Planning of the Past Being out of place in contemporary “cauliflower neighborhoods”

The 1970s and 1980s mark a turning point in urban planning and architecture in the Netherlands. In reaction to the modernist urban planning of earlier decades, Dutch policy-makers and architects now aimed to restore “human beings as the measure of all things.” The penultimate example of Dutch architecture of this period is the so-called cauliflower neighborhood (“bloemkoolwijk”). These residential areas were deliberately constructed to stage “spontaneous” encounters between neighbors to stimulate social bonding and to encourage identification with the built environment. This article examines the discrepancy between the underlying assumptions of an ideal community, materialized in the design of cauliflower neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s, and the daily life experiences of contemporary residents living in two such neighborhoods. The article shows that instead of contributing to community building, the neighborhood design resulted in a lack of social cohesion in cauliflower neighborhoods.