Stoere Houtman / Presikshaaf Arnhem

This post-war housing area is different: most of the inhabitants own their house or apartment and this can clearly be seen from the street. A mosaic pattern of various colours and materials is differentiating each and every ‘personality’. Every private garden contains a different shred; every entrance is individualised by a romantic green canopy, colourful post-boxes and lightings are completing these worlds.

An adjacent site, containing a school, was going to be transformed into a new housing area. A double question was therefore resulting from this new circumstance. How could the neighbourhood committee get involved into a new architectural project on the one hand and how could this existing neighbourhood re-define its own cultural identity in order to provide a self-developing structure – or self-structuring development - through the same project on the other hand? As such a win-win situation could be the result of this action.

The specific neighbourhood-characteristics were registered, analysed and reformulated in order to build up a story-layer for the future housing scheme and formal elements were transformed into urban components. This design process was successfully co-produced with members of the neighbourhood committee. Through the ‘civilised’ glasses of the concerned city-administration however, the process needed an ‘image-quality-plan’ (a very Dutch planning-instrument) first. In this so typically ‘classic’ plan, the original clear and modernistic street-pattern was praised again; as just one example of an urban vision denying people’s input.

Our approach was easily buried after this action. The neighbourhood committee is actually still fighting against