21st Century (2000–present)

Arnhem–Nijmegen City Region SDF

2013 · Netherlands · Western & Central Europe · Regional & polycentric planning · Planned by Stadsregio
'Projectenkaart: Vervoer en knooppunten' from the Stadsregio Arnhem-Nijmegen regional plan: the RegioRail KAN network improvement, HSL-Oost and Ravenstein bridge track doubling, the A12/A50 widening, the new Nijmegen city bridge and Arnhem west tangent, and the multimodal node development areas.
'Projectenkaart: Vervoer en knooppunten' from the Stadsregio Arnhem-Nijmegen regional plan: the RegioRail KAN network improvement, HSL-Oost and Ravenstein bridge track doubling, the A12/A50 widening, the new Nijmegen city bridge and Arnhem west tangent, and the multimodal node development areas. · © Stadsregio Arnhem-Nijmegen — used with credit · Stadsregio Arnhem-Nijmegen (Knooppunt Arnhem-Nijmegen) / Provincie Gelderland, Regionaal Plan Arnhem-Nijmegen 2005-2020, 'Projectenkaart: Vervoer en knooppunten'

Core idea

Rail nodes + river crossings

Why it matters

Twin-city regional coordination

Description

The 2013 spatial development framework for the Arnhem-Nijmegen city region in the eastern Netherlands was prepared by the Stadsregio Arnhem Nijmegen, the statutory city-regional cooperation body for some twenty municipalities around the twin cities. It coordinated growth around the rail network's station nodes, including the corridor between the two cities, and addressed the great rivers crossing the region, aligning housing, employment locations and mobility investment such as the RegioRail/Sprinter services and new river crossings. It provided a shared framework in a polycentric region of about three-quarters of a million people, shortly before Dutch city-regions lost their statutory status in 2015.

Significance

The framework is a characteristic product of Dutch regional planning culture: soft-space coordination of two competing medium-sized cities into a single polycentric labour and housing market structured by rail nodes and river landscapes. It illustrates the node-and-place approach to regional transit-oriented development that the Netherlands helped codify. It also marks the final generation of plans by the statutory Dutch stadsregio's before their abolition, a point of reference in debates on metropolitan governance.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.