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This was not an obvious solution to Islamic radicalism. But Job Cohen tells me that he believes, from an important earlier experience with dangerous immigrant enclaves, that a violent or threatening ethnic culture is nothing more than the temporary product of an ill-designed urban form or economic structure. “I am convinced,” he tells me, “that if the socio-economic component was not at stake, then the ethnic component would be less interesting and significant … I believe, in Amsterdam, that the issue of segregation is related to income levels and access, not just to ethnic backgrounds—among migrants, low income forces them to live in places that are the lowest price, and only that makes them segregated.” He is guided by a strong form of environmental determinism—the belief that ideologies and attitudes are shaped by the physical nature of the surroundings. Fixing the shape and form of the neighbourhood—making it less orderly, less planned, less preordained—will not only create a greater physical and economic bond with the wider city but it will solve a number of other root-cause problems of arrival-city failure. It will create an internal economy, at first based on low-level shops and services, but eventually developing a lower middle class. It will develop a functioning property market for those migrants whose businesses succeed enough to let them buy their apartments. This, in turn, will attract an “outside” middle class from the original city, who ideally will blend with the emerging migrant middle class. And this, in turn, will solve one of the most significant problems of the arrival city, the terrible state of schools. By becoming a place with successful, ethnically integrated student groups with influential parents, the schools will be driven to perform better and attract the best teachers.

It is far too early to tell whether this ambitious project, known as the New West Plan, is succeeding. Crime rates have fallen in Slotervaart, but there are still many problems of gang membership, Islamic fundamentalism, and poverty. Yet there is reason to trust this major investment in de-planning. In Amsterdam, it has worked before. In fact, it has worked on an even larger scale, transforming another dangerous neighborhood.

Bijlmermeer, on the opposite side of Amsterdam in the city’s southeast, was subject, under Job Cohen’s watch, to what has been described as the most dramatic and violent act of arrival-city transformation in modern history.1 Built in the late 1960s as an even more ambitious project in utopian design than Slotervaart, it was a huge honeycomb of 31 very wide 10-story apartment towers with wide spaces between them, housing 60,000 people in a commerce-free expanse of parkland and public spaces, separated from the city by a greenbelt. It never really even began to succeed. Isolated physically and psychically from the urban society and economy, it attracted a great many rural arrivals from the former Dutch colony of Suriname as well as populations from the Netherlands Antilles and sub-Saharan Africa, with a large section becoming the first black-majority town in the Netherlands and the whole place having only a 20 percent Dutch-born population. These ethnic groups, and their neighborhood, became bywords for murder, drug addiction, idle poverty, and casual violence. It was an epic instance of failed arrival. Bijlmermeer was often described in the 1970s and early 1980s as the most dangerous neighborhood in Europe. Over the decades, various efforts were made to improve the appearance, the management, the sanitation, or the policing of Bijlmermeer, but none of these efforts recognized the rural-to-urban dynamics at work in the neighborhood, its need to have handholds in the proper city.

Finally, beginning in the mid-1990s, in a farsighted gesture of radical urban de-planning, Amsterdam demolished all the apartment towers in two waves and replaced them with a tighter arrangement of mid-height structures, which gave each apartment its own