What does a suburb look like in the famously bike-friendly country of the Netherlands? It’s
one thing to inherit historic human-scale cities built before cars even existed, but what can the
Dutch teach us about building sane suburbs in the modern era? On our recent trip we made sure
to visit some newer, lower density residential developments on the edge of Amsterdam and the
Hague to see just how they compare to suburbs back home in North America. What we found changed our
perspective on cities and urbanism, and made us wonder whether the suburbs could be for us.
We visited lots of different neighbourhoods but our footage is mainly from these four:
De Bongerd in Amsterdam Noord; Eendracht, on the western edge of Amsterdam;
Biesland in the southeastern end of the Hague, close to Delft;
Sion in Rijswijk, a municipality south of the Hague, also close to Delft.
There are more-or-less random neighbourhoods we came across while walking, biking,
and ferrying around. As far as we know they’re not special or
unique. They were all built in the past 30 or so years, and two of them
are directly adjacent to major highways. What kind of urbanism does that give us?
These neighbourhoods have population densities between 5 and 10,000 people per square kilometre.
That works out to about half or a third of the densities you’ll find in central Amsterdam or
the Hague, but it’s also double or even triple the densities you’d find in typical suburbs in Canada
or the U.S. One of these developments was actually advertised as “rural living”, which is fascinating
because this would be considered the lower end of urban density in most major cities in the U.S.
and Canada. It’s a pretty compelling livability balance though: urban enough to have amenities,
transportation options, and be a relatively efficient use of land and infrastructure spending,
while still providing more personal space and open space than you’d get with higher densities.
These four suburbs have a mix of housing, from detached and semi-detached homes to apartments
(mainly low-rise), but the basic building block of Dutch suburbia seems to be the townhouse or
row house. Compare that to Canada or the U.S. where suburbia is heavily based on the ideal of
the single-family detached home. Townhouses and small apartments aren’t entirely rare,
but they’re the exception to the pattern, often tucked away in their own corner of
the neighbourhood and, we will always bring this up, not legally allowed to be built on most land.
Having a variety of housing options makes neighbourhoods more interesting and accessible,
and townhouses in particular are a sweet spot for affordability, at least when built on cheaper
land. Townhouses use less land than detached homes and they’re cheaper to build than taller
structures. We’d never say you can’t raise kids in an apartment, but townhouse suburbs are a good
middle ground for families with children for the mix of affordability with space and a backyard.
The basic idea of a suburb is that you give up proximity to the central city and
in return you get more space for less money. This is a normal and valid trade-off to make,
especially for families with children who want more room. But North American suburbs often take
this to the extreme, mandating large decorative yards that dilute the density and contribute to
sprawl without really being that useful. The Dutch suburbs that we saw usually provided some form
of backyard — arguably the most useful of the yards — while eliminating side yards with the
townhouses and having more modest space in front of the house. It can be nice to have a place to
sit out front but it’s kind of crazy that it’s the norm and even the law in lots of places to have so
much empty grass out front. Some of the closest equivalents to front lawns that we saw in these
Dutch suburbs were more like communal courts or playgrounds, which seemed great for kids.
Easily the most unique and fascinating part of Dutch suburbs from a North American perspective is
how small the roads are. Everyone knows to expect narrow streets in the medieval city centres,
but these newer developments built in the past few decades also incorporated surprisingly small
streets. In a suburban part of our city in North America, a residential street might be
8 to 10 metres wide, not including sidewalks where they exist. Through routes are wider,
but this is the norm for the smallest local streets that just provide access to homes.
In the Dutch suburbs we visited, residential streets are commonly half that width,
at just 4 to 5 metres wide. From a North American perspective, that’s on its way
to becoming a pedestrian pathway, and that’s kind of the point — these roads provide access
for cars but they slow down traffic and put the whole neighbourhood at more of a walking
or cycling pace, exactly what you want for an area where children are exploring and playing.
Some of the roads through the neighbourhood literally were pedestrian and cycling pathways,
which were even narrower at 3 to 4 metres wide. In some places these formed almost
a parallel road network, crossing bridges that cars aren’t allowed to. Even when residential
streets were wider and closer to the norm in North America, the part used for parking on the side
was often set apart structurally and visibly, making the street feel narrower and ensuring
that the absence of parked cars wouldn’t just provide more road space for cars to drive fast.
If there’s any one lesson we want people to take away from these suburbs,
it’s that we can and should rethink our basic street network in residential areas. Smaller
streets and pedestrian pathways are not just for medieval city centres! We can incorporate
them into new residential developments and, alongside bollards and other traffic calming,
they can do wonders to set the neighbourhood at a human scale and speed. How nice would it
be to have a house that opened onto a bike path instead of a road? That sounds awesome. Of course,
not all roads can be like this. Roads going in and out of the neighbourhoods were a bit bigger,
and you could use those roads to get to arterials or highways that were much bigger and faster.
Still, even those bigger arterials consistently had adjacent bike paths to get you into town.
On top of being safer and feeling just more quaint and pleasant,
smaller streets are also an advantage for density. They make the neighbourhood more
compact without taking away from anyone’s personal living space.
Imagine what this neighbourhood would look like if you doubled or tripled the width of the roads.
Another advantage of smaller streets is maintenance. One of the first things we
noticed when we got back to Montreal was the awful conditions of the roads. You notice the bumps and
potholes whether you’re walking, cycling, driving, or taking a bus. There are probably multiple
reasons for this in Montreal, from winters to corruption, but it has to be harder to keep your
roads in good condition when a residential street is twice as big as it needs to be.
All of these suburban neighbourhoods had some common needs located within them,
whether schools, daycares, doctors, groceries, or a community centre. You didn’t have everything
you needed closeby like you might have in a city, but it’s at least an upgrade from the
strictly residential neighbourhoods we have in North America. Here in Canada,
having a school within a suburban residential neighbourhood is common
but stores and services are usually pushed to the edge of neighbourhoods or even the edge of town.
As you’d expect for the Netherlands, all of these suburban neighbourhoods have really excellent
cycling connections to nearby city centres. Biking to central Amsterdam from its two suburban
neighbourhoods that we looked at is easy and just as fast as driving. Transit is roughly similar
too. For the other two suburbs between the Hague and Delft, if you’re going to Delft, cycling and
driving are about equal. You could comfortably and safely bike to the Hague too, although for
that trip both cycling and transit are quite a bit slower than driving. There is a tram going between
the Hague and Delft, through some countryside and lower density areas, but it doesn’t go through
these particular neighbourhoods. Overall, in the Dutch suburbs we visited, there are definitely
some trips that are faster or more convenient by car, but it depends a lot on where you’re going,
with cycling and transit being competitive or even faster for many trips too.
All of the suburbs we saw had car parking, but they tend to have it behind the buildings and
in communal lots instead of a front driveway and garage for every single building. This probably
saves space and definitely looks nicer. We talked to someone in one of these townhouse suburbs in
another Dutch city and they said that most of their neighbours have one car per household,
rather than the two-car households that are pretty common in North America.
We’ve covered what these homes and neighbourhoods look like in a general sense from the outside,
but let’s take a look at some specific homes you can get and how much they cost. The Netherlands
is overall one of the more expensive countries in Europe for housing, so whether these suburbs seem
“affordable” to you will depend on how crazy the housing market is in your current city.
In De Bongerd, in Amsterdam Noord, we found a four-bedroom “corner house”
built in 2008 for 685,000 euros. A “corner house” here means that it’s one fourth of
a four-home building. This one has three floors plus a rooftop patio,
for 144 square metres or 1,600 square feet of livable space. It has a one-car garage
on the first floor and seems to have a second parking space in a nearby lot.
In Eendracht, on the western edge of Amsterdam, we found a more affordable three bedroom townhouse
for 400,000 euros. Built in 1990, it has 96 square metres or 1,000 square feet of living
space across three floors, although the third floor is a smaller, furnished attic.
It has a small front yard or porch area and a larger backyard.
In Biesland on the southeastern end of the Hague we found a five-bedroom “luxury
villa” with 276 square metres or 3,000 square feet for 1.3 million euros. We also found a
more modest three bedroom townhouse built in 2003 with a nice patio overlooking the water
and 109 square metres or 1,200 square feet of living space for 375,000 euros.
In Sion, northwest of Delft, we found a four-bedroom townhouse built in 2016 for 620,000
euros that opens onto a pedestrian court and has a backyard. Nearby,
in a similar neighbourhood across the road, there’s a just-built one-bedroom apartment with
48 square metres or 520 square feet of living space and a nice backyard for 300,000 euros.
In North America there’s a frustrating assumption that density, bike infrastructure, public transit,
pedestrian spaces, and other things we talk about on this channel are for big city downtowns where
young professionals live in small apartments for easy access to work and social events,
while sprawling car-centric suburbs are the natural and obvious environment for families
with children. The Dutch suburbs that we visited blur the lines, showing that you can have three-
or four- bedroom homes built reasonably compactly, you can have a backyard while living close enough
to school for your kid to walk, you can have a parking spot or even a garage as well as safe
streets, and you can get out of the city while still having a world-class cycling network.
Visiting Dutch suburbs actually made us question whether we consider ourselves “big city people”.
We like things like bike infrastructure and medium density housing, and in North America that
generally means living in a central neighbourhood of a bigger city like Montreal or Philadelphia.
In the Netherlands these things are available in a lot more places. Even though we live in central
Montreal, if we were to live in the Netherlands we probably wouldn’t choose central Amsterdam, we’d
probably go for a more suburban area or even more likely a smaller city like Utrecht or Haarlem.