Not only in France, but in every country of Western Europe, cities like these can be found, and to millions of people these cities are home. Every social-democracy followed the example set by the English New Towns immediately after the war, relying on decentralized planned cities, with large quantities of public housing arranged in overseeable neighborhood units to counter the housing shortage and social unrest following World War II.

In Holland this strategy led to a harmonious, orthogonally organized postwar landscape, designed mostly by Dutch CIAM members. Though they were highly praised and published at the time, now these cities are only in the news when being demolished. In the next few years some 100,000 dwellings from the postwar period will be demolished in the Netherlands and replaced by something new. When the figures include the former Soviet allies in Central and Eastern Europe, they are even more impressive: here 70% of the population lives in postwar neighborhoods or new towns. It is estimated that the renovation of these Plattenbau-areas will take about 350 billion euros. This will mean employment for 16 million people, as the German newspaper Die Welt estimated last year. So all over Europe the future of the postwar city is being reconsidered. The scale, as well as the economical and social implications of these operations will be enormous.

Since 1999 our office has been working on the renewal of the New Town Hoogvliet near Rotterdam. It gave us the chance to break the architectural historian’s mold of ‘thinking’ and ‘writing’, and just do it ourselves, in a real project, in a real place, in real time. We have called this project WiMBY!, Welcome into My Backyard! It has an annual budget of approximately 1.5 million dollars, partly financed by the government, and for the other part by the stakeholders in the urban renewal of Hoogvliet, the housing cooperations, municipality and developers. The project aims to realize a significant number of experimental projects amidst the ongoing renewal of Hoogvliet, thereby creating a livelier, existing and urban future for this worn-out sleepy city.

The awkward position of WiMBY! in the renewal of Hoogvliet can only be understood by realizing that Holland has changed significantly in the last decade. The strong urban planning institutions and the firm grip of the central government over housing have both vanished. The image which is often so highly idealized abroad, of Holland having a very strong planning tradition, and a rich government which pays for every whim of the architects’ society (of which the SuperDutch generation in the nineties testified), doesn’t exist anymore. Now we have a right wing government

and an American-style, free market system and a liberalized urban planning. The privatization of the housing cooperations was probably the most important change, because the State lost control over housing.

For WiMBY! this meant that our projects have to rely solely on convincing people. We have a lack of power and no political mandate, and this has forced us to devise some ingenious urban planning methods of which the project Logica is probably the strongest example.

Hoogvliet is one of the many New Towns, built from the 1940s on, imitating the English New Towns around London. It was built to house the workers of the harbor of Rotterdam, soon to become the biggest of the world. The small medieval village that was already there had to make way; the old farms along the dikes were demolished and the historical village core was destroyed to make place for a large-scale shopping center. Hoogvliet would become a regional center, and its designs radiate a modern, urbane atmosphere comparable to Harlow or Stevenage.

The London New Towns were considered something of an urban invention at the time. But of course they weren’t completely new: they were a synthesis of the garden city ideas of Ebenezer Howard, of CIAM-inspired ideas on architecture, of Perry’s neighborhood unit and of a rigid hierarchical traffic system. In Hoogvliet’s urban plan these elements are all present, as is most clearly shown by its layout, the basis of which is the hierarchical sequence house-street-neighborhood-city, the neighborhoods all separated from each other by wide parkways, the architecture is sober, industrial, repetitive, thereby stressing the social equality characteristic of the politics of the time.

But like most post-war utopias, the ideal New Town of Hoogvliet soon experienced serious difficulties. Instead of fostering social cohesion, the neighborhood units promoted irritation, and caused quarrels amongst neighbors. The location next to the harbor and its refineries proved dangerous, as was painfully demonstrated by an accident in 1968, when an explosion shattered every window in Hoogvliet.

Hoogvliet lost its utopian ring, and it was never finished. Of the ambitious plans for a regional city center only a bleak shopping mall has been realized. Even today, the area near the church (the former village centre) gives the impression of a wasteland, used for parking only. Whoever enters Hoogvliet at this point cannot help but remember the feelings of the town planners in the late 1960s: Hoogvliet is a town planning accident.

And it got worse: social problems arose when Hoogvliet became a refuge for immigrants, mainly from the Dutch Antilles, Turkey and Morocco. Their neighborhoods were - at least by Dutch standards - known as ghetto’s, full of junkies, drugs dealers, and vandalism.

To stop the downward trend, Hoogvliet proclaimed itself a disaster area in the mid-1990s. The privatized housing cooperations proposed a generic renewal plan, much the same as every other Dutch housing cooperation proposed for every other postwar neighborhood. High-rise flats are substituted for single family homes; private gardens replace collective greenery, costly owner occupied houses replace low-cost rental apartments, and of course water, yachts and hot-air balloons were introduced, at least on the drawings. Finally, the original ‘collective’ ideals were banned, and replaced by the individual and his personal lifestyle. In short: the most characteristic feature of the revitalization scheme was the urge to eradicate the twentieth century’s modern model on which the original plan for Hoogvliet had been based. Everything associated with it was seen as negative. The town planners’ main ambition was to reinvent Hoogvliet.

On the contrary, WiMBY! developed a huge fascination with Hoogvliet. Not because it is unique, it’s far from that! This type of city is more like the common denominator in the western urban landscape. Millions of people around the world live in a place like this, and that makes it all the more fascinating. Gradually, we discovered an enormous, extended family of New Towns of which Hoogvliet was only the little nephew. We found amazingly similar cities at different ends of the world, from Australia to Russia, from Latin America to Hong Kong, in western countries and their former colonies, as well as in the former communist world. This prompted us to extend the Hoogvliet project into a long-term research called the New Town.

As a visiting scholar at Harvard GSD I have studied the political implications and backgrounds to New Town planning in countries outside of Western Europe in the 50s and 60s, a.k.a. the Cold War period. Seeing how the US sent out a number of urban planners to third world countries, the hypothesis soon formed that urban planning was considered to be a powerful instrument in cold war politics, and that the export of architecture and planning functioned as a means of cultural, in stead of political colonization.

It was then that I stumbled onto a fascinating coalition of two parties, the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis and the American Ford Foundation, who together formed a powerful duo of vision and money. They had an intense relationship with long-lasting consequences for developing countries in the Middle East and Africa. Their cooperation shows how the so-called neutral introduction of large scale development urban planning was anything but neutral. In fact it was heavy with promises of freedom, democracy and prosperity, and laden with ideals of community and emancipation.

In the polarized atmosphere of the period, there wasn’t a single American institution not cooperating in the ‘war on communism’; the State Department, the CIA, the United Nations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations, MIT, Rice and Harvard Universities, they all played a role in the cultural cold war. The unraveling of these intricate networks by interviewing people and going through dusty correspondence and faded microfilms has been my job as an amateur detective.

Introducing Doxiadis. Constantinos Doxiadis, was nicknamed Dinos by his Ford Foundation-friends. He developed an extremely hermetic theoretical, design and engineering system called ‘Ekistics’, the science of human settlements. It was a rational and scientific alternative to the existing historical cities with their congestion of cars and people. Instead of those, Doxiaids proposed “gridiron” cities, that would provide for a human scaled environment and at the same time facilitate unlimited growth in people, money, cars etc. In that sense they were extremely well suited for development of any kind. Doxiadis was possibly the leading exponent of the explicit application of modernist planning and design models as vehicles for freedom, peace and progress according to a Western model.

Because of his political talents he was able to form an impressive international network with many US and UN officials, which enabled him to design and build an oeuvre his colleagues could only envy. He probably constructed more urban substance than all his CIAM-colleagues together. In fact, after CIAM ended, he initiated a conglomerate of training and research organizations as well as the Delos-conferences, which were clearly meant to take over where CIAM left off. He designed and built new cities all over the world, in Ghana, Zambia, Sudan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq and the US.

How was it possible that this one office built so many large-scale cities around the world while the most eminent urban planners failed? For instance: Sert was never able to realize any of his South American plans and Le Corbusier had to satisfy himself with only one - though a heroic New Town - Chandigargh. Obviously Doxiadis got to build this empire not only because of his phenomenal charisma or the qualities of his work, but most of all because of the American support he received.

Constantinos Doxiadis

Introducing the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is a private foundation erected in the 30s by Henry Ford himself, and was remodeled in 1950 to extend its activities outside the USA. Its main goals were formulated under the leadership of Paul Hoffman, formerly the coordinator of the Marshall plan in Europe. In that capacity he befriended Doxiadis, who allegedly used his last dime to show Hoffmann Greek hospitality by throwing a party in Athens with a semi-authentic group of Greek dancers. This proved to be a dime well spent. Hoffmann led the Ford Foundation on an ambitious quest for world peace, aiming to better the world by educating the ignorant, increasing their so-called “intellectual capacity and individual judgment” and easing them into democratic western civilization. They tried to reach these noble goals mostly by investing in educational institutions -building schools also - and modernization programs in agriculture. Though urban planning was definitely not a main priority, Ford spent five million dollars on Doxiadis’ design and research, the largest sum they ever spent on one private party. Starting with a grant to Doxiadis’ design work for the city of Karachi in Pakistan in the middle of the 50s, Doxiadis and the Ford Foundation became a truly close-knit unit.

By his connection to the Ford Foundation, Doxiadis was also immersed in the larger network connected to the Foundation. It had strong ties with official American foreign policy, which became visible in the exchange of board members between the Foundation, the American business world and policy makers in Washington. Also prestigious universities such as Harvard and MIT were working in close relation to both Ford and the American foreign politics. They contributed mostly in terms of research and advice, and thereby assisted the Ford Foundation to effectively direct its grants. Usually the research at these centers, for instance the Harvard/MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, was sponsored with millions of dollars by the Ford Foundation. Thus a constant feedback process was organized in which exchange of information, interests and

funding took place between Harvard, the Ford Foundation and the government. There existed a complete consensus on the aims of the American elite to create peace and order in the world and it was seen as completely logical that private and governmental policies would mutually enhance and strengthen each other.

Still this doesn’t explain why particularly the work of Doxiadis - and not Sert, or Gropius - was judged to fit so well into this consensus. What qualities did the Ford Foundation detect in Doxiadis’ planning that made them recognize Ekistics as a useful instrument in their cultural Cold War politics, and what political goals did they attach to his urban planning?

The answer probably lies in the extremely rational character of Ekistics and the way Doxiadis promoted his work as a science. He presented the outcome of his studies and designs in grids, charts, diagrams and schemes, almost like the work of a human computer, completely objectified, with no aesthetics or personal choices. In this pre-computer era there was no possible way to resemble computerized work any closer. Doxiadis was definitely no whimsical arty architect with crayons. He was a trustworthy engineer that could deliver. His Ekistics was a visionary, but nonetheless scientific system in which local data was to be entered, and the design solution followed automatically. A touch of local landscape and architecture was inevitable and necessary, but not too much, since this was contradictory with the universal pretensions of Ekistics.

This objective and rational approach completely fitted the philosophy of the Ford Foundation, which had formulated as its goal the education of non-western people into rational and sensible peoples, and thereby doing away with mistrust and latent violence. In fact, the Foundation exported with this goal one of the most fundamental values of the USA, as the eminent Cold War professor Od Arne Westad has analysed in his recent publication The Global Cold War. As the core values of the USA he singled out: liberty, anti-collectivism, a reluctance to accept centralized political power, and an absolute belief in science and technology as the progenitor of ‘rational action’. The American elite was convinced “that liberty was not for everyone, but for those who, through property and education, possessed the necessary independence to be citizens of a republic.” So: civilization equals rationality. It was the task of the Americans to raise other peoples into a state of civilization. When turning to urban planning it would have been hard to find an urban planning theory more rational than Doxiadis’ Ekistics.

But of course the USA was facing a terrible dilemma, as Westad explains. On the one hand it was clear that: “American symbols and images - the free market, anti-Communism, fear of state power, faith in technology - had teleological functions: what is America today will be the world tomorrow.” On the other hand the question was what means and possibilities a democratic republic could ethically allow itself to influence other nations, a question which is still relevant. This is where the sometimes far-fetched or ambiguous aid programs come in handy, and the always intricate networks of cooperating government and NGO-institutions. It’s a way to exert control, not with the forceful instruments that an old-style empire would use, but in the noncommittal style of a free democratic republic.

Sometimes this went so far that control was exercised through covert operations. A clue on this came when two friends asked me separately to look into CIA-related issues. One question was put very bluntly: was Doxiadis a spy for the CIA? The other question was about a sculpture of Naum Gabo in my hometown Rotterdam. It is an abstract metal sculpture, standing on a prominent spot in the busiest shopping street of the city, right in front of a 50s store designed by Marcel Breuer. My friend assured me that this statue was paid for by the CIA.

At first I thought it very unlikely that the CIA would even bother to get mixedup with paying for artworks in the most pro-American city of the Netherlands. But it proved that the CIA was most certainly involved in manipulating the visual arts scene in Western Europe. In a thrilling 1999 publication the English writer Frances Saunders explains how the CIA perceived an inherent danger in the traditionally leftist arts world in Europe, and feared they might go over to the communist ideology. Their conviction was that to safeguard European culture, it was of the greatest necessity to win over the cultural and intellectual elite, since they would be the ones in charge of the future. To this end a ‘Kulturkampf’ started immediately after the war, right amidst the rubble of postwar Berlin, with both Soviet and allied sides competing in a frenzy of concerts, reading rooms, recitals, film showings and art exhibits.

Architecture was also involved: the well-known publication Built in the USA, published in 1952 by the Museum of Modern Arts was among the translations published by the Psychological Warfare Division of the American Military Government, to showcase the developments in postwar architecture in the USA. It was received enthusiastically and turned out to be very influential in many western European countries and it was on the shelves of every modern architect in the Netherlands.

This cultural manipulation was institutionalized in 1950, when the CIA erected the Congress for Cultural Freedom, just a few years after Truman’s doctrine and the launching of the Marshall-aid plan. Together they formed a parallel set of political, economical and cultural measures to prevent Europe from slipping to ‘the other side’. The Congress’ mission was “to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’”. It was a ‘battle for men’s minds’, fought by the Congress with the help of an assorted group of radicals and artists, most of them disappointed in Stalin’s totalitarian USSR. They were musicians, writers, painters, actors, and included well-known names like George Orwell, Jean Paul Sartre, and Jackson Pollock. The Congress organized an impressive cultural offensive, publishing magazines in many different countries and languages, all over Europe and the third world, organizing a flood of exhibitions of American painters (many in cooperation with MoMa), concerts and congresses.

The position of Jackson Pollock and his fellow abstract-expressionists is especially fascinating: they were adopted by the Congress as the new cultural mascots of the USA, much against the grain of prevailing taste in this country. But to the Congress, the abstract expressionists embodied all the virtues needed in an arts movement to project a new image of America to the old European countries; an image that would convincingly steer away from the stereotypical idea of Americans as ‘culturally barren, a nation of gum-chewing, Chevy-driving philistines” and would present American culture as vital and superior to Soviet-culture.

To the American elite Pollock’s painting radiated the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. It was non-figurative and politically silent; it was the very antithesis to socialist realism. Pollock was new, active, and energetic, while Socialist realist art was stiff, rigid and aping historical styles. Abstract expressionism was seen as a specifically American invention conquering the world, replacing the old centre of the arts, Paris, with New York. Also Pollock was exactly the right character to oppose the boy-scout Soviet painters, who were sheepishly portraying the collective communist values. Pollock was a real, manly and rough American, and a drunk moreover, which was regarded as a proper asset for an artistic figurehead.

Again, the Ford Foundation was very close to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The number of personal connections and personnel changing jobs from the one organization to the other is so manifold, that it could justly be called a sister-organization of the Foundation. Ford over the years granted almost 10 million dollars to the Congress and eventually even became its main financer.

Introducing Doxiadis and Urban Planning. Though the Congress for Cultural Freedom didn’t have architecture or urban issues as a priority, Doxiadis was among the very few architects involved in the Congress’ activities. In their important 1955 congress in Milan he was among the speakers, where he spoke about the “Economic progress in underdeveloped countries and the rivalry of democratic and communist methods”. In 1960 he was a member of the select group that attended the congress on the New Arab Metropolis, together with Hassan Fathy, then a member of his office. These CIA-initiated congresses were paid for by Ford. Of course Doxiadis’ involvement with the congress doesn’t prove he was a CIA-agent, but, it does allude to a hypothesis on the meaning of his work to the CIA and the Ford Foundation, that would finally explain their strong preference for Doxiadis’ work.

I’m using the CIA and the Ford Foundation almost as inter-changeable institutions, because they operated from the exact same mindset. With the risk of sounding paranoical, suggesting a complot-theory, I would say that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Ford Foundation, the US government, Ivy League Universities, but also other private funds like the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations all worked together to accomplish the same goal of fighting ‘the war on communism’ to use a modern paraphrase. They would divide tasks among each other: whenever a certain activity wouldn’t fit into the program of the Ford Foundation, they would ring up the director of the Congress and he would finance or organize it. The CIA would be in touch with the Ford Foundation weekly, discuss their own plans and delegate them to Foundation-officials. This period was, by most people involved in it, described as a very passionate time, an exciting amalgamate of covert operations, boudoir politics, intuitive actions, lots of traveling, lots of pretense, and lots of money especially: no doubt that all this was completely justified, useful, ethical and just. A beautiful, high-minded episode, which everyone loved to be part of. They felt they were “the most privileged of men, participants in a drama such as rarely occurs even in the long life of a great nation”. You just can’t help feeling envious.

To these men, Doxiadis was as much a mascot in the field of urban planning as Jackson Pollock was in the arts scene. Whereas Pollock was the antidote to social realist painting, the work of Doxiadis posed the complete opposite to social realist urban planning and architecture. The cities of the USSR after the war, up to the arrival of Chroestjov at the end of the 50s, strongly showed the mark of Stalinist planning. Up to a thousand New Towns were built all over the country, using a well-known and historical repertoire both in urban planning as in architecture. The vista, the axe, the square, the closed housing block, the monumental, palazzo-inspired architecture; they all evoked an urban image aspiring to be recognizable and familiar to the common people.

While Pollock proposed a completely new direction in painting, and freed himself from historical precedents and iconography, Doxiadis’ Ekistics posed a completely new system in urban planning, freeing it from formal design, and replacing it by organizing the urban area in ever enlarging grids and systems, eliminating monumental composition and replacing it with schemes for unlimited growth and change. His Dynapolis and eventually Ecumenopolis, the world-encompassing city, exploded all known scales in urban planning. The neighborhood unit, known from the English New Towns, was stretched and repeated and put in an endless spaced-out grid, until every reference to existing urban settings had vanished. Ideologically important was the fact that the state-imposed collectivism of social-realist planning was replaced by the emphasis on bottom-up communities. Moreover, the ideas of change and growth without boundaries and technology solving every possible problem, from demographic growth to energy shortage to pollution to economic backwardness to ethnic and social unrest, all this made Doxiadis’ vision the perfect vehicle for US development ideology.

The Ford Foundation described its urban planning projects (in India, Yugoslavia, Chile, Pakistan) as ‘white bread’, the innocent, soft bread, with no particular taste, which everybody likes. They could ease the way for a different lifestyle, western, efficient, peaceful, and help the third world countries to become rational civilizations and grow towards a well-deserved autonomy. In this sense it is not an exaggeration to call Doxiadis’ work part of the cultural and economic imperialism of the West in developing countries.

The Middle East, located right below the soft underbelly of the USSR and therefore a main stage for Cold War activities, was virtually a playground for American architects in the 50s. They followed in the wake of American and international aid programs like the Point Four program and the United Nations Development Decade. They were hired by the puppet regimes installed by ‘the coalition’ of the British and Americans.

In Iran, ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi, Victor Gruen designed a master-plan for the capital Tehran, and numerous American offices flooded the country to work on New Towns. The Iraqi regime of King Faisal hired Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti, Alvar Aalto and Frank Lloyd Wright. Again, there’s a Havard-connection here: this select group of foreign architects was invited by a married couple of Iraqi Harvard GSD graduates, former students of Walter Gropius, of whom the husband’s father was the prime minister.

The American aid programs, focused on Lebanon, Iraq or Iran, often underestimated the complexities of the host countries. Without speaking the language, with insufficient knowledge about the local social customs, these well-intentioned but amateur efforts often missed the desired outcome. In the case of Iran, a group of five American planners took the adventure. When they arrived in 1957 they found out, much to their disgust and disappointment, that the cities in need weren’t exactly metropolitan, didn’t have any comfortable means of transportation, no services, no shopping, no education etc. They had the great difficulties in interacting with the local officials, there were issues of bureaucratic hierarchy, and frustrations about lack of cooperation and lack of almost everything else. The most enthusiastic planner, working in the Kurdish city Sanandaj in western Iran, finally succeeded in setting up a small planning department along Western lines, complete with an office and drawing boards. But after he left for a two week honeymoon he came back to find the office wrecked by a storm and his newly trained planners had disappeared, they never came back. In short, there was an unbridgeable gap between the Western, rational planning methods the Americans longed to impose, and the existing local traditions and habits.

Compared to these rather naïve efforts, the results of Doxiadis’ office were of the utmost efficiency. Especially in Iraq, where he was hired to design a modern national housing program including the capital Baghdad, Doxiadis showed what he was capable of doing: practically on his own he brought in a complete ministry of housing, planning, architecture, and architecture training. Gropius’ office was struggling to get the designs for the Baghdad University built, and only succeeded in realizing one tower twenty years later, and Frank Lloyd Wright saw his grandiose plans for the Baghdad Opera thrown out the window when the revolutionary regime took over from King Faisal in 1958. But Doxiadis didn’t have any problems: his multidisciplinary team made surveys, wrote reports, designed tens of thousands of houses and was able to build them as well. Still, the official architectural history has shown a disproportionate interest in those failed high-profile architects designs, neglecting the far more influential work of Doxiadis.

Unknowingly, everybody has seen the results of his work on CNN. By the end of the 50s, Doxiadis built areas in Iraqi towns which bear the by now well-known names of Mosul, Basrah and Kirkuk. The largest number of houses was realized in Baghdad, on the eastern bank of the Tigris - the endless repetition of square neighborhood units are easily recognizable on any satellite image. This is the area called Sadr City. By now it is mostly known as a nightmarish ghetto and the gruesome décor for war footage. The area has been a hotbed of resistance against the Americans, inhabited by two million mostly Shia Iraqi’s. It consists of endless areas of low-rise but high-density development, with narrow alleys and cul-de-sac, grey concrete slums and small row-houses. Sadr City even has the dubious honor of being featured in a multi-player computer war-game on the Internet, called Kuma War: Mission 16, Battle in Sadr City.

Sadr City was designed by Doxiadis as part of his 1958 master-plan for Baghdad. Doxiadis’ design follows the Ekistics rules and is quite identical to his other contemporary urban designs, be it Islamabad, Tema or Khartoum. Doxiadis encased the historical centre of Baghdad in a orthogonal grid extending on both sides of the Tigris/Euphrates, composed of 40 sectors of some 2 square kilometers each, separated from each other by wide thoroughfares. Each sector was subdivided in a number of ‘communities’, with smaller neighborhood centers and housing areas served by a network of cul-de-sacs. Each community center consisted of a modernist composition of market buildings, public services and a mosque. The row-housing was organized in such a way that the smallest communities each had a ‘gossip square’, an intimate open meeting space inspired by existing local Iraqi customs. Though these small oases could be interpreted as contextual elements, as a whole the extension of Baghdad was a generic, universal system Doxiadis thought appropriate for almost any developing city with a hot climate. The architecture was also generic with some local touches; a restrained modernist architecture with decorated panels in a pattern slightly reminiscent of Arab motives, built with local materials, but not in any outspoken vernacular style. Local influences had a very limited, technical meaning to Doxiadis: it meant using local techniques and building methods, but did not involve using local identity or cultural traditions.

The most appealing feature of Doxiadis’ plans for his American patrons and the Ford Foundation in particular was the emphasis on community building. Something that was to be avoided at all costs was that the cities should have an alienating effect on the millions who were often the first in their families to lead a modern urban lifestyle. After all, alienation would lead the population to turn in frustration to communism or to revert to archaic traditions of superstition and violence. We could therefore regard the cities designed by Doxiadis with their small-cale urban design of gossip squares, little streets and community centers, as precisely tuned ‘emancipation machines’. This emancipation was part of the modernization package, which included democratic institution building and economic reforms to create a free market.

In retrospect, one thing is for certain: the urban planning projects in Iraq, Iran or Pakistan didn’t have the effect the Americans hoped for, of creating a stable democratic mentality that would secure the way for Western foreign policy. The inherent suggestion that a plan with an open lay-out, symbolic of an open society, would also help to accomplish becoming one, hasn’t been successful. It goes to show though, how high the expectations once were for what urban planning could accomplish.

Of course it is tempting to compare the present situation in Iraq with the Cold War episode. Again there is the attempt of the USA to impose its own ideas on Iraq, this time, as Naomi Klein has analyzed, the neoconservative idea of free-market economy. Even officials who were part of the American policy making in the 50s, like the eminent professor of history William Polk, now issue warnings not to make the same mistake twice: of imposing structures, ideas, organizations and plans that are not wanted and not indigenous to the local culture. As Polk has simply and truly stated: not only the USA, but all countries want to determine their own destiny. We could add to it: all countries also want to determine their own architecture. Architecture and urban planning are not ‘white bread’ as the Ford Foundation stated, they are not technical works with no inherent meaning or taste; to the contrary, by their organization they project a strong ideal image of a specific kind of society. But however Doxiadis’ cities might be judged, and however critical one might be, there was at least an ideal behind it, while at this moment it would be very difficult to find any positive images of the future Iraq.

Back to Hoogvliet. It may seem extremely embarrassing to compare Baghdad with Hoogvliet, still, there is one obvious parallel: in the Netherlands there was also a concern felt, right after World War II, about the stability of the democracy, an anxiousness to avoid social unrest and an urge to ease the way to postwar changes and to new urban and industrial lifestyles. In the design of Hoogvliet this was an important factor, because it was built for future industrial workers of the Shell refinery, among them many immigrants from the countryside becoming city-dwellers for the first time. Here, like in Baghdad, the open design had an extra meaning: to shape the minds of the inhabitants, to open their minds to an open democratic society. So even in Hoogvliet the urban plan functioned as an instrument of emancipation and modernization.

As a possibly meaningful coincidence there is also a work of a famous American abstract expressionist in Hoogvliet, Alexander Calder, who was part of the group of artists promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. So far, a direct link between Hoogvliet and the Congress has not yet been proven, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this sculpture was financed by them as well.

To return the discussion to WiMBY! and the here and now, I already mentioned how the planning machinery set in motion by the co-ops went on preparing the demolition of thousands of homes, postulating the values of the new, quiet suburban middleclass Hoogvliet and wiping out the New Town atmosphere in the process. At the same time, WiMBY! worked at a totally different concept. Published in 2000, in the book WiMBY! Welcome into My Backyard! we decided on a re-evaluation of Hoogvliets modernist environment and maybe even more, of the ideas behind it. Our focal point was the existing substance of Hoogvliet, both physically (the buildings and public space) and socially (the people). We declined to focus on the negative qualifications and the obvious problems, but set out to rediscover Hoogvliets hidden qualities as an unloved, but captivating urban entity with its own peculiarities.

The cover of the book illustrates our view: Hoogvliet’s historical church is shown on its square of Stelcon slabs, symbol of failure and incompleteness, but at the same time also manifesting its own peculiar beauty. This beauty is enhanced by Hoogvliet’s unfinished character and can be seen in many places: the dike that had to make place for the subway line, but simply continues on the other side of it, farms that look out of place between the flats, geese and sheep grazing in a setting of 1950s architecture. The WiMBY! strategy demonstrates precisely these qualities by exaggerating even the tiniest specimens of it and by idealizing what went wrong. This analysis had distinct therapeutic features because it showed the inhabitants how unique their New Town really is. Thus, their ingrained inferiority complex could be healed. One of the earliest urban projects of WiMBY!, called Logica, seems to confirm that this strategy may have been successful.

Entering the urban renewal while it was already working at full steam, we wanted a different type of town planning document than the usual master plan. What we needed was a set of instruments that could help to rework the ongoing processes into a coherent policy. The most urgent matter of all was to create some logic in the often contradictory projects initiated by the many autonomous parties working in Hoogvliet. This is how Logica, a town planning manual for Hoogvliet came into being. It was designed by the Rotterdam based architectural firm of Maxwan Architects and Planners. Time and again, Logica emphasized the need for a joint approach of the ‘Hoogvliet project’. Logica stated that as long as a coherent vision was lacking, the revitalization campaigns could only result in a chaotic, unremarkable generic city in which the most important characteristics of Hoogvliet would be lost. Logica identified the qualities that should be seen as the city’s main characteristics on a large scale. There are four of them: the green buffer surrounding the New Town, guaranteeing a rural setting on all sides, the isolated position of the neighborhoods, endowing each of them with its own particular values, the green joints between the neighborhoods containing the New Town’s parkways, and finally the abundance of open space and the overall park-like qualities of Hoogvliet.

Logica was not a design, it simply presented choices: each of the four structuring elements were put to the test. Were they to be respected and kept, or could Hoogvliet do without them in the future? These issues were addressed in the so-called Logica committee that we made up of representatives of all parties involved: the local municipality, the two housing co-ops, the roads and park maintenance departments and the development agency of Rotterdam. The same issues were put before the inhabitants on the WiMBY! website. Thus, Logica changed from a plan into a negotiation process. It resulted in a binding choice for one of the 24 models that could be composed by combining all the variables offered in the process.

Remarkably, the strategy that was preferred opted for conserving and enhancing all existing qualities, even though before the Logica process started, nobody had identified them as qualities. Hoogvliet’s neighborhoods were to retain their self-contained and green character, they were to be flanked by wide parkways and to stay surrounded by a recreational zone alongside the river.

Strangely enough, Logica has been highly controversial in the Netherlands. It’s been called right-wing populist planning by some critics. It has also been called modern-day advocacy planning, only possible within the context of a state controlled planning system. But in fact it is very much the result of the absence of state control, of the necessity to invent other planning methods and other bodies of control that will fit the new market oriented politics. To WiMBY! this invention was necessary to get our way without any central state backup. It is an experiment in urban planning after the welfare state.

While Logica addressed Hoogvliet’s urban and physical qualities, other projects of WiMBY! focused on its social qualities. These were being grossly neglected, no matter how many publicity campaigns the official planning machinery organized. WiMBY! wanted more, we wanted to show what the inhabitants themselves had to offer and make them responsible for projects we would develop with them.

While looking at Hoogvliet’s town planning and architecture, one would almost think that its population must be completely homogenous. It is not. Behind the anonymous facades from the 1950s and 1960s a rich palette of people live there. They differ in ethnicity and lifestyle and express theses differences in the way they dress and the way they decorate their homes. To represent this social diversity we asked dozens of people to have their pictures taken in a mobile photo tent. The elderly with their “rollators”, mothers with perms, hip hop boys acting tough - all kinds of people showed up. These portraits were complemented by photographs of home interiors. Subsequently, the photo’s were blown up to larger than life billboards that were placed near the highway and as traffic signs at street crossings. We also used them as the décor for an exhibition on our projects and decorated a by now demolished row of homes for the elderly with the portraits. Half of the houses was still occupied, the other half ready to be demolished. Some of the empty ones were dedicated to exhibitions on the WiMBY! projects; in others, people could pick up their portraits, while the elderly people living nearby provided them with coffee. In this way, it wasn’t only about showing our own projects but also about enhancing the pride of the inhabitants and about stimulating them to play an active role in the renewal of their city.

While immersing ourselves in Hoogvliet, we discovered that the old concept of the collective was much more important than the official reconstruction campaign took it to be. Working with single mothers from the Antilles community, we found that they longed for housing combined with collective amenities and public spaces, which would make it easier for them to improve themselves, to study or to have collective childcare. Of course the consensus nowadays is that contemporary society completely lacks a collective mentality. That may be true for the average middle income Dutch family commuting from one place to the other in an ever expanding network city, it does not apply however to all people. This consideration fostered two projects we organized with the support of the co-ops.

The first one is a project which re-uses a 50s building to house a group of single mothers from the Antilles. The building’s elevated walkways are widened so instead of infrastructure they become places for social activities. The women are all provided with their own individual homes, but they also get a collective space that can be used as a daycare center, a study or an Internet café. Part of the surrounding public spaces will also be brought under collective control and designated as safe places for children to play.

The second project attempts to attract categories of people that so far try to avoid Hoogvliet. Because even though Hoogvliet is easily accessible and has a lot to offer, it’s negative image puts off the more wealthy and creative layers of Rotterdam’s population to visit. How could we make Hoogvliet more attractive for them, so they could add to the social diversity of Hoogvliet? A form of co-housing might do the trick. Co-housing is a kind of housing well-known in the US, that combines about forty individual homes with a collective facility which is managed by the households living there.

Thus far, two groups have been established: one has an ecological theme, while the other group consists of musicians. Again, each family has its own house as well as a small sculptural music room to practice in, day or night, while they also share and maintain a small communal theatre to perform, have concerts and receive pupils. In this way collectivity is given a new meaning. The oppressive connotations associated with it in the 1950s are replaced by self defined and self chosen contemporary forms that combine individual homes with a wide variety of opportunities to use public space.

Focusing on the blind spots of the renewal, we found education to be the most important one. Of course the quality of the housing stock and the shops, the facilities, the surroundings, the population, all these things matter to ensure the future of a New Town like Hoogvliet, but education is of prime importance, especially in a depressed area with many ethnic minorities. A lot needed to be done to bring Hoogvliet’s schools up to date. Most of them were inconspicuous buildings from the 1960s, with just a lot of identical classrooms. The special rooms needed in present-day education are usually lacking. It is difficult to find a suitable place for teaching pupils on an individual basis, for libraries, music performances, etc. The shabby concrete classrooms that are usually added as temporary solutions are hardly suitable for these purposes. To this end WiMBY developed the so-called ‘SchoolParasites’. The first one is all about cooking and eating. More often than not, children arrive at school without having had breakfast, which greatly affects their school achievements. This classroom provides them with a place to cook or eat their breakfast and lunch. Another school needed extra space for the pupils to work by themselves, with individual working spaces that can be arranged flexibly by moving the sliding walls. The third one is meant for rehearsing music or plays and has taken the shape of a small theatre. The plans were designed by young architects and can be industrially produced. Apart from educational purposes, they can also serve to accommodate neighborhood festivities, meetings and gatherings of parents. These are the first realized WiMBY! buildings and we received the Dutch Design Prize for them in 2004.

To conclude I will show maybe our most important project: the Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet. Heerlijkheid is an untranslatable: it means something like ‘lovely estate’, so let’s call it ‘the Loveliness’. All that WiMBY! has stood for the last four years culminates in this project. The Loveliness is a Summer Park intended to provide recreation and entertainment. It is situated in the green buffer between Hoogvliet and the highway in the periphery of the poor northern neighborhoods. It comprises several components that have been developed in close cooperation with various groups of people in Hoogvliet: a tree collection designed as an arboretum, a graveyard for pets, an ecological playground, a sports fields and a Villa. The local inhabitants came up with the ideas for most of these amenities, and they will also be engaged in building, managing and maintaining them. Don’t think of a 70s ‘love and peace’ atmosphere here: imagine the sweet old ladies of the arboretum fighting the manager of the pet cemetery fighting the Surinam music programmer of the Villa... And imagine WiMBY! getting caught in between.

In the park itself there are spaces for all kinds of activities: there are pick-nick and barbeque tables, there is a pond for paddling. In the center of the Loveliness the Villa acts as an eye catcher. The Villa has been designed by the London-based firm of FAT architects, who also planned the park. It’s character is purely narrative. The ornamental facades show elements that refer to the original village of Hoogvliet, it has cut out trees, it has the geometrical facades of the 1950s architecture and the chimney of the Shell refinery that triggered off the idea to build Hoogvliet. It is a Venturian decorated shed containing the symbols and signs of a popular and recognizable visual language that can be understood by anyone. The furniture in the park speaks the same language, whether it’s the benches, the bridges or the building for the pet cemetery.

Even for fleeting passersby, the need for a facility like the Loveliness is easily grasped, for in Hoogvliet nothing ever happens. The shopping mall boasts a brasserie where one can drink a cup of coffee, but for younger people there is absolutely nothing to do, least of all during evenings and nights. The Villa is going to change this. There will be musical performances, parties, plays, and family celebrations. The Villa will even house the first cinema in Hoogvliet. Like the park, the Villa has something to offer everybody and thereby functions as a modern village green, a place where collective creativity and history is being celebrated. We are testing the need for it in yearly festivals, which attract a diverse and large crowd of people, dancing and building clay sculptures in the ecological playground etc.

So these are our efforts to contribute to a renaissance of Hoogvliet.

Of course it may be asked: What will happen to Hoogvliet once all our projects will have been realized? Will our efforts prove to be more than incidents that are bound to drown in the vast reconstruction work carried out by the official planning bureaucracies? Are they but romantic visions illustrating the merits of an old New Town?

That may be true, but even then one thing is clear: the present-day situation in which the architect and planning community agrees that the postwar cities are a complete failure has only lead to a set of non-productive strategies. In Academia there is a tendency to study postwar modernist planning and to analyze the original concepts to the bone, to the point of obsession even. Minutes of the few CIAM meetings have caused a library full of analytical discourse, and the unrealized designs of Sert, Le Corbusier or Kahn are still being unraveled like they were the Dead Sea rolls. But studies like these tend to banish modernist architecture and planning to a far away and long ago age, almost forgetting that there are real cities out there, with real people in it, that you can go to and walk around in and that have problems to be solved.

On the other hand practicing architects and planners have either completely ignored the existence of the not so sexy and glamorous New Towns or they have clung to the tabula rasa approach of erasing them and starting anew. This can hardly be the proper solution: the postwar urban substance is simply too big, there’s too many people living there, and starting all over again is to risk creating the same problem all over again. The problem of the deteriorating postwar areas cries out for creative urban planning, research and design, which reuses the existing material, both in its physical and social sense. We shouldn’t start again, we should design and add another layer of urban material, to turn them into normal, growing, developing, aging cities.

And it doesn’t really matter if we talk about Baghdad or Hoogvliet: both are part of the same twentieth century heritage we have to deal with - even the moral questions are the same.

WiMBY! has made the statement that the values inherent in modern planning - democracy, the collective, emancipation - still have relevance, though their architectural forms may change. Other cities come up with different propositions. Whenever a city in the Netherlands or the US is being restructured it makes a lot of sense to study the social organizations that have uplifted the neighborhood of 23 Enero in Caracas, Venezuela, or the Indian cities where inhabitants have appropriated their modernist housing blocks by decorating them in a horror vacuum of personalized symbols and signs. On the other hand the Logica project might well be an instrument to be used in the rebuilding of Islamabad or Baghdad.

The New Town project aims to make all these visions known and exchangeable, WiMBY! experiments with adjusting an old New Town to the twenty-first century; both projects offer themselves for scrutiny to the large family of their fellow New Towns, for knowledge and inspiration.