has been dammed of for centuries (since 1122. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaartse_Rijn#History). Effective water flow there is less than 10 cubic meter per second. The Waal normally has 1500 cubic meter per second. This design prepares it for ten times that flow.

Many schools do not do research, just teach. Perhaps that doesn't fit your definition of university, but it is not in the "dictionary" definition for what its worth. https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=define+university

I always get annoyed when people think the point of University's is 'pure' research. There are plenty of pure research organisations out there, the point of undergrad is to teach and the point of Doctoral programs is to teach research.

Universities exist on a continuum between two extremes: research and teaching.

Caltech is an example of a pure research university. It has a relatively small number of students at 2,209, with more postgraduate students than undergraduates (1,226 to 983) and 3 students per faculty member (including research scholars).[1][2]

The California State University system is an example of a (relatively) pure teaching university system. It has 7.4 undergraduates to postgraduates (392,951 to 53,229) and 20 students per faculty member.[3][4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_Techno...

[2]: http://www.caltech.edu/at-a-glance/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_University

[4]: http://www.calstate.edu/pa/2013Facts/documents/facts2013.pdf

The large brick building being moved is on Self Propelled Modular Transporters. Those are the current answer to moving big things on land. Each unit has four, five, or six sets of wheels. All wheels are powered and steerable in any direction and have powered jacks for their load. Any number of units can be ganged together to produce a big moving platform, controlled by computers to move or rotate in any direction.

That brick building is a small job for this approach. Mammoet sometimes gangs hundreds of those platforms together for big jobs.

For those interested: http://www.mammoet.com has plenty of examples. Not only for the "toys for boys" stories and videos, but also as a nice example of marketing. Their message is not that they do heavy lifting, but that they move time ("Moving large and heavy objects is how we serve customers. We really make our customers excel when we move time. With smart solutions, we safely and professionally move deadlines forward, improve uptime and reduce cost of ownership.")

When I lived in Nottingham, a bridge for the new tram line will cross over one of Nottingham's busiest roads so the bridge, weighing more than 1,000 tonnes, was built next to the road. Then one Friday night the road was closed and Mammoet moved the bridge into place.

I was one of the people who went to watch.

Here's a news article which includes a timelapse video

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-2432248...

Tapei and San Jose, CA have done similar river-widening projects, without the island. Both have parks along a river flood plain, parks that are intended to be flooded during unusually wet periods. Taiwan's riverside park [1] is on both sides of the main channel of the Tamsui River. The edges of the park have high walls to protect the city. Guadalupe Park and Gardens in downtown San Jose[2] is a smaller example of the same concept. In both cases, the parks will take damage when flooded, so they only contain things that can handle flooding or easily replaced.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Taipei,+Taiwan/@25.030306,... [2] http://www.grpg.org/river-park-gardens

I'm impressed by the cost. Remodeling a city and building 4 new bridges for approx 10% of the cost of the new east section of the Bay Bridge...

California isn't really a shining example of efficiencies in public expenditures.

Who owns the island? "New land in Europe" is a very strange thing to hear given our modern concept of property rights and land ownership originates there.

I think of all countries the Netherlands will have worked out the legal side of creating new land - haven't they been doing it for about 1000 years?

The area already had an owner, just like one can own a pond.

Also, I doubt there is much new land here. This project is widening the river bed, so it's more giving back land to the river than claiming new land.

Private ownership of land in and around the cities is not common in the Netherlands. The ground is leased from the local government. When the lease is up, the owner (usually local government) has the right to refuse to renew the lease, and automatically gains ownership of any property you have built on it. They may offer to lease the land to you again, or lease it to someone else and sell your property at current market value, or they may force you to tear down anything built on it at your own expense.

I looked up the English term for this system, "Emphyteusis". The fact that I've never heard of it before indicates that it's probably not a common concept.

>Emphyteusis

That sounds similar to the freehold/leasehold system that exists in the UK. In this the owner of a piece of property can sell a leasehold, which is the right to exclusive use for a set period of time (nowadays it is usually 999 years for residential property, but 99 years used to be common). At the end of the leasehold ownership rights revert to the freeholder. This was very convenient for landed nobility, who could re-sell the same land every couple of generations. The Duke of Westminster did very well out of it.

The right of a leaseholder to force sale of the freehold to themselves was introduced a few years ago, so this system will slowly fade.

> Private ownership of land in and around the cities is not common in the Netherlands.

This is only partially correct. Private land ownership exists (and is the dominant form) in many cities in NL, but there are a few prominent ones where 'erfpacht' (still) exists. In quite a few cases the annual fee can be bought out for a lump sum for a couple of decades or even for ever.

It looks like most of the 20 or 30 largest cities have such a system, even if most have plans to phase it out, that will be a process of decades.

The lease is normally bought for a period of 20 to 40 years. When that period is up though, the county can and sometimes will refuse to renew the lease if they can sell the ground for a higher price to someone else, or if they want to change the zoning of the area. Home owners don't always consider this risk, they just buy the property, along with the lease, from the previous owner.

This isn't a great tragedy if the ground happens to be a sports field or a petting zoo, but not so long ago there was a tragic case of a man who lost his home because the county refused to renew the lease. The county decided to split the property, partitioned his home and sold half of it to someone else. His ex wife was allowed to rent the other half of the property from the new owner of the lease.

This case was in the news, because after losing a lawsuit and a series of appeals, the man lost the house he had bought, with a mortgage largely paid off, and all he had to show for it was a bill for removing improvements he had built in the yard. After exhausting all legal options, he decided to undo the partitioning of his former home with a sledge hammer, which landed him in the papers (and probably in jail) as the crazy ex husband with the sledge hammer.

edit:

http://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:R...

Did the city buy the house from him at market value or did he just get a really raw deal?

I like the policy in principle, though, makes sure you don't get quite the landed elite you would get otherwise.

As far as I can tell (from trying to parse Dutch legalese), the owner of the land, county Soest in this case, gained ownership of everything built on the property when the lease was nullified. The way mortgages work in this country, the man with the sledgehammer would still be responsible for repaying the loan in full, even though he was no longer in possession of the collateral.

If I had known or fully grasped all this years earlier, I would never have bought a house!

Vienna, Austria, has built such a channel+island 30 years ago en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donauinsel

If anyone hasn't yet played the original Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far, it's an absolute cult classic game with TCP/IP multiplayer support that centers on this area of Holland - highly recommended.

Something similar is cities that have begun "daylighting" their rivers which were converted into little more than concrete drainage canals.

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