Water and Spatial Planning in the Netherlands: The Latent Potential of Spatial Planning for Flood Resilience

In February 1953, an extremely powerful northwest storm surge combined with spring tide led to serious floods in a number of countries around the North Sea. No country was hit as badly as the Netherlands. In the southwest of the country, dozens of dikes were breached, leading to over 1,800 casualties. At the time of the 1953 disaster, a government-appointed committee was working on an advisory report about the desired future spatial development of the most urbanized western part of the country, a region largely below sea level. Responding to the 1953 disaster, the committee discussed whether urban development in deep polders should be avoided. The conclusion was that what is best in terms of the desired urban morphology should prevail. This is indeed what happened when the government had to make a choice about where to develop new towns (1960s–1980s) and, in the next stage, where to locate new housing estates in and around cities (1990s–2000s). Near floods along the main rivers of the country in 1992 and 1995 opened a window of opportunity for a series of major changes in flood risk management and in spatial planning and design, respectively. A massive program called Room for the River was carried out, which included more than 30 projects designed by multidisciplinary teams of civil engineers, planners, and spatial designers. Parallel and follow-up programs were carried out in which spatial design again played a role. The concept of risk was redefined in law, leading to more stringent protection norms for densely populated areas—again, a spatial turn in flood risk management. When flood risk management started to take a decisive spatial turn in the 1990s, spatial planning began to change as well, becoming more sensitive to issues related to water management and flood risks. One of these changes involved the mandatory use of a water test in (local) plan making. The continuation of the trend to give greater weight to flood risks became interrupted as the multilevel arrangement of planning in the Netherlands started to change from 2010 onward. This was largely the result of the neoliberal ambition to decentralize and deregulate planning. One main effect was that the government no longer took a leading role in locational choices regarding where to build new housing estates outside cities and towns. By the end of 2021, the government-appointed Delta commissioner issued a stark warning that over 80% of the houses that will be built by 2030 are situated in less desirable locations. This and other effects of the downscaling of planning competencies made the government decide to start a trajectory to partly recentralize planning. There are two contradictory objectives, however, claimed by different government departments: the production of new homes as quickly as possible and the ambition to make water and soil leading in future choices. Bringing flood risk management and spatial planning together means that locational choices and the spatial design of localities have to move in tandem.