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Dear future Blue House resident,

I’m thinking about last winter. About how I arrived at The Blue House, as one of its first residents, without any idea of what I wanted to do, without plans or a project. I was totally open to the experience of living in a new suburb – especially to living on new ground and in the centre of a housing block as well planned as Block 35. Suddenly I was part of something that typifies Dutch people on a worldwide scale: ‘reclaiming land’.

How do they build an island all in one go? How can they plan an entire community there all in one go? Is that possible? Will it work? Those are the first thoughts of someone not yet accustomed to such an organised society. But there were also other questions that came to my mind during my first month there: How do I deal with this residential district? What is my position within this experiment? How do I view this artificial place? In the beginning I felt completely lost. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. The reality was that there was no community structure yet: there were no places to meet, people hardly knew one another and a conscience had not yet emerged.

So I started by just looking around. We know that observing is organising, perhaps also judging and certainly making compositions. However, I wanted to observe in a scientific way. With a neutral gaze. I remembered Foucault and his description of science in the seventeenth century; he used biology, I think, as his example. His idea of equivalence: people began to discover the world and classify things according to this concept. They devised groups and families according to common characteristics. That was a way of building up knowledge. Based on the same philosophy, I began taking an endless series of photographs – to record an impression of IJburg based on a gaze directed only at forms, the way a foreigner observes. That’s how I started to make a portrait of IJburg.

Yet a simple portrait was surely not enough, don’t you agree? I knew I had to do more. I was missing the human aspect of IJburg. You know, one of the things that may have confused me more was the idea of conceiving a residential area from inside an office. Because of course a neighbourhood is more than just houses and streets. There are also shops, infrastructure, and above all, people. How then is it possible to plan a community? Or did the project developers not worry about that? I’ve often heard that IJburg is the latest variant of the VINEX subdivision: ‘comparable to a nineteenth-century district in Amsterdam’, said Lia, who was involved in the IJburg project as a sociologist. Yet surely these nineteenth-century districts grew organically? They didn’t just appear out of nowhere! They certainly went through various stages. Do you really think it can just happen all at once now? I don’t know. Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle is a good illustration of this, contrasting the artificiality of the modern community with the old neighbourhood that has evolved organically. Of course reality is not as black-and-white as Tati shows. But you need extreme examples to start a good conversation.

Mon Oncle also brought me to another subject: history. What is the history of this district? If we look at IJburg as an urban design project, we can say that it fits in the tradition of VINEX subdivisions that have been built in the Netherlands since the 1980s. We can also make a connection with two other well-known districts in the Amsterdam area: the Bijlmer and Almere. The latter may be nominally a city, but its dependency on Amsterdam means it can be treated as a city district. In terms of the type of its buildings, I think IJburg is somewhere between these two examples. What can we learn from the problems of these two districts? What did the creators of IJburg do differently, and why?

However, because a residential area is also created by the people who live there, and because people bring along their past, their customs and their values, I also had to record the history of these city residents somehow. Where did they come from? I just went to visit people. I asked them about the path they had travelled in life, the cities they had lived in, and I asked them for photographs of these places. Of course when you’re visiting someone you always chat about life, about the neighbourhood. Soon I began recording these chats. And then each chat became a whole interview about a variety of subjects. That’s how I arrived at the structure of my project.

They often talked about nature. We know that half of the Netherlands is man-made, and that pure nature no longer exists. I’m suddenly reminded of something Ernesto de Sousa, a Portuguese artist, once said: ‘Nature is a historical error.’ That idea fits the Dutch landscape. From that standpoint it’s rather odd that Dutch people are so keen to preserve an area that is entirely artificial – like the IJmeer – and that they call the Diemerpark a nature park.

Plans, plans, plans. Dutch people plan everything down to the smallest detail, even a community: 30% socially subsidized properties, 40% free-market properties and 30% rental properties. Planning doesn’t go so far as to stipulate exactly who is to live there, but the way everything is planned leaves no room for anyone who doesn’t fit in the plans. Lia hopes that this will foster contact among people of different social classes. Even some residents of Block 35 expect this: Marinus too thinks that a mixed population is best for the city. As Maggy puts it: ‘The more we know about one another the fewer prejudices there are.’ That sounds great, but the reality is otherwise. According to some other residents, this mixed community is precisely the problem: ‘To start with, just the fact that they’re property owners and we’re tenants,’ says Chaja Yeah, it’s not all sweetness and light in this kind of planned community.

But it was the issue of ‘social control’ that surprised me more. This issue came to the fore during a conversation with a group of IJburgers after they had seen the Dutch film De Noordelingen at a fellow resident’s suggestion. We talked about how people look at one another and keep an eye on what goes on in the neighbourhood. It emerged that people are more concerned about looking ‘normal’ than about resolving their actual problems. I think social control has more of an institutional quality, and of course there are two sides to this. It’s guided by the authorities. After all, in planning a city district like this, they consider what organisations and facilities are suited to a certain social level. These must be facilities that attract a particular audience and have a particular image. They’re not keen on street trade, for instance, preferring a trendy pseudo-hippie beach café that can generate publicity for IJburg. There are also organisations like the Timon commune, which helps young people lead independent lives. But no soup kitchen or a shelter for the homeless. The Timon families are all genuinely nice people and their work is very important for our society and especially for those young people. They definitely represent the good side of this ‘social control’. But… the other organisations – why aren’t they here? Are they too dangerous for a residential district such as this?

And that is another problem that I can already see in IJburg. They’re building the perfect residential district to keep their children safe, but they’re forgetting that outside IJburg reality is very different. Even in the city centre. Yeah… of course it’s nice to let your child play outside and have adventures. But the greater the protection, the greater the shock when they come face to face with the real city. And that will undoubtedly generate problems in the future. I remember a conversation with Mauricio and Pio of m7red, Argentinean fellow residents of The Blue House. They told me about the ‘gated condominiums’ in South America and about how the atmosphere there resembles IJburg. About how children who live in city centres are more prepared for the dangers of the street. Is IJburg the best solution?

I don’t have any answers. And that’s not what this project is about. This project is in fact about all those questions that occurred to me and that were raised by residents of Block 35 as well. I’ve tried to provide insight into all these questions on The Blue House website (www.blauwehuis.org) and hope you, as a future resident, can delve into them further.

It was definitely an exciting winter I spent in The Blue House.

Love,

Daniela