Randstad

Abstract

This chapter seeks to unravel the history of the Randstad planning concept and focuses on the national level as a lot of the thinking about the Randstad has been carried out within national planning organisations and trickled down to provincial and municipal planning. It begins with a short section about the very first visualisation of the Randstad which was created in the early 1920s. The chapter explains the gradual marginalisation of national spatial planning from the 2000s when comprehensive spatial planning gave way to project-based planning in which there was less interest in spatial concepts like the Randstad. In spite of the sensitive relationships with sectoral departments, it was the West which became the focus of national planning at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. Efforts to plan the development of the Randstad were seemingly over with the finalisation of the growth centre policy in sight.