It is not known who coined 'cauliflower neighborhoods' as a mocking name for the many residential areas from the 1970s. However, a drawing of a residential area in the shape of a cauliflower has been circulating for more than half a century and is believed to have played a major role in the nickname that became a nickname. The drawing of dozens of clusters of terraced houses around courtyards that form a kind of cauliflower florets was first published in the Netherlands in 1972 in the magazine Brick. Niek de Boer (1924-2016), the urban planner who conceived the residential area in the 1960s, was listed as the creator.
De Boer's drawing took on a life of its own and regularly appeared as the ideal cauliflower district in magazines and books such as The terraced house. The history of a typically Dutch phenomenon from 2013. But after De Boer's death in 2016, the inventor's link to the ideal cauliflower district turned out to be too good to be true.
After the ideal cauliflower was depicted in Niek de Boer's obituary NRC Handelsblad Matthijs de Boer informed that his father had not made the drawing. The ideal, typically Dutch cauliflower district had already been conceived in 1957 by the German architect Walter Schwagenscheidt (1886-1968), he discovered. His father also had nothing to do with the cauliflower neighborhoods where one million homes were built between 1970 and 1985. In fact, Niek de Boer hated the neighborhoods with unclear structures where non-residents invariably get lost. He thought they were a perversion of his own residential areas, according to Matthijs de Boer, who is also an urban planner.
In the mid-1960s, Niek de Boer, as an urban planner for the Drenthe municipality of Emmen, had introduced the residential area in the new Emmerhout district. In this first residential area in the Netherlands, cars must be parked at the beginning of residential areas that are only accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. The yard would, in the words of De Boer, “preserve the living environment from driving, maneuvering, parked, smelly and rumbling cars.” He expected that the street would once again become the “meeting place for all kinds of casual contacts,” where “the community spirit could develop.”
Hospitable
With a rectangular allotment of blocks of terraced houses on yards, the first residential area does indeed not resemble a cauliflower district. Remarkably, the terraced houses in the later cauliflower neighborhoods almost never form cauliflower florets. Although the average residential area has a labyrinthine street pattern with many 45-degree corners and dead-end streets, anyone who gets lost never gets the feeling that they are moving through a giant cauliflower. Strictly speaking, most cauliflower neighborhoods are not residential areas. Cars are also parked in the 'yards' between the houses, which are neither streets nor squares.
Only a few neighborhoods in the residential areas resemble a cauliflower. The closest Zwaluw comes to Schwagenscheidt's residential area is in the Nieuwegeinse Doorslag district. The 87 rental and owner-occupied homes designed by Jan Verhoeven are grouped around small courtyards that form one large connected whole that, viewed from above, resembles an angular cauliflower.
Jan Verhoeven (1926-1994) was one of the many 'structuralist' architects who in the 1970s broke with the rational, technocratic urban planning of the previous decades. Instead of the anonymous high-rise neighborhoods, there should be 'hospitable' residential areas with 'homely' homes, the structuralists believed. With Zwaluw, Verhoeven wanted to achieve “a balance between an intensive community life and space for the individual through shelter, recognizability and variety,” he said in an interview. Zwaluw therefore took the shape of a bizarre fortified town, complete with gates and a moat. At the heart is a castle-like housing complex with six triangular corner turrets surrounding a hexagonal courtyard. Even more remarkable are the roofs. All homes in Zwaluw have flat roofs, but because the bent outer walls of the terraced houses are largely covered with red roof tiles, it seems as if everyone lives comfortably under one colossal mansard roof.
Although, according to the creator of the residential area, cauliflower neighborhoods were no more than “decorated parking lots without sidewalks”, they became a success. Most Dutch people seemed to prefer to live in a terraced house with the kitchen and storage room on the yard side than in a gallery flat. Unlike the neighborhoods of previous decades, not one cauliflower neighborhood has become a problem neighborhood.
Revulsion
Nevertheless, the neighborhoods also aroused revulsion from the start. The criticism from architect Carel Weeber, who in 1979 labeled cauliflower neighborhoods as expressions of “the new frumpiness,” was fatal. “In this new style, the Truttigheid, the small scale is represented by structural obscurity, random use of form, unnuanced jumpiness, cuts in all possible directions and natural earthy colors and materials – all covered by participation,” Weeber wrote in architecture magazine Plan. He called the cauliflower neighborhoods 'a social anesthetic'. After Weeber's criticism, frumpiness and bourgeoisness would forever cling to the cauliflower neighborhoods.
Yet it was not criticism that put an end to the cauliflower neighborhoods. This required the deep economic crisis of the early 1980s. When the second oil crisis (1979) was followed by a housing crisis, there was no more money for complex neighborhoods such as Zwaluw.
In the early 1980s, Dutch housing construction underwent austerity and residential areas turned back into normal streets with sidewalks and pale terraced houses with cars in front of the door.
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