The Amsterdam Defence Line was built around that city in the 19th century in accordance with the age-old Dutch tradition of using water as a means of protection. My project uses the defence line as a structuring principle for tackling current briefs in the Amsterdam region. The region is essential to the city's functioning. The city of Amsterdam has accommodated itself to economic and social change; not so the Amsterdam region. The countryside is scarcely earning its keep and looks likely to fracture in the face of urbanization. To compound matters, there is a major water storage problem and the region is ill-equipped to meet the rising demand for recreation. The defence line is ideal for guiding the necessary spatial changes in the landscape of the north wing of the Randstad conurbation, since it adheres closely to the underlying landscape. The brief seeks to resolve the water storage issue and channel the social and economic processes so that city and countryside can join forces the way they once did. The strategy to implement this brief is based on local plans as these offer the best perspective for accomplishing it successfully. The challenge is then to integrate these local initiatives at the regional level into a smoothly functioning whole. To safeguard this double strategy, I have developed a toolbox for this project whereby different themed maps are superimposed to denote the type of nature, texture of buildings and level of water storage that can and should apply to a particular polder. This produces a patchwork quilt of polders with local treatments that still add up to a lucid regional structure.

Each of the constituent elements of the defence line has a role to play when working up this strategy. The Amsterdam Defence Line is composed of a principal water line flanked by inundation fields and shot through with accesses guarded by forts. My designs takes as their departure-point the polders on the inner and outer sides of this principal line. The designs I have made for these polders show that they can be used for a combination of water storage, dwelling, recreation and nature without forfeiting their intrinsic qualities. The principal water line is the supporting structure tying all the individual projects together like a green ribbon round the city. My design proposals for the accesses use small interventions to strengthen the urban-rural link-up, with the forts pointing up these accesses and marking the city bounds. By these means, the Amsterdam Defence Line will be much more than just a cycle route through a historic landscape, which is what the province of Noord-Holland is now proposing. Rather, it will become the structuring principle that ties together today's relevant briefs with the history of the place and serves as an underlay for the new ring of metropolitan Amsterdam.

Place of education: AvB Rotterdam | Specialization: urban design | Tutor: Rob van der Bijl