Bijlmermeer

Bijlmermeer means ‘Bijlmer Lake’. From the seventeenth century onward, the lake that once lay to the southeast of Amsterdam was gradually filled in. It became an area of farmhouses, grazing cows, and little ditches. As a district of Amsterdam, the Bijlmermeer is quite new; it did not exist as such until 1968. Yet less than ten years later, ‘the Bijlmer’ had become notorious in the Netherlands, in much the same way as the Bronx in New York was notorious for a long time throughout the United States. The Bijlmer came to represent everything that struck fear into decent, law-abiding Dutch citizens of the 1970s. The first Dutch feature film including explicit sex scenes, Blue Movie (1971), was set very deliberately in this brand-new quarter of Amsterdam.

When the former Dutch colony of Suriname achieved its independence in 1975, tens of thousands of Surinamese people opted for a life in the Netherlands. Many of them moved into the Bijlmer, making it the first major immigrant neighbourhood, a phenomenon that had been virtually non-existent before then. In its original, pure, form, the Bijlmermeer was rather un-Dutch in its huge dimensions. It had a total of 31 high-rise blocks of flats, with an average of 400 flats in each one. Some of the blocks were linked to make buildings with some 800 flats. There were certain rather futuristic elements in the design. For instance, each block had its own underground car park, with a capacity designed to accommodate an unbridled growth in car ownership (three times as many as while building was going on). The blocks overlooked car-free areas of park-like landscape. The roads were raised, and modern man would no longer get wet if it rained. He would simply drive his car into the car park, cross a covered pedestrian bridge to an ‘interior street’ inside his block, and take the lift to his flat. The municipal authorities of Amsterdam had initially planned to build even more high-rise blocks of flats, but in the mid-1970s it became apparent that these flats were not popular and policy shifted to low-rise construction projects. The lack of demand for flats in large deck-access blocks led to vast numbers of flats standing empty in the 1980s. In some periods, a quarter of the flats were unoccupied. Since the flats were immediately available, large numbers of immigrants settled in the area, people who were just starting to build up their lives in the Netherlands. That is what made the Bijlmer into the cultural melting-pot it is today, a district whose residents come from over 130 different countries. Since radical reconstruction work started in 1992, the Bijlmermeer has been transformed beyond recognition. Many of the tower blocks have been replaced by new buildings. There are new residential boulevards with shops and businesses. Next to Amsterdam Bijlmer-ArenA railway station is a vibrant centre of night-life. With a population of 85,000, the Southeast borough of Amsterdam – to which the Bijlmermeer belongs – is equivalent to a medium-sized Dutch city. But its international atmosphere, the optimism of the pioneers, has remained.