The Bijlmer

Neighborhood · Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam-ZuidoostAmsterdam,Netherlands

Thirteen thousand Amsterdam flats laid out in eleven-storey honeycomb blocks with roads on viaducts, built for families who never came and partly pulled down since.

The Bijlmer is a housing estate built as a model of the future and never filled as planned. Eleven-storey blocks were set out in a honeycomb of hexagons, with roads lifted onto viaducts so that cars never met people, parking in decks, and wide stretches of grass and water in between. Around thirteen thousand flats were laid out this way for Amsterdam families, from the first pile in December 1966. The families did not come. Shops, schools and transport arrived years behind the housing, so anyone who could choose went elsewhere for a house with a garden. The flats went instead to whoever needed housing, and after Suriname became independent in 1975 many of the new residents came from there. No single landlord could manage the estate as a whole, flats emptied, nothing was put right, and crime and drug dealing spread. By the 1990s the city was pulling down blocks it had finished thirty years earlier. Some honeycomb blocks were kept, and they still stand over the grass exactly as drawn.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start at the memorial and walk out from there — The estate has no single centre, so pick one fixed point on the map and use the raised walkways rather than the roads to get around.
These are homes, not exhibits — The surviving honeycomb blocks are full of people going about their day, so photograph the buildings from the public ground and leave doorways and balconies alone.
Do not judge it by its reputation — The blocks that gave the Bijlmer its name in the 1980s are mostly gone; what stands now is an ordinary, busy part of Amsterdam.

Things to do

1
Walk under a raised road
Find a point where a viaduct crosses the green and stand underneath it. The road runs above you and the footpaths run below it, because the plan deliberately kept cars and people on separate levels. That separation still works, which is why the ground here is quiet: no traffic reaches it, and few people cross it.
2
Read the tiles at the memorial
The memorial to the 1992 crash is set into the ground rather than raised above it, and much of its surface is covered with small coloured tiles made by people who live nearby. Look down and read along one row of them. The neighbourhood built this monument itself, rather than receiving one from the city.
3
Find one of the original blocks still standing
Most of the original blocks have been demolished. The ones still standing run for hundreds of metres, bend in the middle, and have open walkways along the front. Stand at one end and look down the whole length of the building. This is the 1960s design as it was drawn, still in use and still fully occupied.