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By Root 1611 0

garden and “ownership” of a section of street, with loosely zoned spaces for shops and businesses in between, allowing teeming and haphazard markets.† This decade-long job was accompanied by a new, active government role in the city’s southeast; its cornerstones are a powerful local security patrol and a municipal corporation dedicated to providing support to entrepreneurs and job-related training to youth. A new Metro link to the neighborhood flowered into a prosperous business and entertainment hub. By the turn of this century, Bijlmermeer was being described as “a national hot spot” and “the core of a network city.”2 This rebuilding was combined with a targeted effort to improve education and job opportunities for the Dutch-born children of migrants. As a result, the second-generation Surinamese now have rates of university education and income similar to the ethnic Dutch, and their children, the third generation, are broadly accepted as full-fledged Dutch citizens with little controversy.

Behind Slotervaart’s forest of wrecking balls is an effort to repeat the success of Bijlmermeer. There is solid reason for optimism, despite the apparently dire state of the Moroccan and Turkish village migrants. The arrivals themselves have remained stuck in a cultural and economic netherworld—but their children have the characteristics needed to turn the arrival city’s fortunes around, if the physical and political changes have an effect. True, about a quarter of Slotervaart’s second generation are high-school dropouts (somewhat less than the rate among the Moroccan-born first generation), likely to face a lifetime of unemployability, benefit dependency, and social housing. But more important is the impressive size of the second-generation population who have carried on to post-secondary education: Fully a third of ethnic-Moroccan youth in the Netherlands (most of whom live in arrival cities like Slotervaart) are either enrolled in or have finished university, a rate twice as high as with “white” Dutch citizens from non-immigrant backgrounds.3 This educated population is almost certain to form an arrival-city middle class, turning Slotervaart into a radically different place within two decades—so long as it can become a place where successful people want to stay and help the next generation of arrivals.

What is it that the Dutch are doing with their arrival cities? First, they are increasing their intensity. In urban-planning terms, intensity refers to the amount of human activity allowed on a given piece of land. Until very recently, most urban officials believed that the greatest threat to the poor was crowding, density, and confusion. “Low-intensity development” was considered crucial to creating happy residential neighborhoods. The solution, for many cities, was rigid zoning, division of uses, and the use of roads and public spaces to create lower densities and intensities of land use.

The concepts of zoning and land-use permission remain dear to the hearts of urban planners, who often still believe that cities should be sharply divided into residential, commercial, and light-industrial enclaves, with little overlap. Yet the most successful urban neighborhoods in the world are neither low density nor highly zoned: The best sections of Manhattan, the London neighborhoods of Kensington and Chelsea, the sixth and seventh arrondissements of Paris, for example, are extremely high-density, very mixed-use districts. In less desirable neighborhoods, the poor arrivals are stuck with low-intensity, high-division planning that forbids spontaneity.

These were the principles behind the urban redesigns of the postwar years, the rebuilding of Europe’s great bomb-ravaged cities, and the rise of planner-driven redesigns in the United States and Britain in the 1950s. But beginning in the 1960s, it became apparent that this urban vision was failing badly. Low-intensity urban housing-project neighborhoods were falling behind, and failing to develop economically. The timing of their construction coincided with the beginning of the great rural