Shaping Holland: Regional Design and Planning in the Southern Randstad

All around the world, regions are facing major challenges: climate change, the transition to renewable energy, reinventing the food system, ongoing urbanisation and finding room to sustain biodiversity. These will radically transform our living and working environments. Regional design uses the power of visualisation to unite regional players around appealing spatial development visions for meeting those challenges. It offers a route to new forms of regional governance and planning that match the urgencies of our time. This book exposes the benefits and the pitfalls of regional plans and designs.

Shaping Holland gives a unique insight into the emergence of contemporary regional planning and design practice in the Netherlands. This densely populated country in the delta of the Rhine and Meuse rivers is internationally renowned for its urban planning and design tradition. Drawing on first-hand accounts and a rich collection of illustrations, maps and diagrams, the book gives pointers for practitioners, academics and students of spatial planning, urban design and landscape architecture.

Regional design is on the rise in all continents. It provides an answer to a world in which economic activities, activity patterns, urban growth and ecological systems are no respecters of administrative boundaries. Amid the growing number of academic analyses of regional design, this book is unique because it focuses on planning practice and first-hand knowledge. As such it is of interest to a broad international readership.

Francisco Felix Colombo (1954) completed his architecture and urban design degree at the National University of La Plata (Argentina) and his Master in Urban and Regional Design (MTD) at the Universities of Delft and Eindhoven (Netherlands). He has extensive international design experience and has won several architectural competitions in Argentina. From 1993 to 2020 he worked as a senior regional designer at the Province of Zuid- Holland, where he contributed to almost all the major regional spatial visions and policies. His design work has been published in numerous policy documents. His practical experience at the Zuid-Holland Spatial Planning and Mobility department centred on regional planning and design in the South Wing of the Randstad. In addition, Francisco Colombo has worked as a design tutor and mentor in architecture and urbanism for forty years, in particular at the National University of La Plata and Delft University of Technology.

Jeroen van Schaick (1978) completed his urban design and planning degree at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. He stayed on at the faculty as a researcher in the Spatial Planning and Strategy research group and obtained his PhD in 2011. His thesis, Timespace Matters, is on the knowledge gap between social sciences and designers. Jeroen has been working as a strategic spatial planner at the Province of Zuid-Holland since 2010. In recent years he has specialised in futures studies and regional design methods, culminating in research publications on the societal impact of new technologies, the water-food-energy nexus and the book Kracht van Regionaal Ontwerp (the 2018 Dutch edition of Shaping Holland). His publications include work on the Dutch layer approach to planning, urban time planning and new technologies, as well as the books Urban Network – Network Urbanism (2008) and Urbanism on Track (2008).

Peter Paul Witsen (1964) completed his urban and regional planning degree at the University of Amsterdam. He is a scholar, writer and consultant on spatial planning. He specialises in regional planning, having been involved in the making of development plans for areas like the Green Heart of the Randstad, National Park Nieuw Land (New Land) near Amsterdam and the New Dutch Waterline military heritage zone. He currently heads his own consultancy firm Westerlengte. He started his career as a planner with the Institute for Traffic, Logistics and Regional Development at the Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO. Between 2000 and 2015 he joined the editorial staff of Blauwe Kamer, the Dutch magazine on landscape and urban design. His publications include The Selfmade Land: Culture and Evolution of Urban and Regional Planning in the Netherlands.