Netherlands – Urban Deprivation and Territorial Stigmatisation the Perils of the Neighbourhood Policy

Urban inequalities have evoked social policies for decades. Especially in the Netherlands, the neighbourhood policies are relatively well developed. The first of these programmes were established in the nineteen seventies, and they eventually advanced into a comprehensive neighbourhood policy in 2007. In this so-called ‘40-neighbourhood policy’, forty neighbourhoods were selected and identified in which interventions and investments were required. The primary goal of this programme was to transform the deprived areas into flourishing, vital neighbourhoods where “the residents contribute to society, have a perspective on social mobility and participate in the labour market (Van Kooten, 2009: 20, translation YW).

The Dutch neighbourhood policies were developed in the decades after the Second World War. Although the urban areas were more or less ignored for the first years due to suburbanisation (Wittebrood & Van Dijk, 2007; Vermeijden, 1997; KEI kenniscentrum stedelijke vernieuwing, 2007), especially from the nineteen seventies, revitalising the abandoned, impoverished and dilapidated neighbourhoods in and near the old city centres became increasingly important. In these years, the policy focused especially on the poor inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and aimed to improve their living conditions by building new, inexpensive housing (Vermeijden, 1997). However, in the nineteen eighties, the problems seemed to flourish as much as they did before (KEI kenniscentrum stedelijke vernieuwing, 2007). This led to an alteration in focus: instead of deploying only ‘physical’ measures such as constructing new residential blocks, other instruments were also developed. This included improving the socioeconomical position of the tenants and introducing differentiation in the housing stock (Vermeijden, 1997). In the nineteen nineties the Big City Policy (Grotestedenbeleid) was established, in which, next to physical and socio-economic measures, social (participation) programmes were incorporated. Nevertheless, this did not solve the problems in many communities: in 2006, the Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment noted that some neighbourhoods were in grave danger of becoming hazardous hotspots (KEI kenniscentrum stedelijke vernieuwing, 2007).