The Fourth Report on Spatial Planning of 1988 broke with the dispersal of the growth-centre era and reoriented policy toward the compact city, concentrating new development on and around existing urban areas to revive the cities and curb car use. It framed the Netherlands as a competitive 'gateway to Europe' and introduced the ABC location policy. Its 1991 supplement, VINEX, translated the compact-city aim into concrete large-scale housing sites. The report thus opens the compact-city chapter of Dutch planning.
The Fourth Nota reversed decades of deconcentration and established the compact city as the organising goal of late twentieth-century Dutch planning.
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