City Atlas investigates mechanisms of urban transformation in Amsterdam from the late sixteenth century to the present. Through the lens of six emblematic sites, it traces physical changes resulting from processes of urban expansion and renewal, from the adaptation or renovation of buildings and blocks to the demolition and reconstruction of whole streets and neighborhoods. The project gathers information from archival sources to live-time satellite images to produce an atlas of synthetic drawings that reflect the spatial transformation of each site. With the aid of digital tools such as Allmaps, an open-source platform for curating, georeferencing and exploring digitized maps, and Placemark, a program for annotating georeferenced maps, the project explores the possibility to overlay, compare, and annotate the built environment of Amsterdam at different moments in time. By linking maps of the city and its neighborhoods to drawings of buildings and public spaces, it intends to make visible relations between spatial developments at different scales.
City Atlas is the second iteration of the Berlage’s long-standing Project NL design-research course in collaboration with Allmaps and the TU Delft library. The project is arranged in three parts. The first part focuses on collecting, categorizing, and annotating archival materials to compile a comprehensive dossier on the spatial changes of the respective sites. The second part analyzes and translates the transformations into synthetic drawings, developing arguments that either affirm, broaden or complement a common historical narrative of each site. The third part summarizes the findings by delivering a physical exhibition, a digital application, and a final event.
The selected sites spread across Amsterdam geographically and temporally, each associated with a specific phase of the city’s expansion and period of transformation. Constructed in the late sixteenth century, Uilenburg gradually changed into a residential neighborhood with the influx of immigrants alongside the rise of Dutch trade in the seventeenth century, and experienced a major demolition in the early twentieth century under Woningwet 1901. A commercial street in the seventeenth century canal belt, the Vijzelstraat was widened and reconstructed in the twentieth century as part of the modernization of the city center. Residential neighborhood Helmersbuurt was constructed following Jan Kalff’s plan for the city’s south expansion in the late nineteenth century and shaped over time by both municipal planning efforts and private initiatives. The Houthavens, a timber port created as a result of the west-ward expansion of the Port of Amsterdam in the late nineteenth century, has undergone repetitive processes of filling and excavation and now transformed into residential use. Modernist neighborhoods Slotermeer and Bijlmermeer were designed and constructed in the mid twentieth century as experiments of the post-war imagination of urban life that emphasizes collective living and shared spaces, and with constant debates over safety, welcomed various demolitions and reconstructions.
The project explores the bridging of the physical and the digital by producing an atlas in both formats simultaneously, mediating between two different modes of representation. The physical atlas contains eighteen plates of synthetic drawings, printed and digitized through photography, then geo-referenced and annotated, before being posted on the City Atlas website, the carrier of the digital atlas. The drawings are developed in three scales, 1:1000, 1:200, and 1:50. In physical format, the scales are separate and relate to conventional scales of maps and building drawings, whereas the digital platform allows the juxtaposition of different scales, and zooming conceals or reveals different information. In addition to the drawings, the digital atlas also contains the collected maps, plans, images, and policies, with links to archives. The drawings and evidence, presented in the final exhibition, piece together a chronology of Amsterdam’s urban transformation.
Digital tools with the capacity of accurate duplication, edit, and juxtaposition of both archival and newly-produced materials, contribute to the ease, clarity and possible comprehensiveness of comparison between changes over time, at different scales. The project uses Allmaps to georeference maps and plans in their accurate position on the present map and Placemark to identify and annotate the main historical transformations in different areas. Results are structured and presented in a custom, open source website. While making use of open-source platforms that work on the basis of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)—a standard implemented by an increasing number of libraries and archives worldwide to share digital collections—the project explores the potential of these tools for the documentation of urban development and the contribution of design research to open source knowledge production.
The source code of this website can be found on GitHub. Coding by Jules Schoonman and Bert Spaan.