Structures of feeling

Tim Verlaan opens a new perspective on the politics of urban redevelopment in Western European cities by investigating different notions of which urban structures should represent a democratic society at the tail end of the postwar economic boom. Specifically, the chapter examines how technocratic private developers collided with action groups over Hoog Catharijne, a vast office and shopping complex in the Dutch city of Utrecht. As an architectural antidote to this consumers’ paradise, the action groups advocated plans for a cultural venue. By researching the developers’ company records and local council archives, Verlaan investigates emotions attached to urban spaces together with notions of democracy and citizenship. As both development schemes aimed at enlightening Dutch citizens, this conflictual entanglement of consumerism and culture points to the adversarial history of subject formation. The different appeals to subjectivity translated into ways in which both schemes connected to the surrounding urban fabric and a new urban vocabulary.