The Netherlands: Empowering Large Cities to Meet Their Challenges

With 16.3 million inhabitants (1 January 2004) The Netherlands is the ‘largest of the smaller’ countries of the European Union. This position has not changed with the EU enlargement with 10 countries. Only Poland, with 39 million, is considerably larger. The other new countries are smaller. In the last 10 years the Dutch population has grown by 0.9 million. Ethnic minorities (allochtonen ² ) accounted for two thirds of this population growth. With 3 million non-native Dutch residents (half of them non-Western), The Netherlands can be considered an immigration country. The largest cities in particular have experienced a change in the composition of their population. In the three largest cities, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague (with 1.8 million inhabitants together), one in every three citizens belongs to a non-Western ethnic minority group (CBS, Statline, 2004). The differences between the three cities are small, although Rotterdam has the largest share, with 34 per cent. Within the cities the differences are enormous, with some city districts where around 80 per cent of the inhabitants is of non-Western origin against other districts with less then 5 per cent. This population composition and its consequences for the development of the cities (especially the integration problem) have dominated a great deal of the political and societal debate in The Netherlands during the last few years. It also influences the so-called Grotestedenbeleid (Dutch urban policy; GSB for short), a national policy, explicitly concerned with typical large city problems. The GSB was initiated in 1994. Between 1994 and 2004 Dutch cities experienced two terms of this policy. The third term (GSB-III) began in 2005. In section 14.2 the pioneering phase of the GSB – and other explicit national urban policies – is recapitulated. Section 14.3 focuses on the major challenges for the Dutch cities. In section 14.4 the actual policy (GSB-II) and the intended policies (GSB-III) are dealt with. Apart from the GSB policies, section 14.4 also discusses a selection of other policies highly relevant for the development of the major cities. Section 14.5 pays attention to impact of European policies. In this first section some relevant features and developments with regard to the larger Dutch cities are presented.