Willem Salet & Andreas Faludi: History of Dutch Planning and AESOP

TU Delft believes Dutch planning is in constant evolution. It needs to contend with new challenges and successive crises. The climate crisis is forcing us to reimagine how this tiny country needs to be spatially organised. The housing crisis we are facing now is maybe only comparable to the housing shortage after WW II and COVID-19 has highlighted new challenges.

But this evolution happens based on a long tradition of planning and design of the built environment, dealing with an extraordinarily fragile environment, the Delta of a major European River, which forced the Dutch to develop a very specific societal model based on consensus seeking, faith in institutions and collective action. It is in this tradition that old and new Dutch planners work.

Planning education in the Netherlands has internationalised very quickly and it is also in constant evolution. From some quarters, we see fear that some of the Dutch planning tradition may be lost. I believe that one doesn’t need to be Dutch to teach and learn Dutch planning and we are all contributing to how Dutch planning is shaping up in the 21st century, bringing new knowledge and experiences. But details about how planning education has evolved in The Netherlands and how this country has influenced the creation of AESOP the Association of European Schools of Planning may indeed escape some of us.

For this reason, we have here today two people who witnessed much of this planning education history in The Netherlands. Professors Willem Salet and Andreas Faludi.

Willem Salet is professor emeritus of Urban and Regional Planning, at the department of Planning, Geography and International Development Studies, at the University of Amsterdam. He chaired Urban Planning at UvA from 1998 to 2017. He was the Scientific Director of the Amsterdam study center for the Metropolitan Environment AME (1997-2003). He was the President of (AESOP) 2008-2010. As a sociologist and urban planner, Professor Salet specializes in the institutional aspects of metropolitan development. He investigates the cultural, legal and political dimensions of public norms in the making of sustainable metropolitan spaces.

Andreas Faludi is professor emeritus at the chair of Spatial Planing and Strategy of the Department of Urbanism, TU Delft. He studied architecture and urban planning at the Technical University of Vienna. In his 'English' period, Faludi brought together different lines in the planning theory and connected these to the philosophical debate around critical rationalism. Through his actions, the planning discipline managed to develop a strong theoretical foundation. Faludi settled in Amsterdam, where he was seized by the special character of the Dutch planning. In the 80s and 90s, he has provided the Dutch the planning debate with a lot of ideas and examples about how we can look at spatial planning and spatial development. Particularly, he has described the influence of the Dutch culture on space and influence of the space (the Dutch delta) on the Dutch culture. 'The Dutch love rule and order' is perhaps his most quoted one-liner.