Waterfront

Waterfront

Amsterdam: reestablishing a city’s relation with the waterfront was the challenge for urban designers in Amsterdam for the last decades. The relation between the city and the estuary had to be redefined since the harbor moved west. Combining the habit of building houses with front doors on quays with a bigger scale and modern construction worked out well. The size of waterways widens from canals to basins, Oosterdok and Westerdok connect the canals with the estuary. A new hierarchy evolved and a new relation between the city and its landscape was created. The scale of the estuary is introduced in the city. Some fifty thousand houses were built for a hundred thousand people.