SPACELAB

research laboratory
for the contemporary city

>> Amsterdam’s core - museum or Faculty of Architecture

Delft University of Technology

living urban monument? Berlageweg 1

2628 CR Delft
spacelab@bk.tudelft.nl
www.spacelab.tudelft.nl

Stephen Read

The historical core of Amsterdam has changed in many profound ways over
time (especially over the last century in relation to the urban agglomeration
and region) and its relevance within the modern metropolitan city has been
questioned. It remains though an area of colour and vitality and in many ways
remains the cultural and functional fulcrum of the modern city. Research on
urban spatial/functional structure done at the DUT and at LJCL in London offers
suggestive spatial reasons for the endurance of the core as a powerful and
binding urban focus and for the nature of the relationship of the historical centre
to the city around it and to the region.

Introduction
One of the consistent themes in the discourse about cities today is the way that
they are changing and the pace at which they are changing. There is a lot of
discussion about the transformation of cities in relation to their peripheries and
their regions and the part that transportation and information technologies play, and
the part that the mobility of people plays in the interaction between the city and its
region. However, one of the interesting things about cities is not simply that they
constantly change - but that so much of them doesn’t. Right at the centre of so
many modern European cities, in their historical cores, there exists a great deal of
the very old - and even the ancient - in the routes and the spatial patterns that make
up their spatial and functional shapes and structures. Whatever changes the city
may experience in the course of its development, these changes take place in the
context of, and are conditioned by what came before - and the most binding part of
this legacy is the spatial/ functional structure bound into the network of public open
space and the patterns of movement laid down in the past.

This paper presents work in progress and as such is directed more towards the
raising of questions than to the answering of those questions. The work that it
describes arises out of the need, within the context of a broader study of the
structure of the form of the spatial movement network of Amsterdam and its
region, to consider historical development - which is considered to have profoundly
influenced the present-day movement network - more directly and specifically.

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 The growth of the city and the roles of space and scale.
The spatial networks of cities arc clearly not simply neutral conveyers of movement
within cities. Certain routes are prioritised by people and traffic - and not simply
because they have been so allocated by planners orpoliticians, or because their
profiles have been designed to carry7 more traffic, or because they have greater
densities of certain functions associated with them or are more architecturally
attractive - although all these factors do play some role. Routes through the urban
fabric tend to be prioritised primarily because of their specific geometries within the
network that makes up the urban spatial grid - and because of their actual spatial
relationships with other routes and with spaces at other levels in the urban spatial
hierarchy. Urban spatial grid shapes and relationships are a product of processes
that take place in history - and this is nowhere more true than in the historical
cores. The purpose of the current study is to try to begin to understand the nature
of some of these processes better and the effect they may have on the present-day
functioning of the historical centre of Amsterdam taken both alone and in relation
to the rest of the city that has developed around it.

The modern city is not all about flux and change - indeed many aspects of the
city change only slowly and only slightly. There is a certain fixity and immobility for
example about the network of public space and its shape and configuration that
exists alongside the changes that are the subject of so much current attention. The
fact that public space patterns right at the centre of our cities may also be intimately
linked with the way the city functions - because of the mutually constitutive nature
of the space/time/function relationship - means that historical spatial patterns and
the historical process of the forming or shaping of the urban spatial network is not
simply and purely an historical/morphological subject - but one that may deeply
affect the way the city has subsequently developed and may profoundly influence
the present-day functioning of the city, through establishing specific types of
spatial/functional pattern, as well as preferred axes of connection into the centre
itself. The dynamic of the city involves change and fixity, and the most interesting
aspects of the picture seem, from the exploratory research so far done, to lie in
the relationship between what changes (the areas and directions of expansion)
and what stays relatively fixed (mainly what has already been built) and between
different scales and different levels in the hierarchies embedded in the spatial
network.

Spatial description and spatial structure

The spatial techniques described here concentrate on the concrete present- day
form of the spatial network of the city’ and do not explicitly consider the historical
development of that network. However it is taken as read that in the urban context,
space and form, time and history, and people and society are mutually constitutive
elements in any framework of analysis or explanation. So while the techniques used
here appear to be a- historical and for that matter not even specifically geometric
or social or functional, they are capable of identifying structure that has its origins
in the historical development of the city or in specific geometric or functional
conditions, for the simple reason that history, geometry and social factors have
given form to the city and have influenced that form toa very large extent according
to their own imperatives. It is necessary to bring history into the story of the spatial
structure of the city in a more explicit way in order to understand better some of
these processes which have given form to the city. The idea of structure in this
context refers to aspects of the shape of the spatial network which are linked to
hierarchy in space and hierarchy in function in space.

Space syntax is a set of techniques for the exact description of the shape of
the network of space in the city. It has been developed mainly at the Unit for
2 Architectural Studies at University College London and has been used in this study
 to try to identify structure within the exact shape and configuration of the urban
spatial network of Amsterdam. The object of working with the techniques is to
search for patterns or regularities in the relationships between this description and
quantifiable aspects of the functioning of the city.

Figure 1.
Amsterdam - axial map

What this means in practical terms is that a plan of the network of space of the city
is overlaid with a graph called an axial map - which consists of the least number of
longest straight lines or axes that completely and continuously cover the network
of space of the city. Each of these elements or axes has a relationship to each of
the other elements or axes in the system which can be expressed very simply in
terms of the least number of other elements one has to pass through to get from
the one to the other. And, just as each element has a relationship with each other
individual clement which can be quantified simply as a number, each clement of
thesystem has a quantifiable relationship with the rest of the system as a whole.
This is usually the average - standardised to allow7 for the effect of the size of the
system - of all the numbers of elements one has to pass through to get from that
clement to all the other elements in the system - the average in other words of the
numeric relationships between the element or axis in question and all the other
elements or axes in the system.

So in essence there is nothing complicated about the technique itself. What is

complicated is the spatial nehvork being studied - and what we are trying to do is
to describe this complex thing in such away that we reveal structure within it. Its
a case of trying to allow a global picture to emerge from a lot of local effects. The
quantities obtained from this analysis - done with computers - can be compared
to other quantifiable features in the city - like densities of people or of movement.
Nobody is suggesting that the only determinant of function in the space of the city
is the shape of the spatial network - but testing the model has proved that it can
predict the densities of people in public space, for example, rather well.
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 Testing the model.
Work on Dutch cities and their spatial networks has highlighted some interesting
regularities in the relationship between the shape of their spatial networks and
their functioning - as well as some very interesting differences as regards these
relationships between London - where most of the work using space syntax has
until now been done - and Amsterdam.

Figure 2. Amsterdam - areas tested with Space Syntax

Figure 3. Amsterdam - Watergraafsmeer - correlation between Space Syntax measures and presence of people in
public space
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 Space syntax has been tested in many areas and in many situations in Amsterdam
and in other Dutch cities. At the simplest level that has meant comparing densities
of people surveyed in real public space with the quantities derived from the model.
Although the correlations (see for example figure 3) were generally good they
were not always as good as those found in London. The reasons for this are not
completely clear at this point in the process of exploration, but some interesting
ideas are emerging from the whole picture which may in the future lead to a
deeper understanding of the role played by network shape and configuration in city
functioning.

Figure 4.
36 areas in 5 Dutch cities - area level spatial measure/functional measure correlations

At another level, its been found that we get some very interesting correlations
between these sorts of spatial measures taken for areas as a whole and the general
averaged out rate of occupation of the public space of the areas taken as wholes.
There is in fact no comparable effect in London - but this relationship appears to
be robust in Dutch cities and the potential of this for evaluating urban layouts and
urban designs in the Dutch situation is considerable.

The space of the city appears to be organised and structured in ways that are not
always obvious or immediately clear to us when we just look at a plan - and this
organisation seems on the face of it, from the results of the research done so far, to
have a profound effect on some types of function. By far the most important factor
affecting this spatial/functional interaction appears to be spatial hierarchy.

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 Urban spatial hierarchy - the area and the supergrid
The hierarchies in movement networks have mostly up to now7 been defined by
reference to rates and types of movement - in other words in terms of the functional
measures of what’s happening in the spaces themselves, and not in terms of their
spatial measures. This is because there has been a lack of means of measuring the
spatial characteristics of urban networks that reliably link them to functional effects.
There are of course many ways of describing space but describing space in a way
that does not consistently relate to the things that happen in that space is of course
of limited value.

Figure 5.
Amsterdam, Jordaan and Grachten - movement rate profiles
If we look at profiles of movement and public space occupation rates in
neighbourhoods in Dutch cities a typical pattern emerges. One almost invariably
finds that some small percentage of the spaces in an area - usually around 10%
- carry a very considerably higher rate of movement than the rest of the spaces in
the area - there is a very clear hierarchy as regards the way spaces are used in the
area, with a small number of spaces being prioritised for more intense and more
long-distance movement through or past the area. These spaces are often, but
not always, also functionally important locally as high streets or shopping streets,
and the exact relationship of the more typical spaces in the area to those spaces
prioritised for longer-distance movement and the relationship of those longer-
distance movement spaces to the whole pattern of longer-distance movement in
the vicinity seems to some extent to determine the function and character of the
prioritised spaces.

These spaces prioritised for longer-distance movement - taken as a whole over the
whole city - form a network with a specialised long or longer distance movement
function and are called the supergrid. Their special characteristic is not necessarily
a high rate of movement per se, but rather a high rate of movement in relation to the
more typical spaces in their vicinity. In other words they are the spaces that people
will move towards when they move out of the local area, or make a journey that is
at a more global scale than the scale of the local area itself.

It is not remarkable that we can determine the spaces that make up the supergrid
on the basis of measuring movement and numbers of people in public space.
However, what is more remarkable for the idea of spatial as opposed to functional
hierarchy, is that it is possible to determine the supergrid pretty accurately simply
by performing certain simple numerical operations on the axial map. The derivation
of the patterns shown in figures 6 and 7 is purely spatial - but anyone who is familiar
with either London or Amsterdam will sec the functional logic in them immediately.
The spaces picked out form - with some rather interesting anomalies in the case of
6 Amsterdam - the system of global movement in these two cities. London produces
 these very clear global scale patterns that correspond very nicely with the roads that
one finds picked out as being more major roads in the London ‘A to Z’. A similarly
derived pattern in Amsterdam is clear enough - but is not quite as reliable as that of
London. This representation of the supergrid network is derived purely from spatial
data - but clearly it is also historical in the sense that it must be processes that have
taken place in history which have produced these spatial/functional patterns.

Figure 6.
London - supregrid

Figure 7.
Amsterdam - supergrid

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 Figure 8. London - figure ground

Figure 9. Amsterdam - figure ground

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 Processes of formation
As designers we are very conscious of geometric order and we often use geometric
order in the form of regular grids and other regular - or consciously irregular -
patterns quite explicitly when designing layouts of urban areas. In fact one can
start talking about another kind of order in the space of the city - one that is very
closely related to some kinds of functional order in the city. There is more geometric
regularity in the Amsterdam map than there is in London whereas London seems
to have more of this other kind of order - because clearly there is a type of order
here although it is not an order that \vc as designers necessarily ‘see’ that well -
compared that is to how well we see geometric order.

It is possible of course that both these types of order - the more geometrically
regular order in Amsterdam and the more structural order one finds in London have
their origins in the ways that these different cities have grown and developed.

Figure 10. London - 17thC map

Figure 11. Amsterdam - 17thC map

The most obvious spatial difference in the processes of development of the spatial
patterns of Amsterdam and London as they occurred in the 17th century must lie
in the relative degree of conscious planning between the two cities. Whereas it is
clear that virtually all of Amsterdam has expanded in very deliberately planned and
contained spatial bursts - as if ‘blistering’ in stages at its perimeter, huge expanses
of London have ‘just grown’ in a much more piecemeal and continuous way - more
or less ‘leaking’ into the surrounding landscape. It is clear also that whereas in
London this ‘leaking’ into the landscape was structured around and along already
existing movement routes, in Amsterdam the expansion of the city was structured
more by the area of the spatially contained expansion project.

Figure 12. Figure 13.

London - figure ground/axial map Amsterdam - figure ground/axial map

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 If we compare a sample area of Amsterdam with an area of London again and pick
out the longest spaces that we find in both of them, then it seems that long spaces
in London are organised in a very particular way. One can see that they tend to
be strung together much more than are those in Amsterdam. This sort of chain
of long spaces arrangement may be some sort of key to what is going on here.
London tends to be (and this is all relative of course - there is nothing that pure
and straight-forward when it comes to cities) structured by movement. Areas or
neighbourhoods within London tend to be centred on these chains of long spaces
- supergrid spaces. This is the origin of London’s high-streets - and the origin at the
same time of one of the biggest problems with them. Today they are often made
unpleasant by the volume of global traffic which passes through what also serves
as a local neighbourhood centre.

There’s a story in here about organic versus planned cities; John Summerson said
“a town, like a plant or an anthill, is a product of a collective unconscious will, and
only to a very small extent of formulated intention.” The town he is referring to is of
course London which has resisted all attempts by central authorities at planning.
And nothing would be further from the truth were he referring to Amsterdam.

Figure 14. Amsterdam west - supergrid movement routes.

Amsterdam, structured as it seems to be by the expansion project, has supergrid

routes threaded almost as an afterthought through or even around neighbourhoods.
The supergrid is often relatively compromised by this threading process - one
does not see the same clear strings of long spaces that one sees in London. The
supergrid is much weaker than the supergrid of London, but is still clear enough
- the spatial analysis still in general picks it up quite accurately.

It seems that there is a kind of match between origins and present day function
in the spatial pattern of London - which arises out of the origin of the spatial
pattern itself in routes of movement and the subsequent relative stability of this
pattern and stability of the relative distribution of the city around this pattern. So
movement orders and structures the original shape of the spatial network which
then orders and structures present day movement. And that is a lot of what the
space syntax instrument seems to be picking up - not all of it but a lot. The space
10 syntax instrument ‘sees’ these movement routes as strings of lines or axes - and
 really what it is measuring is strings of generally long axes. That doesn’t seem to
mean that all the axes in a supergrid route need to be long - only that taken together
it is made up of generally long axes. It’s picking up a formal/geometric property
of supergrid routes that is measured in generally long axes - or perhaps one can
think of it as long sight-lines - in the model and one that is pretty consistent even
in Amsterdam. Speaking then in crude terms, a city’s primary movement routes -
which in fact means those that tend to structure movement in the rest of the spaces
of the city as well - tend to be straight and characterised by long sight lines.

Spatial formation processes in Amsterdam.

So what’s the story then with Amsterdam? These movement routes in Amsterdam
are nowhere near so purely structured by movement as are those in London. While
there is a supergrid that clearly operates as such, its origins are nowhere near as

Figure 15. Figure 16.

London - supergrid close-up. Amsterdam - supergrid close-up.

clearly pure movement as are those in London. Its a bit of a paradox really - because
Holland being as flat as it is, one would imagine that there is little resistance to
movement in any direction. In fact the land is crossed and divided - geometrically
pre- structured if you like - by dikes and waterways and this doesn’t just apply to
the landscape as a whole, it has also applied to the city and its origins.

Figure 17. Water in the landscape.

Figure 18. Water in the city.

The long axes - or long sight-lines - that one finds in the historical Dutch city may
often facilitate longer-distance movement today but they have their origins in a
process of formation that is not always to do with movement. In a real sense one
could say that compared to the movement system in London (and again this is
always a relative thing of course), the movement system of the centre of Amsterdam
is an ad hoc or post hoc construct on the back of processes that often have more to
do with large scale environmental engineering than movement. The purpose then of
this little historical study on the origins of Amsterdam is to start to fill in some gaps
11 in my understanding of the spatial/functional dynamic of modem Amsterdam - and
 to try to begin to understand the processes of development of the spatial structure
of Amsterdam better and to try to link that to the present day functioning of the
city. I have taken 6 stages in the development of the historical core - including
today - at about 1300,1544,1612,1650,1662 and the present day and the study is
based on contemporaneous maps. Diagrams are being drawn which it is hoped will
isolate the important factors in the development of important features in the spatial
network. It is expected that these factors will include the positions of city gates at
the various stages of development and the positions of dikes, city walls and moats.
One of the ways that routes within the historical city were structured by movement
was by the positioning of gates. What I’ve begun to do at the simplest level is simply
to trace some of the routes within the city which began as being access points to
the city at various stages of development. Dikes, walls and moats often established
long sight-line axes which in some cases were incorporated into the longer distance
movement network, and which in any event tended, simply by being there, to affect
the movement network in some way. All this is very much unfinished business - in
fact only just begun business - and I welcome any criticism.

Figure 19. Amsterdam - axial map 1300

Figure 20. Amsterdam - 1300 diagram

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 Figure 21. Amsterdam - axial map 1544

Figure 22. Amsterdam - 1544 diagram

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 Figure 23. Amsterdam - axial map 1612

Figure 24. Amsterdam - 1612 diagram

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 Figure 25. Amsterdam - axial map 1650

Figure 26. Amsterdam - 1650 diagram

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 Figure 27. Amsterdam - axial map 1662

Figure 28. Amsterdam - 1662 diagram

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 Figure 29. Amsterdam - axial map 1997

Figure 30. Amsterdam -1997 diagram

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 The spatial logic of the historical core.
I am going to present some ideas about the spatial nature of the historical core
of Amsterdam as tentative conclusions to this unfinished work. I expect that
these ideas may change somewhat as the work progresses, but at the moment
they represent what appear to me to be reasonable speculations about the final
outcome.

The historic core of Amsterdam is only poorly spatially integrated with the rest of
the city immediately around it for a number of good spatial reasons. The first is that
the original city was small, and while the scale of the spaces - and here I am talking
about length of sight-lines rather than the width of spaces - was adequate for the
size of the city in the seventeenth century, there is a real scale contrast as one
enters the historical core from the nineteenth and early twentieth century belt today.
This seems to affect perceptions of accessibility and comprehensibility of the
historical core. Amsterdam does not have the equivalent of the boulevards of Paris
which have given that city a spatial scale at its centre which is more appropriate
to the scale of the whole city. Amsterdam’s core does have long sight-lines -
along the Damrak/Rokin, Nicuwezijdsvoorburgwal, and the Spuistraat and their
extensions into the Vijselstraat and the Leidsestraat, but these tend to be used as
quick connections in one direction - south-north - to Central Station and the Prins
Hendrikkade and its connections to the regional road network and do not form a
multi-functional movement network - with that complex layering of functions that
is the mark of true urbanity. Movement in the east-west direction in the historical
centre remains difficult, due entirely to the small scale and convoluted connections
left by the processes of spatial pattern formation - especially those before the
17th century. Another point is that there are other long sight-lines in the centre -
generally formed by connections running alongside dikes, and given form by those
dikes - Klovenicrsburgwal, Oudezijdsvoorburgwal, Oudezijdsachterburgwal, for
example and of course on the west side, Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht
and the Singel - but the connection of these potentially powerful routes is negated
by their poor connections to the rest of the global movement system. There is no
question that their poor connections are a result of them never having historically
been part of a movement system which included the areas outside the old city that
now comprise the newer parts of Amsterdam. The historical centre is therefore
spatially isolated from the newer parts of Amsterdam with the exception of a
couple of rather specialised north/ south routes. At the moment I am developing a
space syntax technique which identifies clustering of groups of elements within the
whole axial map and 1 expect that this will show this relative independence of the
historical centre in relation to the rest of the spatial configuration of Amsterdam in
a graphic way.

Another reason is that the core is not truly at the centre, but is in fact at the edge
of the whole configuration. The connections to Amsterdam North from the core are
tenuous to say the least and the waterfront along the IJ- oevers as well as the core
behind it suffer from this problem which is common to many waterfront and other
city edge situations, and identified by Jane Jacobs amongst others.

What is the most interesting aspect of the relationship of the historical core of
Amsterdam to the rest of the movement network however, is the way that this
relationship has been affected through scale changes in relation to the region
as opposed to the city of Amsterdam. Much has been written recently about
processes of ‘urban transformation’ and the regionalisation of urban systems along
with the rise of the importance of the periphery at the expense often of the centres
of cities. Conventional perceptions place the historical core of Amsterdam at the
centre of a model which develops in concentric rings out to the periphery. The idea
18 I am researching challenges this, taking a more fragmented and metropolitan view
 of the city, placing the historic centre alongside a constellation of urban centres
strongly connected in a regional network. The experience of the historic centre on
a Saturday morning supports, I believe, the view that the centre is as closely if not
more closely connected, as far as the functional importance of the connections are
concerned, to Purmerend, Castricum and Haarlem as it is to Osdorp or Amsterdam
Zuid. The historic centre looks at the moment more like a regional shopping centre
rather than the economic heart and engine of the city. It seems likely that the
continuing relevance of the historic centre is tied most strongly to its relationships
to the region and to other centres in the region and seen in this light, the importance
of a strong regional-level connection to the explosively growing Amsterdam RAI/
Schiphol axis seems obvious.

Recommended reading
Hillier B., J. Hanson, The Social Logic of Space, CUP, 1984.
Hillier B., A. Penn, J. Hanson, T. Grajewski, Xu J., ‘Natural movement: or,
configuration and attraction in urban pedestrian movement’/ in; Environment and
Planning B, Planning and Design, vol. 20, 1993.
Hillier B., Space is the Machine, CUP, 1996.
Jacobs J., The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Penguin, 1984. Jacobs
describes the city as a system of organised complexity and identifies spatial
configurational reasons for urban health and blight. She proposes that activity and
a diverse urbanity depend on certain conditions of the urban grid.
Read S., Function of urban pattern/Pattern of urban function, Publikatieburo
Bouwkunde, Technische Universiteit Delft, 1996.
Read S., ‘Space syntax and the Dutch city’, in; Proceedings of the First International
Space Syntax Symposium, University College London, 1997. Awaiting publication in
Environment and Planning B, Planning and Design.
Read S. ‘Space syntax and the Dutch city - the Supergrid’, in; Proceedings of the
First International Space Syntax Symposium, vol. 3, University College London,
1997.
Rossi A., The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1982. Rossi emphasises the
way the city changes - but at the same time talks a lot about the permanent
phenomena that link different historical stages with each other. The most powerful
and meaningful permanences are, according to Rossi, the city’s basic layout, the
street and the plan and for him there is a dialectic relationship between this kind
of permanence and growth. ‘Cities tend to remain on their axes of development,
maintaining the position of their original layout and growing according to the
direction and meaning of their older artefacts...’

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