The Compact City Policy in The Netherlands

The compact city policy in The Netherlands is more a shared concept among land-use, transportation and environmental policies than a concrete and systematized policy. It strongly reflects the country's long history of planning and the concensus to avoid urban sprawl in maintaining cultural identitiy of each municipality.The 20 years' experience of the policy revealed dilemmas between the spatial planning and the environmental policies: As compact urbanization requires new sites in the built-up area, sometimes the sites which do not meet the environmental standards of, for example, sound, odour or soil contamination levels have to be selected.To solve this problem, the “Towns and the Environment Approach” was developed: In short if the project could improve the overall living environment, the standard might be relaxed.Although the policy seems to be successful in avoiding the sprawl, car-use has not been reduced as anticipated even with efforts to enforce the modal shifts to public transportations and bicycle-use. Among the efforts, the ABC location policy is well-known as an instrument of controling both land-use and traffic demand.Careful consideration is necessary before concluding that the compact city is sustainable and in applying the compact city concept to Japan.