Public support is “crucial” for the major renovation of the Netherlands until 2050 and beyond, says the cabinet. But involving people in and finding broad support for drastic choices in the landscape will be “very difficult”, says researcher Josje den Ridder of the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP).
The Dutch are strongly divided on the question of what should be given more space: nature, or agriculture and housing. They distrust the weighing of interests by the government and lack the vision and decisiveness of politicians and management. They say that the Netherlands is already full and is becoming uglier, but at the same time find spatial planning complex. This is evident from the new edition of the Continuous Research Citizen perspectiveswhich SCP does three times a year.
Negative mood
There is a lot of pessimism in the Netherlands compared to the past fifteen years, the report says. About 60 percent of those surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the direction of the country and politics.
The survey for the study (2,067 participants) was conducted between July and October last year: the period when asylum seekers slept in front of the fences of Ter Apel, the heated farmers’ protest dominated the news and there were many discussions about the price cap for energy prices. This is partly reflected in the biggest problems that people name: politics, their income, migration, climate, housing and the way of living together.
This negative mood also affects how people view the major renovation of the Netherlands by the cabinet, thinks researcher Den Ridder. “People see a government that does not solve the major problems of our time. So there is a lot of suspicion; that makes it difficult to generate support for policy.”
A nuance is that many people are dissatisfied with the country, but satisfied with their own lives. Similarly, they are often dissatisfied with the Dutch landscape, not with their own living environment.
The Rutte IV cabinet wants to resume central control of spatial planning in order to solve major issues for the future. Such as the housing shortage and population growth, the sustainability of agriculture, nature restoration, the energy transition, climate change and sea level rise. At the end of next year there should be a new Spatial Planning Memorandum with plans for the coming decades.
The survey showed how diverse the views of the Dutch are: about a third want more space for nature, about 30 percent more space for agriculture and housing, and the middle group (four in ten Dutch people) is neutral.
What people think depends on their political preference and level of education: people with a secondary vocational education, and voters for right-wing parties such as PVV, JA21, FVD and BBB, for example, consider agriculture and housing more important than nature. They are also the most dissatisfied with the country and politics.
In addition to the survey, SCP held group discussions with a total of 32 people in Amsterdam and Almelo. What was striking here is that people have the feeling that they have too little knowledge to be able to judge spatial choices. They are mainly concerned with the here and now and their own living environment, not with the whole of the Netherlands or the future.
Den Ridder: “We also asked people: should we take future generations into account? Almost everyone thinks so, but then they seem to think mainly of today’s youth, not generations that have yet to be born.”
People tend to make spatial issues both very small and very broad, the researchers conclude. The housing shortage, for example, is attracting many people to migration more broadly: the shortage is said to be due to the influx of asylum seekers. That’s what some politicians say. However, the independent Advisory Council on Migration concludes that between 2015 and 2020, an average of 7.3 percent of social rental homes was rented to status holders annually, in 2020 only 4.3 percent.
At the same time, people often reduce spatial issues to something tangible from their own region. In Almelo, for example, participants kept talking about windmills in the landscape, while in Amsterdam the nuisance caused by Schiphol and the housing shortage were recurring examples.
Amsterdam is the Netherlands
Salient observation of the researchers: for the group in Amsterdam, ‘The Netherlands seemed to mainly consist of the Amsterdam region’. It was difficult for the moderator to broaden the conversation to the Netherlands as a whole, including people from Aalsmeer, Diemen and Monnickendam. The group in Almelo, which also included people from Oldenzaal, Nijverdal and Enschede, took a broader view and compared, for example, living in Twente with the Randstad.
Den Ridder: “It is probably a bit of a prejudice, but if people in Amsterdam had to think of the Netherlands outside Amsterdam, they would call Flevoland.”
To find support for the major renovation of the Netherlands, the government will have to look for new ways to involve people, says the SCP. They cite as examples games or visual simulations, a ‘value map’, or the four future scenarios for 2050 recently published by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
But it is also up to the House of Representatives and the cabinet to take control, says the SCP. Above all, people want the government to make spatial decisions for them. They realize that these can be hard choices, as long as the government treats regions equally and is transparent.
“That is of course different in practice,” says Den Ridder. “From a distance, people say they can accept painful decisions. But if you are exactly the one who is affected by those difficult choices, then you are a little different.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 20, 2023.
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