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SPEAKER_00: It was a beautiful image, a new image, a new alternative for living in cities. Put the people up, give them a view, give them space down below, free the grounds. It was a great image.
SPEAKER_12: After World War II, modernist architects offered people a new vision for urban planning. A so-called city of the future, where people would live in high-rise apartment buildings and cars would drive on elevated roads so that the ground could be open for recreation. Housing, shopping and traffic would all be separated out into distinct zones. It would mean the end of congestion. It should be a kind of smooth, nice machine where you're very comfortable.
SPEAKER_12: These new modernist ideas for urban design were used to some degree in developments all over the world. But in Amsterdam, they took this modernist idea really far. The Belmermer. It's the apotheosis of all modernist thinking.
SPEAKER_13: It was the best attempt to build the city of the future.
SPEAKER_07: But in the late 60s and early 70s, as the first residents moved in, the Belmermer was not living up to its promises.
SPEAKER_12: The waiting list disappeared really fast.
SPEAKER_06: The desperate people that start screaming, where's the subway, where are the shops?
SPEAKER_13: You should have said, stop building more units because they'll be standing empty. When it was completed in the mid-70s, the Belmermer, or the Belmer as locals call it for short,
SPEAKER_12: was a massive expanse of 31 concrete towers arranged in a honeycomb pattern. There were 13,000 apartments and many of them were unoccupied. Just sitting there. Totally empty. Senior producer Katie Mingle will take the story from here. There are so many planes that fly over the Belmermer.
SPEAKER_01: It's a route to the airport, yeah. It's a very busy airport. Schiphol Airport.
SPEAKER_09: That's Dutch producer Chris Beijme. He co-reported this story with me.
SPEAKER_04: And you'll hear him occasionally asking questions, speaking in Dutch and waiting for planes to pass as he talks to people out at the Belmer.
SPEAKER_09: We hear that the Belmer is a very busy airport. We hear the planes still because it's the same old route.
SPEAKER_04: If Chris were standing outside the Belmer in the 1970s, he'd have heard the same thing. A lot of planes.
SPEAKER_09: And many of them would have been coming from across the Atlantic, from a nation on the northern coast of South America called Suriname. And we used to go to Schiphol to the national airport to spend a Saturday simply to look who had arrived.
SPEAKER_03: It was like a sport.
SPEAKER_09: That's Gilly Koster. He lived in Amsterdam in the 1970s, but he's originally from Suriname.
SPEAKER_03: When people ask me, I say, you know, from the tip of my toes to the head, I'm a Dutchman. But in my heart and in my soul, I am Surinamese. It's a beautiful country with very special people. The climate is tropic.
SPEAKER_09: And that tropical climate is part of what attracted the Dutch to Suriname back in the 1600s. The Netherlands colonized this part of South America, as well as a handful of islands in the Caribbean. And for a couple hundred years in these places, the Dutch used slave labor from Africa to grow tropical crops like sugarcane. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies in the 1860s. And many years later, in the 1950s, these Caribbean colonies, including Suriname, were incorporated into the Kingdom of the Netherlands. All the people were given Dutch citizenship and allowed to live in whatever part of the kingdom they wanted. And so Gilly Koster and his family chose to move across the Atlantic. I left Suriname when I was six years old. This was 1962.
SPEAKER_09: So Gilly was already living in Amsterdam when, in the 1970s, suddenly a lot more people from Suriname started moving to the Netherlands. There were 5,000 people coming per month sometimes. Maybe I exaggerate a little bit now, but a lot. 3,000 at least every month.
SPEAKER_09: A movement had started within Suriname for independence from their former colonial rulers. And people got scared that the upheaval would be bloody and that they'd lose their ability to live in the Netherlands. They thought, well, we have to go now. If we wait too long, we have to stay in Suriname.
SPEAKER_06: That's Dan Dekker, who wrote a book about the Belmermere. You met him in the last episode.
SPEAKER_09: So it was quite an exodus.
SPEAKER_09: Suriname eventually did become independent in 1975, and around this time, it's estimated that more than a quarter of the country, or about 100,000 people, moved to the Netherlands. For the government, it was really a shock because they had housing problems in the Netherlands and they didn't know where to place all those people.
SPEAKER_09: Of course, there was one place with housing available in the 1970s, a brand new development with thousands of empty apartments. The Belmermere. Gilly Koster was already living in the Belmermere when the major migration from Suriname started in the 1970s. And he says that the apartments were nice enough, large, modern, but the outside was not pretty. It was big and ugly. It was like they created a monster of Frankenstein.
SPEAKER_03: At that time, there were several housing associations that managed the different buildings at the Belmer.
SPEAKER_09: And even though they were having trouble filling up the apartments with white, middle-class Dutch people, some of these associations put quotas on the number of Surinamese they'd take as tenants. The housing corporations in the Belmer, which said we only want 10% of Surinamese in our flats, because else it would become a ghetto here.
SPEAKER_06: How was that legal? Aren't there anti-discrimination laws or something?
SPEAKER_09: Well, we're talking about the 70s, and nowadays it's different, but in the 70s there wasn't any regulation in that way. There was racism, without a doubt.
SPEAKER_06: But there were already a few Surinamese people living in the Belmer, including Gilly, and a guy named Joost Madreich.
SPEAKER_09: Madreich is no longer living, but Gilly remembers him well.
SPEAKER_03: Joost Madreich? This guy deserves a statue, Katie.
SPEAKER_09: Gilly says that Madreich saw all these people coming in from Suriname being squeezed into tiny flats in downtown Amsterdam. And he said, no, you're not animals, you're not supposed to live like that.
SPEAKER_03: He also saw that a building close to his house was almost empty, or at least 30% or 40% empty.
SPEAKER_06: So Madreich organized a group to squat apartments in one of the buildings, and Gilly was part of it.
SPEAKER_09: I was in the posse to squat the houses. You had some tools to break open the kitchen window, sneak in, and within five minutes you would have a lock put in, and you put a chair in it.
SPEAKER_03: And from that moment, the Dutch government had to go through a civil process to get you out of the house. Ultimately, a lot of the squatters were given legitimate leases, and over time more and more Surinamese Dutch moved to the Belmer, not just as squatters, but as regular tenants.
SPEAKER_09: I had never seen an area in Holland where so many black people were living in a couple of square kilometers.
SPEAKER_03: To be young there was really great. I'm really grateful for that period because, you know, we could play our music loud because other Surinamese people were used to hearing music loud.
SPEAKER_09: Gilly talks about his particular building at the Belmer really fondly. He says there were a lot of artists and musicians there, that a guy he knew used to project movies from his balcony to the wall across the courtyard. And people could sit in the summer on their balconies and watch Laurel and Hardy.
SPEAKER_09: But while the Surinamese were finding homes in the Belmer, there were still some white Dutch people who lived there, and they weren't all thrilled about the newcomers. They weren't that happy that a lot of people from Suriname arrived there with their own style of living, making more noise.
SPEAKER_06: Oh my god, it was like invasions of immigrants from the Western Indies from Suriname that invaded the Belmermere because there were lots of empty apartments.
SPEAKER_13: That's Peter Brown, the architect you met in part one of this story, who helped design the Belmermere and was living there in the 1970s.
SPEAKER_09: It stigmatized the area overnight in a, let's say, an immigrant area.
SPEAKER_09: But the thing is, the Surinamese weren't technically immigrants. They were Dutch citizens who had grown up speaking Dutch and learning the history of the Netherlands in school. The rivers, all the cities, everything. They knew everything about the Netherlands.
SPEAKER_06: And they thought they would be welcome in the Netherlands. But when they arrived here, they didn't feel that welcome. And they also saw that, well, they knew everything about the Netherlands, but the people in the Netherlands didn't know anything about Suriname.
SPEAKER_09: In any case, when the Surinamese started moving into the Belmer, Peter Brown saw them as, well, here, I'll let him say it. These poor people were coming out of the jungle. They were not used to live in high-rise, sophisticated, flat buildings with central heating and with refuse chutes.
SPEAKER_13: And they couldn't understand the sophistication of living in such a machinery of a building. They threw their refuse over the balconies. It was like a ghetto. No, the Belmermere was never a ghetto. People called it a ghetto.
SPEAKER_03: Again, Gilly Coster.
SPEAKER_09: Yes, there were problems adapting to the system. And yes, we had to find out that you cannot go with 12 people in an elevator.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, we had to find out that you cannot throw your dirt out of the balcony. But this was not a serious and long period. But also, they were like living in some apartments 20 people.
SPEAKER_04: So what? The apartment could hold 20 people?
SPEAKER_09: Gilly doesn't really dispute that the Surinamese Dutch had a different way of living than the white Dutch. But he points out, and I think rightly, that the Belmermere was failing before the Surinamese showed up. So here's a bunch of white guys. They decide to build this area.
SPEAKER_03: This Belmermere area, people, it was the city of the future where living and working were physically separated and there would be a subway and it would be great and it would be fantastic. Everybody with Hispanics, jackets. This was the idea.
SPEAKER_09: The idea fell apart, Gilly says, when no one who could afford to live in the Belmer actually wanted to live in the Belmer.
SPEAKER_03: Gilly said, I must be out of my mind to pay 700 guilders to go and live in that piece of s*** you built there.
SPEAKER_09: White Dutch people didn't want to live in the Belmer. And so it increasingly attracted the people who couldn't afford housing anywhere else or who were being discriminated against elsewhere. At the time, thousands of gay people moved there and immigrants from places like Turkey, Morocco and Ghana who came to the Netherlands for work. But the fact that the Belmer had become undesirable to people with the means to live elsewhere was really disappointing for the people who designed it, who thought they were creating a better kind of city, a utopian paradise that people would line up to live in. In the late 1970s, some of them were still working on the project, including the lead architect Siegfried Nasut. Here's Dan Decker again, who wrote a biography of Nasut. It was a big disappointment for him, a really big disappointment.
SPEAKER_06: Didn't want to give interviews about it, even with his best friends he didn't talk about the Belmer.
SPEAKER_09: And then one day in 1979, Nasut just quit. Not just working on the Belmer, but quit being an architect. He walked out of the office, didn't even say goodbye to everybody and never came back.
SPEAKER_06: The visionary behind the Belmer mirror had given up on it, but there were still a lot of people living there.
SPEAKER_09: And their story was far from over. In 1980, the metro train connecting the Belmer to the rest of Amsterdam finally came. Five years later than planned and a shopping center opened up nearby. But still, the Belmer didn't fill up. At the highest point of vacancy in the 1980s, 3,200 apartments were sitting empty, or about 25% of all units. Because of vacancies and a vulnerable population that couldn't always make rent, the housing association that controlled the buildings was broke and couldn't do routine maintenance. The place was falling apart. And then there was heroin.
SPEAKER_06: So the real decline of the Belmer started with the heroin that came to Amsterdam. In the 1980s, heroin use was at a peak in Amsterdam.
SPEAKER_09: And when the government decided it had had enough of the heroin dealers and users in the city center, it pushed them out and they found a perfect place to go, just 20 minutes away. The Belmer mirror. It was full of vacant apartments, neglected common spaces, and various other good places to hide.
SPEAKER_04: So we now have to start talking in English. Maybe first you can say your name.
SPEAKER_02: My name is Tahira, Tahira Sabayo.
SPEAKER_09: That's Tahira Sabayo talking with Chris out at the Belmer. Tahira lived there as a kid and she says there were a lot of heroin users who hung out on the top floors of her building where there were more vacancies. She was constantly afraid that the elevator would accidentally take her up there. When I had to go to school in the morning and I stepped in the elevator, I was always praying like, please don't go up. Please don't go up.
SPEAKER_09: One day when Tahira was around 11, she was playing outside with her little three-year-old brother when she noticed that he was carrying around something strange that he'd picked up off the ground. A heroin needle. I mean, I was small. I didn't know it was a drug needle, so I went to my mother and I showed her and she was like, OK, this is the limit. We're moving.
SPEAKER_09: Tahira's family did eventually leave the Belmer and lots of other families did the same thing. The turnover rate was high, 40 to 50 percent in some buildings. Other numbers weren't great either. In 1987, the burglary rate in the Belmer was two and a half times that of Amsterdam and almost 10 times the rest of the Netherlands. And over half of the Belmers residents were a victim of crime in 1988. The Belmermere had been talked about during its conception as a city of the future. But by the 1990s, it had come to be known as the, quote, drain of Dutch society. Over the years, various small measures had been attempted to help the Belmer. Maintenance, security cameras, subsidizing rents. But nothing seemed to work. Finally, the government decided they had to do something drastic. Maybe it was time to demolish some of the buildings. But before they could start, something horrible happened.
SPEAKER_00: On October 4th, 1992,
SPEAKER_09: a Boeing 747 carrying mostly cargo left Amsterdam Schleppl Airport bound for Israel and almost immediately lost two of its engines. They needed to return to the airport for an emergency landing. But they never made it back. It's hard to make out, but about 15 minutes into their flight, the pilots can be heard saying, going down, one eight six two, going down, going down, going down, going down.
SPEAKER_09: From an altitude of about 4000 feet, flight one eight six two nose dived straight into an apartment building at the Belmermere.
SPEAKER_04: So can you tell me something about the 4th of October 1992? October 1992. So we are together with friends at home when we hear a very loud, loud noise.
SPEAKER_01: That's Susie Mpofo, an immigrant from Ghana who was in the building when the plane hit.
SPEAKER_09: She and her friends escaped, but she never saw her apartment again.
SPEAKER_01: So you lost everything? Everything. Yeah, we lost everything. We lost everything.
SPEAKER_01: The only thing we get is our life. Yeah. Many people didn't get their lives.
SPEAKER_09: It was a Sunday night at the Belmer and so a lot of people were home having dinner or smoking cigarettes on their balcony. It was and still is the deadliest plane crash in the country's history. The official record says that 43 people died, including the three crew members on the plane. But the number may actually be much higher. A lot of undocumented people were living in the building and it was hard for the government to get an accurate count. So nobody knows exactly how how many people died that night.
SPEAKER_04: So what did change after 1992? That's Chris talking with Joep De Haan, an urban sociologist who worked on the renewal of the Belmermere.
SPEAKER_09: After the plane crash, the city waited a couple of years to make any major changes to the Belmer. People were traumatized and needed time to recover. But eventually a massive renewal began, which included tearing down many of the original high-rise apartment buildings. It was decided to tear down one quarter of the apartments.
SPEAKER_05: And so they started taking down buildings.
SPEAKER_09: But not all at once. The buildings came down over about 15 years. One building after another after another, so that people could be relocated. And the buildings weren't dynamited like the infamous housing project Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. They were taken apart story by story to avoid the imagery and metaphor of a neighborhood being blown up and forsaken. Because they weren't just going to tear down the Belmermere. They were going to redesign it, make it better. And that's what they did. So we can see a street with small houses for one family.
SPEAKER_04: Here on the water side we have five-story-high buildings. Eventually a lot of the high-rises were replaced with smaller buildings between one and five stories.
SPEAKER_09: Shops were relocated to be closer to the housing. And the 31 parking garages were mostly torn down because no one was using them for much besides drug dealing. Even though the original designers were sure the car would be the primary mode of transportation for people of the future.
SPEAKER_05: It was sort of city of the future. We all come in with our cars. Instead of parking garages, the redesign made places for bikes because, let's be real, the Dutch are ultimately way more into bikes.
SPEAKER_05: Bicycles are of course very important in Amsterdam. And you want to put your bicycle on a safe place inside.
SPEAKER_09: Some people do drive cars, of course, but they tore down the elevated roads. Now people drive at ground level.
SPEAKER_04: The funny thing is we're now standing at one of the original flats. A car is moving. Formally impossible. No cars in this kind of area. It was strictly forbidden.
SPEAKER_05: We're looking for mixing functions instead of taking them apart.
SPEAKER_09: Mixing functions, or mixed-use development, is happening all over the world. We seem to have come 180 degrees away from the modernist idea of separating functions. Now urban design is focused on creating neighborhoods that have shopping and recreation and housing all mixed in together. No car needed. And we've realized something else about cities. And it's not a machine. A city is not a machine.
SPEAKER_09: That's city planner Zeph Hamel. You heard him in part one of this story. And he says, yeah, people want their apartments to be quiet. They want their cities to be safe. But they don't want the city to be a well-organized machine. Crowded cities, congested cities, mixed-use, and a lot of improvisation, and a lot of stupid things. People love it.
SPEAKER_09: Yes, people seem to love the chaos of cities. Yeah, of course, because life is chaos.
SPEAKER_07: You want to be surprised. Otherwise life is boring.
SPEAKER_09: Also, people realized they didn't want to live in huge concrete structures. Almost immediately after the Belmermere was finished, another neighborhood in Amsterdam was also redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up, but not with concrete. But bricks, that's what they wanted.
SPEAKER_07: And I remember it was very expensive building in bricks. But they wanted bricks. Give the people bricks.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, give them bricks. Because that's nice, and it feels warm. And it's human. But this modernist, it's cold. It's an architect's aesthetics. But it's not what people really, really like.
SPEAKER_09: In this way, the Belmermere, and maybe a lot of modernism, was architecture for architects. And that was probably always part of the problem. Yeah, it's arrogant. It's very arrogant. But the modernists were arrogant and paternalistic. They knew better.
SPEAKER_07: And they would take care of people and build them homes. And they would show them how to live.
SPEAKER_09: The redesign of the Belmermere area did not make this mistake. The community was heavily involved at various levels, and the physical environment was not the only thing that got attention. Programs were set up for job training and education, and special housing was opened for heroin addicts. And now the Belmermere is a nicer place to live. It's not perfect, but it's much better.
SPEAKER_02: Well, this is my house. Welcome.
SPEAKER_09: Even Tahira moved back, whose family left after her three-year-old brother was found playing with a heroin needle. This is the living room, an open kitchen. This used to be closed.
SPEAKER_09: Tahira actually lives in one of the original high-rise apartment buildings. The outside of her building was repaired, and on the inside, all of the apartments were gutted and sold completely empty and bare bones for the buyer to remodel however they wanted. In Holland we say blut zwet entranen.
SPEAKER_02: Blood, sweat, and tears.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's in this apartment.
SPEAKER_15: Making it financially possible for people to become homeowners instead of renters has also been a priority of the redesign.
SPEAKER_09: And there's a growing black middle class there now. The Belmer is still one of the most diverse areas in the Netherlands. Over a hundred different nationalities are represented there, including still a lot of Surinamese Dutch. We created the Belmermere as it is today. We created it.
SPEAKER_03: We were never the problem. We were the solution to the problem, and we made something from it. And Gillie is right. The Surinamese Dutch really are the people who stuck with the Belmer all along.
SPEAKER_09: After the white people left, and the lead architect deserted it, and the public declared it the drain of Dutch society, the Surinamese, and later immigrants from all over the world, raised families there, opened businesses, and made a future for a city that didn't have one. Coming up, Kurt and I talk about one of the design strategies for making the Belmer a better place for everyone, right after this.
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SPEAKER_10: But a few years back, a consortium of architects and developers pitched a plan to revitalize it instead. They got approval, and they went to work on the exterior and the common areas. They started sandblasting the concrete façade and renovating the halls and the elevators. And they also moved the storage up from the ground level to make that first floor livable. But the actual private living spaces were gutted and left unfinished. People moving in had to start from scratch. And when you say unfinished, what are we talking about exactly?
SPEAKER_12: No shower, no kitchen, no rooms at all, basically. A total blank slate.
SPEAKER_10: And they dubbed the project Cluesflatt, Cluesen being Dutch for do-it-yourself. That sounds like a rough situation to move into, especially if you're not do-it-yourself inclined.
SPEAKER_12: What is the appeal of an unfinished flat? It's partly about flexibility and sustainability. There's less waste when people don't move in and immediately remodel and throw things out.
SPEAKER_10: But a big driver is affordability. Developers often add premium materials and fixtures to justify higher prices. And that, in turn, prices some buyers out. But with DIY condos or houses, people can make their own decisions about how and when to finish their homes. Residents who want something more luxurious can have that, but others can pick more Spartan options. Or just, you know, add incrementally as they have the budget to do it, starting with the basics and working their way up from there. So if cost is a major factor, how much more affordable are these types of unfinished spaces?
SPEAKER_12: From what I read, those Billmer units were put on the market for around 1200 euros per square meter, which is cheap for the Netherlands.
SPEAKER_10: And really cheap compared to Amsterdam, where places can cost multiple times that much. And this kind of DIY housing project, this is something that is actually a larger trend that's happening around the world.
SPEAKER_10: Absolutely. There's a British nonprofit, for example, called Naked House, which is also working on stripped-down homes. They claim their houses will actually go for 30 to 40 percent less than other homes of similar sizes on the market. So, you know, that's a pretty huge potential savings. And part of their design strategy is to build in some double-height spaces. The idea being that people can build them out over time and create additional floor space when they need room to grow.
SPEAKER_12: So you move in and your bottom floor is two stories high. Yeah. Put it in a second floor eventually. Yeah, you get this kind of mezzanine level, so you've got this nice open space.
SPEAKER_10: But if you really need that floor space, you can add the floor joist easily, and it's sort of all outfitted so that's easy to do. That's awesome. And this actually reminds me of the story we did in Chile, Half a House, that we did about a year ago.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, exactly. Elemental has used a similar approach in Chile.
SPEAKER_10: Basically, they frame and roof the house on both sides, but they only enclose one side with exterior walls. The open half can then be built into over time. And even those spaces that are initially enclosed are kind of bare bones. You know, they're missing basically everything except for the kitchen sink. Unpainted drywall, unfinished floors, no appliances.
SPEAKER_12: I think there's a real intellectual appeal to this kind of approach, but it's definitely raised some questions and some criticisms too.
SPEAKER_10: It has. And some of those are very legitimate critiques. One of the most common is that to make that place livable in the first place, a DIY home buyer will have to use some of their upfront savings to purchase materials and other basics. And they'll generally be paying retail rates because they can't tap into the same economies of scale that developers get to use. Plus, some people of course don't have the skills or the time to work on their own home. But you know, for people with more time than money or with some experience building things, these kinds of DIY options can really make housing more accessible. They give people choices too. You know, letting them build things out that they want in their own time that fit their own needs.
SPEAKER_12: And this sounds like the exact opposite approach that the modernists were originally doing with the Belmer, making everything the same in an attempt to be their version of egalitarian. Yeah, I mean, as it turns out, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't actually fit everyone equally.
SPEAKER_10: Right. Exactly. So before we wrap up, you also wrote a series of three articles on the website that tie into this two-part episode of the Belmer.
SPEAKER_12: Could you describe what you talk about there?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so basically this set of articles traces the career of Le Corbusier, that famous European architect who co-founded the International Congress of Modern Architecture. And the first piece explores his early houses designed to be quote, machines for living in. The second covers his utopian radiant city, which is all about this sort of separation of functions idea. And the last one talks about some of his mixed-use units of habitation, a set of vertical micro cities that actually got built around Europe. And for better or possibly worse, Le Corbusier helped lay the conceptual groundwork for the Belmer. So understanding his other built projects can kind of show you how modernism played out in different contexts too.
SPEAKER_12: So if you enjoyed your trip to the Belmer and want to dive even deeper into modernism, functionalism, and Le Corbusier, be sure to check out the articles on 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_12: 99% Invisible was produced this week by our senior producer Katie Mingle and Chris Bajima. Special thanks to Jean-Louis Cohen, Bota Yama, and Frank Wassenberg, whose PhD research on large housing estates was invaluable to this series. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Jean Rial. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio-topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners just like you. You can find 99% Invisible enjoying discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you really want an education on modernism, let Kurt Kohlstedt be your guide with his articles on Corbu. They're on our website, 99pi.org.
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