On a rainy day in September, we meet Ralph Ploeger, a planologist with the municipality of Amsterdam, at the Amsterdam Stopera. The occasion is a series of studies on the living–working balance in the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (MRA), in which we worked closely with him. Gijs de Haan, urban planner at PosadMaxwan, speaks with him about why this balance between living and working is so important today, and what the research teaches us about the future of the city and the metropolitan region.

Gijs de Haan interviews Ralph Ploeger
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GdH: Why did you initiate the study on living–working balance and what outcomes were you hoping for?

RP: "The idea for a study on the balance between living and working emerged around 2019, when the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK) and the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA) started to develop one of the first urbanization strategies, which resulted in the Development Perspective Novex MRA. There we saw that living and working were growing further and further apart, resulting in increased pressure on mobility and a risk of transportation poverty. We wanted to understand how spatial planning could help to weave living and working together more effectively.

Together with PosadMaxwan, we investigated what types of mixed urban environments work well and how to encourage them. The results formed the basis for the Aproach Living-Working Balance, in which we helped subregions to apply these insights in concrete terms. Meanwhile, we see that the concept of living-working balance has penetrated policy and plans. Municipalities themselves now use it to substantiate their choices. With that, it has really become part of thinking about healthy and sustainable urbanization."

GdH: Was it mainly from Mobility that the realization came: we can no longer continue to plan living and working separately, because the system is getting bogged down and that leads to transport poverty?

RP: "Yes, Mobility really sounded the alarm in the Multimodal Future Perspective that the State and the Region drew up for the MRA. From the study we did together, you nicely pointed out that with our spatial choices for living and working, we are actually mainly contributing to the imbalance. The economy is concentrating, while affordable housing is moving further and further away. And we kept hearing that the economy cannot be steered easily. We jumped into that gap: how can you still use spatial planning to exert influence?

The Multimodal Future Picture wrote it down very sharply at the time: this will go wrong if we do nothing and spatial planning is the first knob we have to turn. By that they meant: build where there is already mobility, or make sure that functions come closer together. That signal helped. Since then you see that the effect of spatial planning on mobility is really taken into account in spatial choices and in the order in which projects are carried out. That's a big step forward."

GdH: The concerns were not only about an overburdened mobility system, but also increasing inequality and reduced accessibility to amenities and work. How do you see that?

RP: "That's right. As urban areas became increasingly expensive and crowded, not only did lower- and middle-income people have less access to the housing market in the MRA, but urban-serving businesses are also being pushed further to the edges. The Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Raad voor de leefomgeving) and the College of State Advisors (CRa), among others, sounded the alarm about this a few years ago. Not for nothing does the development perspective Novex MRA therefore begin with the words: we are not building houses, but societies. A similar signal was recently sent in Amsterdam by the Court of Audit (Rekenkamer), with 'Building the complete city', and within Amsterdam a spatial response to this is also being made in line with the Omgevingsvisie Amsterdam: employment and facilities must grow in step with the number of homes.

For a long time, this sort of thing was seen mainly as a social problem, not as something spatial. But both in the city and in the MRA we are showing that you can have influence through spatial choices. It's not just about travel time, but about quality of life and equal access to housing, work and facilities."

GdH: What does an area with a good living-work balance look like in your opinion? What do you say about that when you have to explain it, for example, to the Municipality of Zaanstad?

RP: "First, we do not intend that everyone should work close to home, and we realize that this will never happen. But neither do we have to see the expansion of the 'daily urban system' as something that happens to us. What matters in our work is that we at least try to organize the spatial conditions for living and working so that there is a greater possibility of finding work close to home or a house close to work, that car dependence is reduced, and that people live in places with sufficient facilities around the corner. Second, living-working balance and mixing is not a synonym for realizing highly urban mixed-use living-working environments everywhere. That would not be realistic and is unnecessary. A good living-working balance can also be achieved through proximity: a business park next to a residential area can work just as well. The point is that functions reinforce each other and people can move easily between living and working.

Important is that you can see before you how it will really function. Will it be a vibrant environment where people can stay, or will it again be primarily a car location? There is no single recipe, but there is a starting point: create places where living, working and daily facilities come together logically.

GdH: You distinguish between different scales at which mixing can be achieved: from building and neighborhood to district and agglomeration. How do you assess what works at each scale?

RP: "On a small scale, such as buildings or neighborhoods, mixing is mainly about liveliness: places where living, working, and amenities complement each other. At the district level, it's more about proximity, so that people can easily commute to work and get around in their daily lives.

At the agglomeration level, we have more sharply defined the power of proximity. Proximity means working to create an environment where living and working and facilities reinforce each other. What this means exactly differs per region: in Haarlem it is about more local jobs for theoretically educated people, in the IJmond region it is about quality of life and support for facilities, in Amsterdam it is about maintaining affordable workplaces. Each place has its own challenges in terms of living-working balance."

GdH: What would you advise municipalities that do not have a metropolitan context like Amsterdam? What steps can they take to strengthen the living-working balance?

RP: "Even outside the big city, you need to think about who lives in your municipality and where those people find their jobs. With new developments, you should not only ask whether it is a good housing location, but also whether there is work nearby or space for business. A city or village only becomes truly vibrant when living and working and facilities are connected.

Municipalities like Lelystad and Almere realize that it is not enough to build housing for people who work elsewhere. They are building their own economic ecosystem so that opportunities arise locally as well. That is exactly what the living-working balance is about: understanding who lives near you, where they work, and how you can coordinate that better."

GdH: Actually, every municipality should have a good idea of that before making big spatial choices, right?

RP: "Yes, exactly. You need to know who lives in your municipality, where they work and how that develops. That's surprisingly easy to analyze: you can see from the data exactly which region companies are recruiting their employees from and whether those places are still easily accessible. Such insights help enormously in making spatial choices.

What is often missing is that economy and spatial planning still work separately. Municipalities think in business parks or offices, mixed urban environments are already harder to grasp and develop, as are the spatial conditions for innovation. I see our studies with you as the first steps towards this.

If municipalities start to link work environments better to housing and mobility, they can effectively steer towards a healthy balance. Not by waiting for The Hague, but by looking locally: which jobs are here, which ones do we need and is there potential for them, who can fill those jobs, are we serving those people sufficiently on the housing market and with the right mobility facilities, and how do we translate all that into spatial investments? That's the step that needs to be taken now."