Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "Hoog" channel.

Seperation of zoning almost always leads to disaster. Basically all well designed living spaces mix commercial and residential areas. The Bijlmer is now a much better neighborhood, and that's exactly what they did, they added commercial activities everywhere. You needs shops, bars and restaurants if you want a livable space. The high rise itself is not even the big issue here, it's the fact that these high-rises are completely seperated from commercial activity.
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@nunyabiznes33 Top down stratified thinking. Categorisation and separation of those categories has appealed to many people all over history. Zoning is still a big deal in the US for example. The Bijlmer was very much a product of its time, when people thought that commercial activity would crowd a place too much, but without it you clearly get the opposite problem, an empty street, which isn't nice and calm, but dirty and dangerous. People stick together for a reason, even in rural areas people tend to live relatively close together and at least in the Netherlands even the smallest of villages almost always have a bar and a restaurant, a sense of community is super important and it was heavily undervalued in these kinds of projects. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
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@PaulaBean the Bijlmer is legit a nice place right now. I work there and if the weather permits walk around the neighbourhood during the lunch break, and it actually looks really nice. It's completely different from what it supposedly was in the 60s and 70s. Mainly because they kind of got rid of the original concept and built a lot of commercial activity in between the high rise (and broke some of the high rises down). It's genuinely a pretty nice place with quite a lot of green but still a lively neighborhood.
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@tobene it's why I said commercial, not industrial. I get for many reasons why you don't want to put a steel mill in the middle of town (land is way too valuable for that kind of company to even want to be inside a city anyway), but more about bars, restaurants, supermarkets, shops, that kind of stuff. This stuff is not really polluting that much (in fact there's a good argument to be made that pollution goes down when shops are close to where people actually live). In the Netherlands there are several pretty big chemical industrial sites, and for obvious reasons they are relatively far away from residential areas. Offices indeed are often pretty close to city centers. I happen to work in one of those they built after the Bijlmer got reimagined. It's like a 3 minute walk from the train station, which is a pretty big boon for any company. Obviously cities used to pollute more in general in the past (just cars alone have become massively better than they were in the 50s and 60s), but the typical commercial activity you see in a 20th or 21st century city are not really that polluting. The east west side stuff was more the 18th and 19th centuries, when if you didn't have your factory close to a city, you wouldn't be able to attract employees, since most people, particularly poor people, weren't able to travel very far. This stratification stuff was more a mid century movement, which was closely related to the prevalence of the car amongst the middle class, well after the polluting industries left the cities.
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@9iht6ihgt43rzhijj to be fair in a lot of Western Europe has similar close proximity stuff. Particularly in the Netherlands it is hard to find your typical zoned neighborhood that you often see in the US. One of the main reasons the Bijlmer failed so much is because it didn't have this, and was the exception to the rule (now it has tons of commercial/social activity, and it's a very lively neighborhood). So nobody wanted to live in a neighborhood that didn't have all this stuff, and a half empty neighborhood only made things worse.
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@vinniechan I don't know where you live, but if you get a rat infestation when you're above restaurant there are far bigger problems.
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@utube1255 "social housing or concentration camps for refugees", it definitely wasn't that. Like the video said, the whole point was to make it a middle class neighborhood. It was a failure because it was planned to be this futuristic middle class neighborhood and became one of the worst neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, but true ghettos haven't really existed in the Netherlands since the mid 1800s (outside of Jewish neighbourhoods during the Nazi occupation, but you can't really blame the Dutch for that). The problem was that it stayed half empty which made it both expensive and undesirable. When only half the people pay rent, because the other half is empty, you have to basically pay double to keep the elevators and stuff running. It just wasn't a desirable place to live. And contrary to modern day where 1000s of apartments being empty in Amsterdam is unimaginable, the housing shortage was really low in the late 60s and early 70s. This project is near the end of the building boon after the massive housing shortage because of WW2 bombings. As is always the case in long term projects, people look way too much in the present and not when it is actually finished, so too many houses got built, and, an unpopular neighborhood like the Bijlmer, then remains relatively empty. So a neighbourhood that just doesn't adhere to the standards in the Netherlands in a period where there actually were more or less enough houses makes the neighbourhood relatively bad, and is a downward spiral. I don't know a lot about Russia in the 60s and 70s when it comes to housing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was very different over there. It was a failed project because it was a utopian project that became very subpar to Dutch standards. However I still would much rather live in a neighborhood like the Bijlmer in the 70s, than let's say a ghetto in any large American city, they are not even remotely close.
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@utube1255 They said storage not stores. That's something entirely different. That's quite a normal way of designing an apartment building in the Netherlands is to have storage space for every apartment on the ground floor, so you can store big stuff (like bikes) safely locked up without having it to take it up several floors every time. It even has its own word that I've never heard used in any other context of storage space: 'de berging'. But storage of course doesn't add commercial activity to an area. I'm quite interested to see what they did differently in Moskow, because at least here in the Netherlands I've always seen it go wrong. Of course not in every street, but at least nearby there should be something, and if it is close enough in basically all directions you will see people on the streets at almost every hour of the day. Understandably not every apartment block has their own shopping center, that would be completely unsustainable. But it should never be further than 5-10 min by bike to go to at least some commercial activity, and that wasn't the case in the Bijlmer, that's what they mentioned in the video, that there were no shops. Nowadays there's a reasonably big shopping center right in the middle of the Bijlmer that is much newer than the original neighbourhood from the 60s, and it works very well, the area is super lively since it's there.
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@hollandsemum1 I have no idea what you are replying to. I just gave my view on the situation. I don't know why you are talking about customer service (is that your only experience with the Netherlands or something, that you bought something from here once that wasn't up to your standards?), it has absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if it somehow would matter, there is absolutely no evidence other than anecdotes you can find in basically every country in the world to suggest that somehow the Netherlands is significantly worse on this issue. I was specifically not talking about pre-industrial infrastructure, I was talking about a building project from the 1960s, well after the industrial revolution, like almost everything in the Netherlands btw. In 1900, the Netherlands had over 3,5x less people than it has now, so even if every building from 1900 would still be standing (and I can assure you it does not, whole cities have been bombed since then), the vast majority of people wouldn't be living in them. There's no reason to even mention the cultural difference between the Americas and the Netherlands, since I was talking about a single development project in Amsterdam, namely the one discussed in the video, the Bijlmer. It's a development project I happen to know relatively well, since I work there. I've walked around the neighbourhood quite a bit. I just gave my 2 cents about why in the context it was built in (the Netherlands in the 1960s) it was considered a relative failure, because it lacked something that basically everywhere else in the Netherlands has, that has now been added and has almost immediately greatly improved the neighbourhood, to an extent that large corporations feel comfortable building their headquarters in. And you start talking about 'golden age pride' and customer service. I really don't understand why.
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@utube1255 well Russia never had mass immigration, in fact they put up the biggest most protected border in modern history to stop emigration, so obviously Russia doesn't have large immigration quarters. Indeed it was a problem that immigrants usually get social housing that historically was relatively concentrated. The idea was that it would help them if they had 'people similar to them' nearby, this of course massively backfired and for about 40 years now we've done the opposite.
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@uncletiggermclaren7592 I never said it was a disaster. The Bijlmer never was a disaster, it just was far from the utopian neighbourhood it was supposed to be. And it was an undesirable neighborhood because of it. If all the neighbourhoods are like that it becomes normal, but when it is one of the very few, it stands out.
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@alexmin4752 I don't think most people in the Netherlands have even considered the privacy aspect. It's not really part of concern over here. I'm definitely in favour of more high rise particularly in more central parts of cities (and in some cities you see it more and more). I think the main disdain for high rise relates to how the city looks. Most Europeans don't want high-rise because they are considered an eye sore of the city, particularly in cities with historical city centres (which is most cities).
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Dutch patriotism is very real. It's just less flag-waving (which is more associated with nationalism than patriotism in the Netherlands) and more 'look at this cool stuff we did' patriotism. And most Dutch believe there's actually a reason to be proud of the country, and it doesn't help the patriotism that the facts actually back it up quite a bit. Most Dutch people also don't think we are definitely the best, just that 'for such a small country' we're doing pretty well and have done some pretty cool stuff. We're quite high in most lists you want to be high in and quite low on most lists you want to be low in.
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@phantomblacklove there's no such thing as natural living. Unless you want to live under a tree or in a cave I guess. What is natural for humans is to use their brains and build things that make life better, and with 8 billion people on this planet, that includes high rise. That's what we humans do, we go further than any other species because we stop to think and actually improve things. Almost all species are just surviving every day. I guess worrying 16 hours a day whether there will be food on your plate tonight is very natural, you can just do that if you want. But I prefer to live in this 'unnatural' environment that is actually nice to live in, because humanity has spent millennia to make the world a better place and I can spend time on things because I like to do them, instead of being busy getting food all day.
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@johnnylong6289 that's just not true, the Blijlmer has never been that bad, just bad for Dutch standards. It's not like there were 50 murders a year or something. In fact the ghettos of Paris are far worse than the Bijlmer had ever been. The Dutch just like to complain a lot and feel like it could have been better. It wasn't that much of a ghetto really. The problem was just that it was a new development project that was supposed to be one of the nicer parts of town and it became one of the worst. That doesn't mean it was a true ghetto or anything like that. Half of the neighborhoods in most cities in the US are far worse than the Bijlmer has ever been. It really isn't that bad, it just wasn't good, while it was specifically designed to be, which is where the problem lies.
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@Chris-nn3vu what does villages have to do with this all? Villages have shops and stuff between houses as well. It's not like a village is just houses and nothing else. At least not in the Netherlands outside of the smallest of hamlets, which work because everyone knows each other. So you don't even remotely need as much social control that you'd have to civil engineer for in a big city neighbourhood with tons of people.
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@mauricio533 That's just not true. That's only true if you have suburbs. Without suburbs people just walk to shops. In fact the Bijlmer has less air pollution, since a lot of it is a pedestrian zone, so it doesn't have cars at all. The idea that commercial activity is noisy and polluting is a very American idea that just isn't true in most of the world. Suburbs have MUCH more noise and air pollution, since everyone is forced into a car.
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@mauricio533 you'd be surprised at how many people actually live in pedestrianised places. In every city centre thousands of people actually live there. Virtually every shop in the Netherlands has a house on top of it. It's just not that visible to most people.
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