From Ponte Garibaldi to Langerak in a split second.
Monday afternoon, the 25th of June 2001; a black Volkswagen parks in a desolate street in the old neighbourhood of Leidsche Rijn. 4 men get out of the car, 2 of them wear shorts the 2 others don't, no one wears sunglasses. 1 of them hands the other 3 a map of the centre of Rome, divides the group in 2 even smaller groups, both now consisting of 2 persons. The map shows the area from the wonderful Villa Borghese in the upper right corner to the Villa Doria Pamphili in the left corner at the bottom of the page. The guide then orders that the 2 groups must leave in opposite directions & meet each other again in 45 minutes on the Ponte Garibaldi, the bridge connecting the Piazza G. Belli with the Via Arenula.
When the obvious question arises what to do when the appointment somehow fails to take place, the guide answered them that everything must go according to plans because they are responsible adults in the possession of an accurate map. Somewhat baffled they did as was told & off they went.
The whether was excellent, the first sunny day of the year, 27 degrees Celsius, making for proper Italian spring conditions, the participants in this excursion had to locate their starting point
before they could even start thinking about moving towards the designated target. But Rome is an ancient town with a rich history looking upon it's visitors so it proved not too difficult to find points of reference to which the experienced could be compared to the representation.
Half way on their trip one group had to face a disappointment. The Vatican turned out to be less sensational than expected. Nothing more then a grey box behind a very tiny square, it was proven again that reality & the image of it provided by television are 2 separate things.
The self seriousness which the 2 groups showed in their effort to navigate trough Rome makes you nearly forget the fact that they were somewhere else, some 1300 kilometres to the north of Rome to be more precise. Who in the right side of their minds would want to get lost in the largest building site of the Netherlands while following a map from a town where you are not?
The construction of Leidsche Rijn started in 1998 & will be finished around 2010. In between 30 thousand houses will be built, homing 100 thousand people. A whole new town will be built from scratch. The City of Utrecht on whose ground Leidsche Rijn is arising will see it's population burst with one third to 400 thousand.
It's an impressive project & already, with 15 percent of the houses finished you can see that a lot of work has been put into it. The effort to prevent that Leidsche Rijn will be just another boring suburb is visible everywhere. The architectural styles employed are rich in variation. Designed with different kinds of people in mind it's also obvious they want to ensure diversity in the ethnographic department. The family nucleus, 2 parents raising 2.4 children in companionship of a dog (named Lisa), will naturally make up for a good deal of the population, but there is plenty of room for the rich bachelor racing around in his 4 wheel drive Mercedes, the old granny playing domino with her granddaughter while serving her pretzels & cheap cola & even for an odd hippie commune (as long as they don't inhale). People who are moving in from all over the country immediately notice that Leidsche Rijn is more than living: it's an experience: the new urban frontier.
Especially when reading the scenario for Beyond, the project that coordinates the implementation of art in the public space of Leidsche Rijn, you notice that we're not just talking ordinary city planning here. Art is not looked upon as something which should
be included because the law prescribes it, but they actually believe in art as a tool for social engineering & therefore use it to stimulate the growth of a community in Leidsche Rijn. How strange! Where not talking business as usual here, were talking about utopism polder style.
Utopism not in the megalomaniac modernist / functionalist mode we remember from large scale schemes like the communist akademgorodoks or the never built 'radiant cities' by Le Corbusier. Utopism not in the rigid sense of full blown technocracy, but definitely utopian in the sense that, working from a coherent ideology of what is (or should be) desirable, everything is planned beforehand. The key weakness of every utopia is it's resentment of change, it's hatred for the spontaneous & it's revulsion for the anecdote. The holistic pre-imposed function of which no object can escape carefully negates the anarchistic elements which make living in the city so pleasant.
The developers of Leidsche Rijn & Beyond are aware of this & are working very hard to prevent it happen by actively encourage all sorts of unregulated projects. Even the uncontrollable has got it's own paragraph in the master plan & this is where it bites in it's own tale. You can't regulate real city dynamics. So perhaps, the conclusion might be, Leidsche Rijn is nothing more than a caricature: an avant garde doll house for commuters.
So why were these 4 man navigating through a landscape of mock rural ditches, building sites & silent terraces, this Barbie metropolis, on a map of Rome? What was the purpose behind this purposelessness?
Based on a fictionalised premise these 4 man were re-wiring their perception of Leidsche Rijn. Using the Map of Rome as some sort of randomiser, they went beyond the mere exploration of a real-time crypto-utopia into a state of recalibration of their perception in an attempt to revaluate the impact of such a place on the observer. They were playing out some obscure situationist ritual: an occult act of urban (re)engineering. A silent attack on the stasis of Leidsche Rijn, an act hopefully to be integrated on a larger scale in the day to day praxis of those involved in the Leidsche Rijn project.
Leidsche Rhino Hou Je Bek