The quality of life in growth centers is decreasing, crime among young people is increasing

Growth centers built in the 1960s as a spillover point for the big cities score above average in terms of quality of life and safety. These cities also struggle with decay, poverty, youth crime and little social cohesion. That shows research commissioned by New Town Alliance (a partnership of growth centers) and the Ministry of the Interior.

These places were built in no time, with the idea of ​​relieving the burden on the cities and providing space for people who wanted a house with a garden near the city . For example, Almere was built as a spillover city for Amsterdam, Zoetermeer for The Hague and the towns of Nissewaard and Capelle aan den IJssel for Rotterdam.

More than a million Dutch people now live in one of these new town. But the seven new towns are now sounding the alarm together, because more than sixty years later, wear and tear is becoming evident on a social and physical level.

“Buildings are starting to get tired, we really need to renew and renew,” said Mayor Michel Bezuijen of Zoetermeer, chairman of the Newtown Federation. “Consider school buildings, for example. They all need to be renovated at the same time, because they were built at the same time.”

Bezuijen says that this work requires a lot from the cities. “We see this coming our way, but we cannot solve it alone. We want help from The Hague, we need knowledge and money to achieve this. And that includes a sum of 3 billion euros.”

In addition to the physical decline that is occurring in these cities, Bezuijen is very concerned about the decline in the quality of life and safety in the neighborhoods. Download youth crime news. “I was mayor of Rijswijk before, that’s a completely different matter there.”

“The people who come to live in these growth centers are people with socio-economic disadvantage, with all the issues that come with it: youth care, people who deserve Social Assistance and Aging Act.”

Corinne Koers has been a ‘city marine’ in Capelle aan den IJssel for six years. There she works in different neighborhoods on problems with juvenile delinquency. She sees a lot of weakening and young people being drawn into that cycle.

Children at a young age have to do jobs for criminals, get harassed, and pick up drugs in the port of Rotterdam. “It’s really an intercity problem. But we don’t have the money that cities get to deal with these problems.”

An example is the Capelsebrug metro station, where there has been unrest for weeks because of youths causing trouble there. “If you walk out of one side of the metro station, you are in Rotterdam. If you walk out of the other side, you are in Capelle aan den IJssel.”

Koers wants more money from the government to deal with the problems. That’s why there’s a lot of communication between the different cities, also to see what’s going on online and offline. “What happens offline can amplify online, come from far and wide to specific places and then fight out physically again.”

In other areas as well, the scale of the problems facing these growth centers exceeds the opportunities available to cities, the study concludes. Take ‘residential attractiveness’, on which these growth centers score lower than cities elsewhere in the Netherlands. “There is a good chance that this will encourage the selective migration of social climbers from these neighborhoods,” the report says.

Michelle Provoost, an architectural historian at the International Institute of Newtown, also sees this. “These cities were built in a short period of time, so it’s a lot of the same, the same single family homes and social housing, some of which were built very shabbily in the 1980s. Those who want to keep growing find Nothing and leave.

This leads to selective migration, says Provoost. “Today, more and more people are coming to these growth centers, not because they want to live there, but because they can’t live in the big city.”

The geographical researcher Josse de Voogd confirms this. “People are less motivated to live there, participate less in social life, or are not interested in maintaining a garden. At first glance, they are not always the most poor people who live there, but they are vulnerable. people who have come from the lower class, without wealth in the family, who really get into trouble when abuse happens. .”