Questions and Answers: Amsterdam for one day.
Recently I was in Amsterdam. Shortly after arriving I sadly had to leave, for a total of only 29 hours in the city. Long enough, though, to have lots of questions about the place.
These are the questions that came to me, and the answers I’ve been able to cobble together from perusing the internet. Any inaccuracies are likely the fault of my amateur research skills, and I would happily accept, and publish corrections.
I don’t know much about the geography of the Netherlands beyond that it is a low-lying country with an extensive network of dikes, and that most of the country was reclaimed land. Therefore, I wondered if Amsterdam had been built on wetlands, or otherwise marshy ground, and if the canals actually helped to dry the land next to and between the canals. Basically, do the canals of Amsterdam make building in the city easier?
Here’s what I’ve found;
Beautiful Amsterdam / Built on Poles/ Who would pay if it all fell down?
–The Translation of an old Dutch rhyme.
“In the Netherlands, there are more than 7 million houses of which roughly 750.000 are built on wooden piles. It is estimated that in the upcoming decades about 200.000 of these wooden pile foundations need repairing. Problems with this type of foundation are mainly caused by wood-decaying fungi, bacterial degradation, and insufficient load-bearing capacity. If no measures are taken to deal with these problems houses will undergo unacceptable settling and become uninhabitable over time. Foundation repair is essential to prevent this from happening.” — From the Master’s Thesis of Toon Klaver, which I found online. All the best for your career.
The canals of Amsterdam contain a lot of water, all 165 of them, along their total 100-kilometer length, but they don’t drain the surrounding soil of its moisture. The city has a high water table, and if you were to dig a hole it would quickly fill with water.
To reach rock you have to drill to a depth of 400 meters. That’s a quarter mile for you non-metricists. Amsterdam’s houses and buildings are built on poles that are driven through the clay, peat and water beneath them till they reach a layer of solid sand. That first sand layer is 12 meters deep. For a larger building going deeper to the next sand layer at 20 meters, or even to a third at 50 meters, is necessary, and costly.
The piles that are driven down to support a building were historically timber, but pine has now been banned due to its tastiness to insects and bacteria.
Now piles are usually steel or concrete, but whether they’re spruce or pine or a modern material, there are over a million piles sunk below Amsterdam.
Over the years, these piles have sunk deeper at various speeds, and led to cracked streets and stairs, uneven rooflines and whole rows of buildings that are called dancing houses, leaning against each other like drunks in the city’s squares.
So I’ve found that in answer to my question, was Amsterdam built on a wetland, that is a yes, in the same way that most of the Netherlands is a combination of peat and clay and water.
Do the canals make the areas around them easier to build on? Possibly. The canals must draw away some water from the surrounding soil, but the water table is still very high, and no one will be digging out a foundation for a building in Amsterdam by hand anytime soon, at least not without wearing water wings while they do it.
To put it another way, the canals were not dug and then filled with water, streams or rivers did not have to be diverted into them. They were simply dug, and the water was there. The canals are basically a look at what is underneath the city, and it sure is a wet, soggy picture.
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One more question I had was just how many people live in Amsterdam. The city sure does have population density down. Four or five storey dwellings on the older streets are the norm and twenty-plus floor apartments I could see are starting to ring the canal periphery. But for a city that wears its antiquity and 15th-century heritage on its sleeve, just how many citizens can it handle?
I’ve found that the city itself has 811,000 residents within city limits, at a population density of just below 5,000 per square kilometer. That compares amazingly well to New York City’s over 10,000 per square kilometer, considering that the canals are included in that space while containing only 2500 houseboats, and that the city’s structure, layout, and building style have largely stayed consistent for the last 500 years.
New York has had changes in land use and building style as it’s only constant. Listen to the fantastic Bowery Boys podcast for more NYC history than you can imagine. Speaking of imagination, if the city of New York had carried on as New Amsterdam it makes a fun thought experiment to think what a Venice of the US East Coast may have looked like.
But the world itself as it is already a pretty amazing place. While looking into Amsterdam I came across a couple population categorizations that I found interesting. The Netherlands four big cities, The Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, along with a handful of other smaller cities, commuter towns, and exurbs are together labelled as the Randstad.
Together, this collection of individual cities form a megalopolis, a term that’s been used in a variety of ways over the last one hundred years, generally to mean a string of adjacent metropolises that benefit from shared transportation and infrastructure links, and a more mobile population. Of course, a string of major metropoli is not exactly the Netherlands brand, at least I wouldn’t have thought.
On reading deeper though it begins to make a lot of sense. Whether it’s the bicycle superhighways that extend up to 50 kilometers, linking Amsterdam and Utrecht, the Space Coast that houses the majority of the European Space Agency’s facilities that runs down from Amsterdam towards Rotterdam, home of Europe’s largest seaport, the Randstad is able to incorporate advancements and developments that may not be possible for just one city.
The string of urban centers surrounds the Groene Hart, or Green Heart of the Netherlands. This is the country’s primary agricultural area and provides clean air, food and cash crops such as the iconic Dutch tulip, and rest and relaxation opportunities to the city-dwelling population. The farmers and townsfolk of the Green Heart have the reciprocal benefit of easy access to the attractions and entertainments of the cities.
There is an inevitable low-level friction between these two worlds sharing a border however, as a city’s innate desire to grow can conflict with the rural towns and villages sense of autonomy and identity, much less actual land. However the Netherlands has a centuries long tradition of careful and strict land use planning, and so far it seems to have been paying off well. Currently, the megalopolis is home to around 7.1 million people, a number comparable to the Milan region or San Francisco Bay Area.
I’d love to learn more about the Randstad megalopolis, it’s history, geography, and possible futures. When I do, look out for a further piece.
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Finally, I came across an interesting tidbit of far more general information. First, a question. What do you call a corridor of cities that run across Europe, from northeastern England to northern Italy, housing over one hundred million of the world’s most highly-educated professionals and most affluent consumers? The answer is, a Blue Banana.
The name and concept of the existence of this corridor comes from a group of French geographers, and was coined in the late 80’s. I had never heard of this label before, but apparently the Blue Banana became a term in common usage.
Regions and municipalities flocked to be associated with the label, to be part of the arc of industry and productivity that formed the “backbone of Western Europe”. It helped attract investment and could mean a potential capital influx. The borders of the block began to blur and stretch as it’s cachet grew.
There wasn’t a lack of criticism for the concept however. The geographer that led the group that defined the Blue Banana, Roger Brunet, had explicitly excluded Paris and the urban conurbation around it, as criticism for France’s history of over-centralization around the capital and persecution of minorities in the provinces. It also excludes Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, and other similar corridors along the Danube River, and Baltic and Mediterranean coasts. While ruling these large and productive cities as being outside the economic backbone of Europe, it included large areas that are and were sparsely populated, such as the Alps and the North Sea.
It may not be much more than arbitrary lines on a map, although the population numbers do follow such an arc across the continent, but if nothing else, it’s a great concept for imagining a strong belt of industry binding together the European Union. As a new arrival and potentially naively enthusiastic pro-European, that’s a nice thing to imagine. And yes, the Randstad does have a place within the Blue Banana, and that makes me happy.
