The Dutch Urban Areas Act: a Black Liberation Perspective on the Policy of Exclusion
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The Dutch Urban Areas Act: A Black Liberation Perspective on the Policy of Exclusion By Reed Jordan B.A. in Political Science, Carleton College Northfield, Minnesota (2012) Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in City Planning at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2018 © 2018 Reed Jordan. All Rights Reserved The author hereby grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Author____________________________________________________________ Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 22, 2018 Certified by________________________________________________________ Professor Justin Steil Thesis Supervisor Department of Urban Studies and Planning Accepted by________________________________________________________ Professor of the Practice, Ceasar McDowell Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning The Dutch Urban Areas Act: A Black Liberation Perspective on the Policy of Exclusion By Reed Jordan Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 22, 2018, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in City Planning Abstract The Dutch Urban Areas Special Measures Act is a national policy in the Netherlands intended to improve the quality of life in distressed neighborhoods. The Act allows a municipality to designate neighborhoods where the municipality can alter the demographic composition through a housing permit system that regulates access to homes. Cities are allowed to deny permits for residence and therefore exclude in-moving people who do not have an income from work or who have certain police records. What began as a policy experiment in the City of Rotterdam animated by a far-right anti-immigrant movement, the Act is now an institutionalized policy accessible to any city in the Netherlands. In this thesis I present two key missing perspectives on the Dutch Urban Areas Act: how other Dutch cities are using the Act after its origins in Rotterdam and how to understand the Act through analytical frameworks around race. With these perspectives on the Dutch Urban Area Act I present two distinct arguments. The first is that the Dutch Urban Areas Act’s diffusion to cities outside of Rotterdam is in conflict with its own statuary basis. Through a complete reassessment of the Act’s social and political origins in Rotterdam, my second core argument is that the Dutch Urban Areas Act was conceived to be a spatial policy of racial exclusion. The foundations of the Urban Areas Act, as developed in Rotterdam in the early 2000s, are the same ideas of controlling the movement of a racialized group of people as expressed by state sanctioned segregation policies found historically in the United States and South Africa. Thesis Supervisor: Justin Steil Title: Assistant Professor of Law and Urban Planning 2 Acknowledgments I was able to complete this thesis because of the compounded support, love, and encouragement I have received from many people who have been a part of my life. Thank you to my mom Claire, father Michael, and brother Calder for showing me how to love; I am so grateful and appreciative of all you do. To all my friends at DUSP, I have grown tremendously by learning from you. Tiffany and Jonathan, you have been my anchors through two tumultuous years and I love you both. To the Students of Color Committee, our fellowship can mold the future leadership in urban planning that is so necessary to reshape the field. Your efforts, representation, and ideas matter and we are strong as a community. Thank you Justin for showing me a model of teaching, leadership, and activism that blends an intellectual rigor and a commitment to justice with a humility that acknowledges the humanity and academic capacities of all students regardless of context and background. I also want to thank Professor Ingrid Gould Ellen who as my thesis reader provided helpful feedback and whose leadership in the field of housing policy was a source of motivation to pursue this work with rigor and seriousness. I am highly indebted to André Ouwehand, a senior researcher at Delft University and former housing policy official for Rotterdam who helped me identify an initial list of interviews to begin this project. I also want to thank the people in the Netherlands who I interviewed for this project and were remarkably generous with their time. 3 Table of Contents CHAPTER 1. The Dutch Urban Areas Act................................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 2. Research Methods .................................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 3. A Policy of Exclusion .............................................................................................................................. 8 3.1. What is the Dutch Urban Special Measures Areas Act .................................................................................... 8 How Articles 8, 9, and 10 specifically regulate who can live in an area. ........................................................... 9 The process for cities to apply for the Act. ......................................................................................................... 11 3.2. Origins of the Dutch Urban Areas Special Measures Act.............................................................................. 13 The social and political context in Rotterdam providing conditions for the Urban Areas Act. ................. 14 Origins of the Urban Areas Act: Justifications for an exclusionary policy..................................................... 18 Iterations and policy experimentation in Rotterdam before becoming a national policy. ........................... 21 Turning a local policy experiment in Rotterdam into naitonal legislation ...................................................... 26 3.4. The Dutch Urban Areas Act in Four Other Cities: Deliberation, Goals, and Design .............................. 29 A university city in South Holland: Tilburg ......................................................................................................... 31 A suburb in metropolitan Amsterdam: Zaanstad ............................................................................................... 33 Rotterdam’s neighbor: Schiedam’s city-wide plan for the Urban Areas Act.................................................. 35 Den Bosch: The Act as a hindrance to current practice.................................................................................... 40 Summary of the Dutch Urban Areas Act across Rotterdam and four other cities ....................................... 43 CHAPTER 4. Assessing the Dutch Urban Areas Act on Its Own Logic ............................................................... 44 4.1 Existing Critiques of the Dutch Urban Areas Act ........................................................................................... 44 4.2 The Dutch Urban Areas Act is in Conflict with its Own Terms ................................................................... 48 Why the Dutch Urban Areas Act Continues Despite Evidence from Rotterdam of No Impact .............. 49 The Consequences of the Dutch Urban Areas Act’s expansion. ..................................................................... 56 CHAPTER 5. Race and the Dutch Urban Areas Act ................................................................................................. 63 5.1 The Dutch Urban Areas Special Measures Act as a Racialized Policy .......................................................... 63 Why a paradigm shift in analysis of the urban areas act is necessary. ............................................................. 64 The bridging concept: segregation as an expression of the Racial Contract. ................................................. 68 5.2 Connecting the Urban Areas Act to Segregationist History in US and South Africa................................. 70 Similarities in ideas: Tracing Pim Fortuyn’s ideas from its origins and into a national policy .................... 71 Similarities in policy mechanisms. ......................................................................................................................... 75 5.3 The Institutionalization of a Racialized Policy .................................................................................................. 85 CHAPTER 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 87 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................................................................... 90 4 CHAPTER 1. The Dutch Urban Areas Act The Urban Areas Special Measures Act is a national policy in the Netherlands intended to improve the quality of life in distressed neighborhoods. The Act allows a municipality to designate areas within its boundary where the municipality can alter the demographic composition of residents through a housing permit system that regulates access to homes. The permitting allows municipalities to selectively control the in-movement of people based on certain characteristics such as income, employment status, occupational sector, criminal