The Genius Urban Design of Amsterdam: Cblocks, Dams & Leaning Houses

It’s com­mon to hear it said that some par­tic­u­lar city — usu­al­ly one of the Amer­i­can metrop­o­lis­es that sprang into exis­tence over the past cou­ple of cen­turies — “should­n’t exist.” And indeed, as urban plan­ner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On the scale of human his­to­ry, we’ve only just start­ed build­ing the things, and we don’t do so on pure instinct. “There isn’t sup­posed to be a city any­where. They exist because we will them into exis­tence.” And we often do so in unlike­ly con­texts: “Half of Boston was dredged up from the ocean. St. Louis only exists because we tamed the great­est riv­er on our con­ti­nent. Sup­ply­ing Philadel­phia with drink­ing water is an engi­neer­ing feat on the scale of the Los Ange­les Aque­duct.”

Out­side the Unit­ed States, we see the same con­di­tions sur­round­ing “the great­est cities ever built: Tokyo and St. Peters­burg required engi­neer­ing feats on the scale of any­thing seen in the US. Ams­ter­dam and Mex­i­co City were lit­er­al­ly built on top of water.” How that was man­aged in the par­tic­u­lar case of the Dutch cap­i­tal is explained in the new video from The Present Past at the top of the post, as well as in the OBF video below.

Ams­ter­dam’s most strik­ing fea­ture, its cblocks, were cre­at­ed not to look pic­turesque; in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it, their con­struc­tion was “a mat­ter of life and death.” Too soft for farm­ing or home-build­ing, the swampy ground beneath the city on the riv­er Ams­tel had to be drained; when drained, it became sub­ject to floods, which neces­si­tat­ed build­ing dikes and a dam.

httv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3llzKdAD0

That thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry engi­neer­ing project of damming the Ams­tel pro­tect­ed the city, and also gave it its name. The Ams­tel itself is, in fact, a huge cblock, and the rapid expan­sion of the set­tle­ment around it neces­si­tat­ed dig­ging more and more aux­il­iary cblocks to ***ist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new dis­tricts (Venice-style, atop hun­dreds of thou­sands of poles dri­ven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this dis­tinc­tive urban struc­ture dic­tat­ed the shapes of the city’s hous­es, with their uni­ver­sal­ly nar­row façades and their depths reflect­ing the wealth of the fam­i­lies with­in. Now, four cen­turies after it took its cur­rent shape — and hav­ing sur­vived numer­ous crises inher­ent to its unusu­al sit­u­a­tion and form — the cen­ter of Ams­ter­dam is looked to as a paragon of urban plan­ning, some­times imi­tat­ed, but with­out sim­i­lar­ly “impos­si­ble” orig­i­nal con­di­tions, nev­er repli­cat­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Dutch & Japan­ese Cities Are Insane­ly Well Designed (and Amer­i­can Cities Are Ter­ri­bly Designed)

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

New Web Site Show­cas­es 700,000 Arti­facts Dug Up from the Cblocks of Ams­ter­dam, Some Dat­ing Back to 4300 BC

Trav­el from Rot­ter­dam to Ams­ter­dam in 10 Min­utes by Boat: A 4K Time­lapse

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

When the Dutch Tried to Live in Con­crete Spheres: An Intro­duc­tion to the Bol­wonin­gen in the Nether­lands

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.