Articles

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  The Space of Cartography

  Gabriel Carrascal Aguirre

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  There is a type of contemporary space which, as such, remains practically unnoticed even by those who are responsible for its creation. This could be explained by the fact that these spaces have no specific location, their essence being of a sym-bolic, conceptual kind. I’m referring to maps, the forms for the graphic representation of spatial milieu. As it will be explained below, maps are themselves places that substitute those of the represented reality; they are surrogate spaces operating primarily through analogy and abstraction.

  The production and use...

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  Harvesting: Small-scale public interventions in city districts

  Like Bijlsma, Eireen Schreurs

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  The economic crisis and changing conditions in the Netherlands have rapidly put an end to large-scale district development. Now that urban renewal – long an excuse for radical intervention in deprived nineteenth- and twentieth-century city districts – no longer seems feasible, we face the question of where to go from here. For lack of investment capacity, housing corporations, private investors and local authorities will have to convert their ‘building development’ strategies into ‘devel-oping management’. They must now involve local parties and private initiative in a new...

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  Putting science on the Map: the Natura Artis Magistra society and the transformation of the Plantage in the second half of the nineteenth century

  Esther Gramsbergen

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  In the eighteenth century Amsterdam more or less stopped growing. Its population fluctuated around 200,000, and there was ample room within the seventeenth-century walls for the few building projects that were carried out. Especially east of the River Amstel there were still plenty of vacant plots, and typical ‘fringe-belt elements’ such as social welfare institutions, the municipal refuse dump and industry found a place there. To the east of the Muidergracht canal, the Plantage remained a virtually unbuilt recreation area, with rented gardens and wood storage areas.2

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  A pleasing view: Landscape and composition in the design of Holland's country estates

  Gerdy Verschuure

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  In the seventeenth century a new fashion developed among the welltodo citizens of the Dutch Republic: owning and maintaining a country estate. This term (buitenplaats, literally ‘outside place’, in Dutch) has been defined as a substantial residence with a designed garden, garden ornaments and outbuildings. Country estates were not usually isolated structures in the landscape, but were built in clusters, as we can see from seventeenth and eighteenth century waterboard maps. In the area round Amsterdam they could be found on the banks of the River Amstel and in Watergraafsmeer,...

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  Four hundred years of urban development in the Scheldt estuary: Spatial patterns and the trade flows in the south-western delta

  Reinout Rutte

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  The Dutch province of Zeeland has an unusually large number of large and small towns, including Zierikzee, Brouwershaven, Veere, Middelburg, Vlissingen (formerly known in English as Flushing), Goes, Tholen, Hulst, Axel, Oostburg, Sluis and Aardenburg. These developed over a period of some four hundred years, from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Since most of these towns declined economically at the end of the Middle Ages, some are fairly well preserved, while others are now just modest local centres. It takes some imagination to realise that what is now often considered...

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  Distribution of towns, cities and infrastructure in Holland's Noorderkwartier up to around 1700

  Henk Engel

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  The first printed map of the Zuiderzee and the marked navigation channels in the western part of the Wadden Sea was produced by Lucas Jans-zoon Waghenaer in 1584. It differs from nautical charts of the area published later in that  it also shows the inland waterways of Holland’s Noorderkwartier (‘Northern Quarter’). The map provides a rare picture of the infrastructure and the distribution pattern of towns and cities in the area in the late sixteenth century. Land reclama-tion would alter the map dramatically in the centuries that followed, but waterways remained the...