London: Twentieth Century Housing Projects

Tjerk Ruimschotel (born 1949) is a Dutch urban designer, lecturer, and publicist. He trained at Delft University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and until a few years ago worked for private firms and local councils. Latterly he was chief urban designer of the city of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. Alongside this, he taught and lectured, carried out research on former Dutch colonial architecture and urbanism in Indonesia, and regularly wrote for professional magazines. He is the co-author of Atlas of Change: Rearranging the Netherlands (2001). From 2009 to 2015 he was chair of the Dutch Association of Urban Designers and Planners (BNSP).

Since he is not based in London, Tjerk Ruimschotel has no first-hand experience of living there, though he does frequently visit his daughter, her British husband and their two Anglo-Dutch sons. He never worked professionally as an architect or town planner in London or the United Kingdom and does not claim to know the building industry and policy-making around housing first-hand. As an urban designer, however, he has always had an interest in British architectural design and especially housing. From his student days onwards, he has regularly visited newly built projects such as the Alton Estates and the construction sites of Barbican and Thamesmead in the 1960s and 1970s. He continues to do this up to the present day, when a new generation of British architects are realising the importance of (social) housing for the living fabric of the city. One of his long-held beliefs is that an outsider’s perspective can (at times) be a favourable point of view.