Direct quotation from “Las Vegas of the Welfare State” - S,M,L,XL Book - Koolhaas and Mau.
Las Vegas of the Welfare State
Biljmermeer Redeclopment.
Amsterdam, Netherlands Project, 1986.
“Weaknesses
…But most wasteful and unfortunate of all has been the complete neglect and under exploitation of the highway as potential instrument of desirable social activity. Maybe inevitably in a model conceived in the European thirties, and not fundamentally adapted since, the car itself has still been seen, implicitly, as an intruder in the socialist idyll, in spite of the huge megastructure of highway and parking harbors that accomodates it. For its designers, the true inhabitant of the Bijlmer would not even want to own a car and would happily shuttle back and forth between the city and satellites in a lavish variety of public transport. This dogmatism has created an anomaly where, although physically dominant, the road is conceptually ignored, not there.
In the Dutch seventies, almost universal car ownership could and should have generated “socialistic drive-in culture,” a deliberate strip, not of crass, exploitative casinos, but an exhilarating boulevard of social condensers, all accessible by car, old and new types of facilities that would also have articulated the polarity Biljmer vs. Amsterdam = modern vs. traditional, and thus positively reinforced the Bijlmer’s identity and reasons for existing.
Unless this still latent potential is realized, there is every reason to consider the Bijlmer as historic, or at least unfinished.”
