De geordende stad: waar alles op elkaar begint te lijken
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Essay by Tobias Arends
There was some relatively good news in the paper recently. Victor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, had lost the election to opposition leader Péter Magyar. Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, managed to win the trust of a large section of the population with promises of structural reforms. Tackling corruption and strengthening the democratic rule of law were central to his campaign. Whether he can actually deliver on those promises remains to be seen, but a change in political direction seems inevitable.
In 2008, Hungary still scored 7.44 on The Economist’s democracy index. Since Orbán took office as prime minister in 2010, that figure has fallen to 6.58, placing Hungary in the ‘flawed democracy’ category (The Economist, 2026). Furthermore, since 2021, Hungary has been known as the most corrupt country within the European Union (Transparency International, 2026).
Since 2019, Hungary has been governed by decree under the ‘state of emergency’ declared by the ruling party at the time (comparable to the PVV’s attempt in 2024 to introduce emergency law in the Netherlands in order to implement a strict asylum policy). Freedom of the press is also no certainty. Government propaganda is disseminated via public broadcasting, whilst the independent media are subjected to increasing pressure. General civil liberties are also under pressure: the LGBTI+ community, amongst others, is constantly vilified (Végh, 2024). Sufficient reasons, then, for the current poor state of democracy. The hope is that these curtailed freedoms will be addressed in the coming period under this new – still radically right-wing – administration, so that the democracy score at least returns to the level of sixteen years ago.
Dictators are known for adding new structures to their legacy without regard for existing ones. And the power they amass does not always go hand in hand with good taste. For years, the opposition in Hungary has used the construction of an estate near Orbán’s birthplace to highlight corruption in the country. The buildings and surrounding grounds are designed in a neoclassical style and feature various classical elements: parterres, rose gardens, bosquets, and straight axes. According to Orbán, the two large swimming pools are used for keeping sheep, although no sheep have ever been spotted on the estate. In contrast, buffalo, zebras and antelopes do roam the grounds, possibly for hunting. The estate, valued at around 15 million euros, may not be the most significant aspect of the corruption, but it is certainly the most visible and has therefore been identified as the tip of the iceberg. At present, the deeper layers of corruption remain somewhat submerged, as far as the public sphere is concerned.
Figure 1: Orbán’s family villa in Hatvanpuszta. (Akos Hadhazy, 2024)
For other recent examples of totalitarian power in the public sphere, one might travel in one’s mind to Bucharest during the reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu. During his rule, Ceaușescu was known for the mass demolition of residential neighbourhoods, something many a dictator does not shy away from. Yet the difference is that the dictators of yesteryear were less bound by notions of ‘heritage conservation’, whereas Ceaușescu operated in a world that was now expected to take good care of its historical monuments. Thus, in 1981, the demolition of the Uranus district began to make way for the construction of the enormous Parliament Palace. Streets, homes, gardens and significant ‘landmarks’ such as the Brâncovenesc Hospital, the State Archives and many churches were erased from history. Ultimately, 10,000 homes were demolished, forcing around 50,000 people to be rehoused elsewhere, if they could be rehoused at all (Bucharest, 2025).
Figure 2: Map of the Uranus district, with the newly built Parliament Palace shown in red.
A comparison can be drawn with the renovation of Paris under Haussmann. During that period, 19,730 buildings – containing 120,000 homes – were demolished. The key difference is that Haussmann’s reforms were intended to improve the city, a stark contrast to the construction of a megalomaniacal parliament building. Haussmann also had 34,000 new buildings constructed, containing 215,300 dwellings: partly as a result, the population did not grow faster than the number of dwellings during that period (De Moncan, 2002). Of course, the Haussmann boulevards proved far more beneficial to certain people than to others, but that was not the intention. Even if social filtering was part of the reforms, it was at least presented as a modernisation project serving the city as a whole.
Figure 3: A map produced for tourists clearly showing Haussmann’s widened and extended streets. (F. Dufour, 1878)
The key factor in all these examples is the structure within which they came about. Decisions were driven from central government level, and local authorities and citizens had little say in the matter. Even if there is no corruption involved in this arrangement, its democratic value is particularly low. In the Netherlands – the present day, that is – policy on public space is also determined from above and is implemented most concretely at municipal level. At national level, we have had the Spatial Policy Document since 2025. This describes how spatial planning should develop in our country. At the provincial level, provincial executives draw up similar visions, often simply titled ‘Environmental Vision’. Here, the government’s vision is made slightly more concrete. These visions can then be followed by environmental regulations (binding on local authorities) and environmental laws (binding on everyone). At municipal level, further visions are drawn up, based on the guidelines set out at national and then provincial level. These then give rise to programmes in which the vision is made even more concrete, and ultimately environmental laws are drafted that are binding on everyone.
Planning therefore becomes most concrete at the municipal level. It is also at this administrative level that the greatest legal authority lies. Visions are not legally binding and serve merely as guidelines. Environmental laws, on the other hand, do have legal status. Consequently, one might initially assume that the municipalities have the final say in spatial planning, but nothing could be further from the truth. Although visions are not legally binding, there are various processes through which the different levels of government can monitor one another. For instance, the province exercises ‘inter-administrative supervision’ over municipalities and water boards. This allows the province to check whether the lower-level authorities are operating within the established frameworks. If this is not the case, intervention can even take the form of ‘substitution’, whereby the province can take over the municipality’s tasks if they are deemed unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the most important framework – the Spatial Planning Policy Document – is drawn up at national level and then passed on to the various levels of government. In our spatial planning, therefore, control is not explicit but implicit.
Democracy in our spatial planning thus seems to be quite well structured. It paves the way for certain shared intentions to come to fruition. There are a number of challenges that are relevant at national level and must be taken into account in virtually every design project: for example, liveability, safety, greening, the quality of public space and social cohesion. Such a shared agenda is beneficial to its development, but a universally desired improvement in quality also entails responsibilities. The definitions of ‘good’, ‘safe’, ‘orderly’ and ‘attractive’ – and therefore also of ‘quality’ – are culturally determined and thus highly subjective. The question, then, is who determines exactly what quality means. Behind terms such as liveability, safety and attractiveness lie implicit ideas about what a neighbourhood should look like, but also about how it should be used.
There is simply no disputing the good intentions. It is striking, however, that the solutions to these shared problems are becoming increasingly universal, perhaps due to the shared nature of the challenge. Boardwalks, wadis, food forests and raised planting beds are all ingredients in the ‘quality’ recipe. Whereas certain ingredients used to be found only in a select few well-stocked shops, neighbourhoods or even countries, they are now much more accessible globally. Circulating reference images reveal an increasingly homogeneous design vision, driven by a universal desire for ‘quality’. The history and cultural heritage of a place are often still reflected in its naming or the preservation of a façade, but the typical daily use and social dynamics of a place can change enormously as a result of developments in the public space. So culture may well continue to exist as an image and in theory, but certainly not always in practice and in everyday experience.
Figure 4: Raised planting beds with seating elements as a universal component/ingredient of the ‘quality’ formula (left: Grijsen, right: Streetlife)
Figure 5: A good example of an integrated approach to adding quality; it is therefore important to be critical of the cultural context and intended target group within all these terms. (Project for Public Spaces, 2016)
New urban developments change not only the appearance of a neighbourhood, but also the rhythm and behaviour within it. Different shops attract a different crowd, public spaces are subject to more intensive regulation, and informal spaces gradually disappear from view. Although the exact causal links remain difficult to establish, urban planning literature, for example, regularly links urban greening to processes of gentrification. Democracy in spatial planning is therefore not merely an administrative arena. Indeed, designers too have the power to determine for whom designs are created. Is it the current residents, the future residents, or is the design not focused on people at all? It is important to reflect on this during the design process. If adding quality is the sole aim of a design, without taking current and future cultural values into account, a monotonous landscape looms. In a monotonous landscape, many places disappear that, due to the normative consensus surrounding ‘quality’, no longer have (or are not allowed to have) a place in our daily lives. Without care, we may lose a large part of the individuality in our public landscape, and these are precisely the places where we can break away from uniformity and experience genuine authenticity and ‘quirkiness’.
Both totalitarian and democratic systems can therefore produce spatial homogeneity, albeit through entirely different mechanisms. The result in the Netherlands may not be an authoritarian city, but it is an urban landscape in which spatial deviation and individuality are becoming increasingly less visible. Just as in the monumental urban planning of authoritarian regimes, there is a strong emphasis on order, tidiness and a shared aesthetic ideal.
References
Végh, S. (2025) Hungary. Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/country/hungary/nations-transit/2024
Bucharest (2025) Uranus, the vanished neighborhood of old Bucharest. What once stood where the people’s house -now the palace of the parliament- rises today. Bucharest.
De Moncan, P., Heurtuex, C. (2002) Le Paris d’Haussmann. Paris: Du Mecene.
Transparency International (2026) Hungary Remains the Most Corrupt Member State of the European Union for the Fourth Consecutive Year. Transparency International.
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