The City of Private Initiative
ReUrba interview Rudy Stroink
19-07-2007 Stipo: Hans Karssenberg
What is the future of cities? Why is it important to invest into cities? What changes should we make in our investment policies in cities? Twelve leading European thinkers about cities answer these three questions.
Here the thoughts of Rudy Stroink: The City of Private Initiative. “As an experiment, we should try leaving most things - or even everything - to the market. We’ve been trying it the other way round for long enough."
The new premises of TCN Property Projects, a company that develops and operates innovative real-estate concepts, reflect the corporate philosophy. The Utrecht city authorities wanted to use the building on the banks of the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal for industry. TCN bought the building and refurbished it. The first thing you notice when you walk in is the café in the hall. Visitors feel welcome immediately. The new offices show what happens if you let the market do the job. “Cities get better if you create more room for private initiative,” believes director Rudy Stroink.
Stroink has a passion for cities. “Cities are fascinating phenomena. I am still an adept of the school of Jane Jacobs, the American publicist and urban activist. She said: ‘The city is not the summum of human evolution; the city is a precondition for that evolution’. In other words: major developments are shaped by the urban fabric.” He believes that urban design in the Netherlands comes from the protestant engineering tradition. It assumes that things are alright with the city if plans are continuously being made. He has very different ideas. And, once again, he quotes Jane Jacobs to support his argument. “She thought you needed a programme first: an economic, social and community structure to give shape to the city. If you intervene in a city, what you make has to fit in with the underlying economic logic. You can only intervene satisfactorily if you understand properly how a city works.”
The top man at TCN is still a Marxist and his political leanings are reflected in the way he works. He is totally convinced that the economy comes first and that people are led by economic motives. The development of the social structure of the city is primarily determined by the economy. “Urban planners and architects believe that the world changes when they make something that pleases the eye. They’re wrong. All you can do is provide the conditions, make adjustments and demand quality. Post-war urban planning and urban development are based on the idea that everything can be regulated on the basis of plans. For example: I think it is mad to restrict shops to the city centres. That approach has led to an impoverishment of the facilities in our cities. City development has to go with the grain.”
“As an experiment, we should try leaving most things - or even everything - to the market. We’ve been trying it the other way round for long enough. Private initiative results in better cities. We daren’t leave urban planning and urban development to the market because we are scared of 19thcentury situations. But there are differences between now and then. At that time, growth was unstructured and explosive. And things that are out of balance always go wrong.”
He believes that there is equilibrium to be found in steady growth. “If you understand the structures properly, lots of things happen automatically. Large, forced interventions cause the biggest problems. For example, the city authorities and project developers have been working for 30 years on the ‘Kop van Zuid’ in Rotterdam. During that time, the city has been paralysed as a result of all sorts of interventions. After all the Herculean efforts, success seems imminent. But a more flexible approach and more private initiative would have resulted in much more balanced development.” He has another swipe at government. “Civil servants are totally convinced that they can rule cities like sun kings. And the result is friction.”
After the Second World War, the Netherlands opted for a strong, controlling state apparatus. Stroink thinks that the investments made have generated terribly low returns. “The worst thing is that the business community has adapted completely to this system because it can’t manage without the government. As a result, there is a lack of creativity in the market and the system has become very technocratic. The government has become a multi-headed monster that is turning into an urban monopolist. That’s not right. Government decides where the buses stop, who receives permits, where land is released, you name it. Everything is governed and planned on the basis of risk management. Caution rules the day. We need to look for the tricky balance between dreams and practical implementation. Let’s stop being careful and start getting exciting!” Stroink is convinced it will happen. “I predict that there will be a political revolution within the next five years. It will turn this risk-avoidance system upside down.”
Stroink is an advocate of strategic plans for government too. “Define your ideal city, describe the quality you want and make sure you get it. The government’s tasks when it comes to making plans are: encouraging urban coalitions, identifying quality requirements and introducing regional structures. People have to be trained in visualising and describing quality. You have to make it possible to talk about quality. You have to tackle different levels of quality: economic, social and cultural.”
In addition, Stroink calls on government to use less constraint and to enter more into a dialogue with the market. He believes that the business community must also establish a clear position of its own and develop itself. “In other countries, governments don’t often say straight out to private players ‘you can’t do that’. Instead, they ask those players why they want to do something and what measurable requirements the government can set for the initiative. The government and the business community talk to each other, and try to find out together which way they should be moving.”
He believes that the idea of the controlled city is a myth. “We are always working on new plans and they spell trouble for a city for 10 or 20 years. We have to learn to develop the process strategically. This is only possible if there is a final quality goal that you can aim for.” Stroink thinks that cities are collapsing under the planning compulsion of governments and the reality that they gloss over. “You can try and make plans for everything, but nothing is as permanent as transience. The entire city is temporary. Cities will never be completed, however hard we work on them.” Stroink nods when we ask whether cities will always be there. “I believe Jane Jacobs when she says that there will always be nodes, places where functions group together. In that view, the city as a whole is a set of interesting locations.”
Rudy Stroink is the director of TCN Property Projects. This company operates and develops innovative real-estate concepts and has branches in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Hungary, as well as activities throughout Europe. TCN Property Projects is one of the leading Dutch real-estate companies. Its distinctive profile is the result of the innovative concepts and creativity it brings to the fields of design, management and financing.
This publication was enabled by ReUrbA2, Provincie Zuid-Holland and the Interreg IIIB programme of the European Union:
This interview is part of a series of twelve, made by Mark Reede, Ellen Weerman, Simon Maas of
ReUrbA and Hans Karssenberg of
Stipo. They interviewed ten leading European thinkers avout cities to be able to write the Statement for Strong Cities, that was presented to the closing conference of ReUrbA and to Danuta Huebner, the EU commissioner for Regional Policy.
