Netherlands Nice: How Thoughtful Dutch Design Makes Public Life a Pleasant Experience
I returned from a trip last week to Amsterdam after a forty-year absence from that city, which is too long to have been away. The visit renewed my faith in what is possible in public life. The city was still as clean and running as efficiently as I had left it, but this time around I photographed artifacts of streamlined public life, instead of churches and monuments, as I had in 1983.Striking is the baseline politeness of many Dutch persons. It must be built into their culture. Every time I stepped aside to allow for a pedestrian or biker to have more room to pass, the reply I heard from them was:Gosh that’s nice. An acknowledgment that my thought to make room was appreciated. Thanks for your thoughtfulness in stepping aside for me, they were saying. Every time. And there’s a lot of opportunity to “step aside” traversing around The Netherlands because there are 17 million (mostly tall) people squeezed into a quarter of the size of New Jersey. I took photos of street-side electric car chargers, the many, many combinations of recycling centers for any kind of recyclable waste, the sea of bicycles, the immaculate trams, the clean metros.Daily I clocked at least two street cleaners everywhere I went. Step aside! I saw very little trash or dirt on the streets. My last day there, I noticed for the first time that two seats in the almost empty tram were covered with different fabric from the rest of the seats. There seemed to be small drawings on the fabric, and the fabric was a different color. As the tram twisted and turned down the Amsterdam street, I carefully stepped forward by clutching the bars above to investigate. I found that the figures on…
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