This week I biked past Zeeburgereiland on my bike route from the Eastern Docks to IJburg and all I saw was completely desolation and this billboard. I had wanted to bike along side the IJ but this part of the city is so unfinished larg pieces of it are inaccessible.
This is what it looks like through the fence:
I completely forgot the text on the billboard and had a hard time finding the place. Google Maps doesn’t even know it yet1. Just look at Street View.
My trusty neighborhood council member Jan-Bert Vroege is usually available to answer these kind of questions for me and he pointed me towards the right site.
It’s going to be the site of some significant development in the near future. It’s odd that in developing IJburg the city skipped over this part and is only now beginning to fill it in.
The site points to a fantastic concept at the site of the current silo’s to build an art house, playground, museum and restaurant with a fabulous view and attractive position: the Annie M.G. Schmidt house.
Looking forward to this, but curious if the exurbs of the city beyond where I live (Diemen + Bijlmer) will ever be (re)developed or if we’ve forsaken those to become multicultural ghettos:
I biked on to IJburg and large swaths of that area still are empty and being built and filled in. Most people won’t remember how long it took for tram 26 to be extended there or when the first supermarket opened (is there one now even?).
Some nice parts too:
Concerning that part of urban development we can learn a lot of the prefab cities being erected in the East (take Dan Hill’s account of New Songdo). I know it takes time to fill up residential units and some amount of organic growth/frontier mentality is good, but is it that hard to have basic amenities in place when the first people arrive there?
- Just like it had no clue about IJburg in the beginning. ↩
As I said on twitter, there are a few ‘historic facts’ wrong in this post.
IJburg had a supermarket almost from the start, it was a supermarket in a tent.
There was also a bus connection from Amsterdam CS to IJburg from the day the first people got the key to their house. This bus (326) was taking the same route, tram 26 is taking nowadays.
The reason why the development of the ‘Zeeburgereiland’ is just beginning, is that there first was a ‘Sewage treatment’ factory which had to be removed after a new one opened in the eastern habour area of Amsterdam.