Fred Feddes

The title of this book is slightly misleading: although there's evidence that people have been living in the area since around the year 1000, you can't really talk about "Amsterdam" until there is a river called the Amstel and someone builds a dam across it near the point where it flows into the IJ. Both of those things happened some time in the second half of the thirteenth century, so Amsterdam can't really claim more than 750 years. But I suppose we shouldn't quibble about the odd century here or there, and the publishers obviously thought "1000 years" sounded better...

What Feddes is doing, anyway, is not so much giving us a history of the city as using it as a case study, in a kind of semi-coffee-table format, to illustrate how ideas of what cities should be, and how they should be organised spatially, have evolved during modern European history. And Amsterdam does make a good case-study: it's a city that's always been a wonderful mixture of organic development and strict planning, from its very earliest days. Feddes takes us through the city's development: the medieval core around Dam Square and the Amstel, the famous concentric arcs of canals built round it in the 17th century, the 19th century ring around that, the arrival of the railway and the North Sea Canal, the new suburbs of the early 20th century and the famous General Plan of 1934, the tempestuous squatter-wars of the 1970s, right through to today's megalomaniac office corridor along the Southern Axis, the North-South Metro and the string of new apartment-building islands in the IJ. All with more pictures and maps than anyone could possibly ask for.

Feddes is particularly interested in how the process of planning works, what it's for, and how ideas about both of those things have changed over the course of time. Sometimes architects seemed to be in charge, sometimes capitalists, sometimes engineers, and occasionally politicians. Very occasionally — but increasingly towards the end of the 20th century — someone would think to ask the people who lived there, or intended to live there, about what they needed. Because the Dutch are generally pretty good at that sort of thing, the experts very often got it right, and (at least as Feddes sees it) there were few really spectacular miscalculations. The overambitious 1960s high-rise development of the Bijlmer is the most famous of these, of course, but Amsterdam was by no means the only city to make that particular mistake at the time.

In between the broad-brush history and theory there are plenty of interesting little bits of detail, explorations of particular neighbourhoods or buildings that happen to have been recorded by artists or photographers at different times over the years. And I loved Feddes's discovery that the photographer J M Arsath Ro'is, who documented most of the city expansion projects of the fifties and sixties for the municipal archives, always managed to get his moped into the picture somewhere...… (altro)