How can a new motorway mean a boost in quality for the spatial planning of peri-urban areas? This scheme made for the area between Rijswijk and Delft on the A4 extension seeks to answer this question. The Department of Roads and Waterways tacitly constructed the road to a design that was great in 1967 without stopping to think what the road might mean in the spatial planning of today. This response has engendered a veritable sewer of traffic that fractures the city periphery into so many unserviceable left-over spaces.

Four model schemes illustrate the developed principle of intertwining and cross-pollinating. A high-grade green network compensates for the motorway's presence and generates conditions for a new urban milieu in the city's periphery. Its potential consumers are the local inhabitants plus the 150,000 motorists roaring by. Here, then, a cross-pollination obtains between local and national/global scales.

The intertwinement principle for one of the four slipways, the Harnaschpolder intersection, was worked out in detail. A mega acoustic 'wall' a full kilometre thick repels traffic noise from the A4 which cleaves the wall like a canyon. Thousands of courtyards perforate the acoustic wall, acting as exterior space for the houses incorporated in the wall. With its roof of semi-public greenspace, the residential estate is part of a green zone linking the coast and the Green Heart of the Randstad. Filling stations and a shopping mall at the intersection with its dive-unders, also do duty as the centre of the estate. The proposed intertwining of motorways and wildlife/recreation areas shows similarities with the traditional Volksparken (people's parks) of the nineteenth century. These used picturesque staging and a cleverly crafted system of pathways to simulate a small patch of nature in the city. If more peri-urban areas were to be infilled using the developed principles it might produce a 'people's park' of the twenty-first century with the motorways as the pathways, and an interlacement of fringe areas with the fuzziest of lines drawn between dwelling, working, travelling and leisure.

Place of education: Amsterdam
Specialization: landschapsarchitectuur/landscape architecture
Tutors: Berno Strootman, Rients Dijkstra & Wilfried van Winden