Ypenburg : veroverd op de zee, van vliegveld tot woonwijk

This is a kind of Festschrift commissioned by the project management team to mark the completion of the new residential suburb of Ypenburg on the eastern side of The Hague. This development, started in 1998, was part of the big expansion of housing foreseen in the Dutch government’s celebrated “VINEX” policy briefing note of 1991.

While part of the book consists, as you would expect, of planners and architects patting themselves on the back, the editors have chosen to put the emphasis on the prior history of the area, which actually turns out to be quite fascinating — as most local history is, when it’s well done. The early chapters discuss how the land was formed in the aftermath of the last ice age, the remains of a Stone show more Age settlement that archaeologists discovered during the construction of our shopping centre, the transition from sand dunes to peat bogs and then the gradual human exploitation of the land for agriculture and peat extraction from medieval times onwards. This is all very much the story of anywhere in the low-lying land behind the coast of Holland. In the eighteenth century some rich family from The Hague builds a country house (now lost under a highway intersection) and gives it the name “Ypenburg” because of the elm trees on the property.

In the twentieth century the story takes a slightly more unusual turn: a local businessman buys up land to create an airfield, which soon becomes popular with sport pilots and sees occasional commercial use. In May 1940, it becomes the scene of a failed airborne landing by German forces, a minor Dutch victory that delayed the surrender of the Netherlands for long enough for the government and queen to go into exile. After the war the airfield tries to re-establish itself commercially, and is the setting for some very popular air-shows, until it is taken over by NATO during the Cold War, used mainly as a (reserve) transport base and for VIP flights. An important aircraft repair and maintenance facility is set up on the site by aviation entrepreneur Frits Diepen (later part of Fokker). Diepen also ran a charter airline, an air-taxi service, and all kinds of other businesses.

After the abandonment of the site by the military — and the overdue clearance of unexploded WWII ordnance — it becomes a VINEX suburb and a famous playground for urban planners, with a bewildering range of more and less successful architectural innovation. Most of it very pleasant by the standards of what passes for urban planning in other countries, but some just weird…

Inevitably, a rather self-satisfied sort of book, and with some terrible layout choices by the graphic designers, but much more information-dense than I was expecting. show less