Amsterdam: A Museum City That Still Provides Excellent Travel

Now that I have chosen to focus my research on urban planning in Amsterdam, I have been finding all kinds of interesting information from the reading, which makes me think this is going to be a really interesting topic! In the reading I reflected on in the previous post, there were some interesting points about Amsterdam when looking at the urban planning that came up again in the reading for today in Understanding Amsterdam. The fact that downtown Amsterdam consists of buildings that are hundreds of years old that are separated by picturesque canals, makes Amsterdam almost more of a museum then a functional modern city. Apparently Venice is the only other city that has maintained this dedication historical preservation of its downtown.

Last week's reading indicated that there has been some tension to revamp Amsterdam in the sense of making it conform to the more modern standard. For example: fill in the canals to make them roads, or drain the canals and then pave roads in them. While this seemed like it would be a logical solution to me in order maximize practicality, they chose to make the core of downtown pedestrian only, and instead experimented with other types of urban plans in the areas outside of downtown. Keeping this museum-like downtown seems like it would cause many problems with efficiency of travel, but it seems that the opposite is true.

To contrast, Seattle is a city that has a fairly modern and intricate downtown with many complicated roads that allow the people to drive into the heart of the city. Interestingly, if you asked someone who lived 10 miles north of downtown how they liked commuting to the city every day, I can almost guarantee their response would be a negative one.

Amsterdam, on the other hand, is referred to by Paul Claval in "The cultural dimension in restructuring metropolises" as a metropolitan area that "...Has some of the best conditions for work and daily life in the contemporary world." This seems contradictory at first due to the fact that are more canals than roads in downtown Amsterdam, but the use of mass transit combined with "efficient motorways" where necessary allows commuting into the city to be painless and easy. The fact that a city that was designed hundreds of years ago is easier to travel in than a city that 150 years ago hadn't even been founded, is certainly worth taking a look at.

These questions that follow are related to how I am thinking about possibly approaching my research on urban planning in Amsterdam:

1) What aspects of Dutch culture have shaped the way that Amsterdam's urban structure has developed over the years?
2) While Amsterdam's museum-like downtown has served the Dutch well for the last few hundred years, is it going to be really work for the next few hundred years without significant change? Why/why not?