Pakhuis de Zwijger Case: Havenstad IJpoort
What if the 800 hectares of the Hoogovens are released tomorrow? What do we want with this popular location by the sea in the middle of the Amsterdam metropolitan region? One possible implementation is Port City IJpoort, a plan for a new metropolitan residential area for 105,000 inhabitants on the North Sea Canal. How do you develop a plan for this area, how do you build a new city on the site of a steel factory? Together with urban planners and other experts, we are diving into the future of Dutch urban planning.
Garbage dumps, sewage treatment plants, waste points; they are all highly polluted areas. Yet in the past, we built on these places. Where these have always been relatively small transformations, there is now a plan for a whole new city that should accommodate 200,000 people in the area where the blast furnaces of IJmuiden are now located. Pieter van Duijn, the initiator of the plan called 'Port City IJpoort', describes in this plan a possible design for a healthy, liveable and sustainable city on the site of the current blast furnaces of IJmuiden.
A healthy, liveable and sustainable city with space for 200,000 in one of the most polluted areas in the Netherlands; an unprecedented operation in one of the most unlikely areas. How do you develop a highly polluted area into a sustainable residential area? What does this plan mean for the way we look at polluted areas? And where do we make cities in the future? In this programme, we will look at the Port City IJpoort plan and look for answers to these questions.
This programme is a case study in urban design, not a conversation about the future of steel production and Tata Steel in the Netherlands.