Usually, I am not a big fan of book reviews. They take away the pleasure of your own interpretation, they give away all the clues of the book, or they are just not right and you find out half way through the book that it is a useless read. And I didn’t even mention yet that each book has about all these kinds of reviews at the same time! I am sorry to disappoint you, dear reader, but I really have to write a review right now. At the office of my municipal employer, a book was thrown in my lap that I think every Amsterdam-based student of urban issues should have on their bookshelf, especially if you are interested in Amsterdam’s history. And by student I mean everyone who thinks he or she can still learn something new about the city.
Over three hundred pages of sheer happiness later, I knew I had to share this work of Fred Feddes. His book, 1000 jaar Amsterdam (literally, one thousand years of Amsterdam), covers the thousand year history of Amsterdam’s spatial development. The book therefore could easily have existed out of a thousand pages as well, but is purposefully kept to just over 350. For anyone who can’t get enough of it, the author’s blog covers additional stories if you can’t get your hands on the book.
Most reviews would now start mumbling stuff about the setup of the book, its chapters, its parts, its conclusions. But I just want to show you the book cover:
This is Amsterdam in the 19th century. At first glance, it does not seem very special: images of the old city, the canals, and the IJ (the major body of water in the image) have been shown on book covers before. One could even say that this particular image is a bad choice: it doesn’t show the canals very well, it is not very detailed, and anyone who knows something about the street pattern of the old city centre can even identify some mistakes there.
But this cover gives a first insight into the brilliance of the book. First, the ridiculous angle. The city is hardly ever shown in bird’s-eye perspective from east to west. The classic way to depict the city is from north to south, while the modern map makers are putting north on top. The author seems to like this alternative way of looking at the city, as he finishes his book with a drawing showing the region from the top of a dune near Haarlem, depicting the region from west to east. This alternative perspective on the city comes back regularly in the book, as Feddes chooses to look at places in close detail, review the changes made, and the plans that have not been executed.
Another exciting element of the cover is the focus on development. The picture is full of ships and canals, Amsterdam’s traditional source of wealth. It also shows how the railway network is developing around the city, connecting the West of the country with the East through the capital. The impact of this development is enormous, cutting the old centre of the city from the water of the IJ, but connecting it by railways to the whole country. Feddes does not take a stance in the intense debate on the development of Amsterdam in the industrial era, but succeeds in showing its intensity and the impact of the outcomes.
Finally, the cover shows an unusually large amount of rurality, especially in north of Amsterdam, partially caused by the angle of the image. This reveals a wider interest in the impact of Amsterdam on its surroundings. The author does this throughout the book, trying to look over the city walls of the medieval town, over the defense structures of the 19th-century city, trying to see the land that is about to be devoured by the growing city.
This, together with a great interest in details, for example by looking at a row of three little houses on Dam Square and how they change over three centuries, makes this book extremely worthwhile and fun to read, bringing new insight to even the most experienced urban professionals and researchers.
It being a history book, it also reveals an obvious weak point in the book however. The most recent past of the city, more or less the last forty years and definitely the last twenty years of urban development in Amsterdam receive rather little in-depth analysis. The author concludes that the 1935’s Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan (literally, the general extension) and its implementation after 1945 was aimed at completing the city, and the bold modernist plans of restructuring the city centre in the 1960s and the construction of the Bijlmermeer in the 1970s are explained as the last great attempts of creating a new city. After this the focus lies more on the region of Amsterdam, which is of course also very interesting and has stunning parallels with the past, but lacks a full analysis of the Zuidas development, the impact of Schiphol Airport, the meaning of sustainable development in recent years, and the restructuring of post-war neighbourhoods in Nieuw-West and Bijlmermeer.
Nonetheless, this book will make a perfect birthday gift, especially to those who know Amsterdam inside-out, and in general to those who are interested in the history of this peculiar little big city in a swamp in north-western Europe.
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