Tristate City Vintage

Read on Tristatecity.com:

Imagine: ‘The Battle of the Cities’. The Dutch employers organisation VNO-NCW and the real estate developer CBRE think there is a battle going on in this world. They wanna be winners. Mr. Peter Savelberg, a Dutch consultant, proposes a city of 30 million inhabitants. VNO NCW and CBRE decided to sponsor him. His TristateCity covers the whole of the Netherlands, the Rhine-Ruhr Area and Belgium. He even made a map of his transnational conurbation, its size even bigger than Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis of 1962. Mr. Savelberg, who is a professional in real estate and marketing, thinks it’s gonna be the most powerful urban power center of the world. Yes, we’re going to beat the Chinese! We need transport corridors that are connecting all three rings of rather small-size cities. The so-called Randstad is just the inner ring. A second ring connects Middelburg, Goes, Tilburg, Breda, Eindhoven, Zwolle, Leeuwarden; a third ring binds Ostende, Ghent, Brussels, Maastricht, Aachen, Cologne, Duisburg, Enschede, Groningen together – this last ring is even wider than the outer ring of Greater-Beijing or the MKAD of Greater-Moscow. The outer ring is shrinking, the future of the middle ring is fishy, even parts of the Randstad are suffering a Rust Belt condition. Mr. Savelberg’s scheme reminded me of a diagram and an old idea: in 1898 the British inventor Ebenezer Howard thought a diagram like this would make sense. He was wrong. The Soviets tried. It only generated congestion.

The problem with Mr. Savelberg’s TristateCity is its scale too, of course. It’s simply too grand, too megalomanic, too much out of control, lacking any decent governance. The whole idea is also not liveable and sustainable, and worse, what it lacks are agglomeration economies. You remember the corridors-discussion of the nineties? See the result. The future Mr. Savelberg and his powerful sponsors seem to propose looks almost like Soviet or Fascist style planning of the twentieth century. On the website of Tristate City, the organisations that support Mr. Savelberg refer to the Pearl River Delta, a conurbation of 60 million inhabitants. So that is their adversary. Are they aware of the fact that Chinese planning schemes on this huge scale have a communist background? I doubt it. And do they see the difference between Pearl River delta and the Tristate City?: one is full of peasant-immigrants and growing very fast, while the other is ageing and shrinking. Mr. Hans de Boer, president of the Dutch employers organisation, thinks it is just a great way to present the Netherlands to the world. Is it? I think it is ingenious. As a planner I even feel embarrassed. No, we should be very worried. 

Mr. Savelberg commented:

“Jammer dat u niet even contact heeft opgenomen/zich echt ordentelijk heeft verdiept in ons MARKETING-model; het gaat hier natuurlijk geenszins om een ruimtelijk ontwikkel model; laat staan om een ruimtelijke ambitie.

Op dit moment wonen er al lang 30 miljoen mensen in dit gebied en dat zal ook niet hard groeien. Ook nemen wij de Pearl River Delta absoluut NIET als voorbeeld voor onze Lage Landen. In tegendeel, wij stipuleren juist dat ons organisch gegroeide model van netwerk van kleine steden op vele fronten als voorbeeld kan dienen voor alles wat er nu mis gaat bij de onbeheerste urbanisatie in o.a. China.

Wel geven wij een antwoord op de huidige inefficiente en gefragmenteerde citymarketing van vele kleine steden en hun bestuurders. Dat wordt overigens door velen op prijs gesteld (ook in de academische wereld).”