Impassable No Man’s Land: The Development of Courtyards in Antwerp and Amsterdam

Column by Jol Abels

The apartment we slept in was right in the city center, and when I looked out from the kitchen window over the courtyard, I recognized it immediately. The peeling walls barely three meters away, the poorly maintained window frames, and instead of seeing the ground, I saw the roofs of the lower floors. It felt as if I were looking out again from my old student room further down the road in Antwerp, where I had stared at the bare walls outside for an entire year.

And in the other buildings I lived in or visited during my student years in Antwerp, I recognized the same phenomenon. The windows facing the interior of the building block opened onto an unremarkable void—an empty space without interaction or movement. The roofs formed a lonely landscape, marked by traces of lives I did not know, a view I could watch for hours with fascination. When, during the summer months, one of my neighbors inside the block blasted loud music from their speakers, I had no idea which door to knock on. The dense, enclosed structure made the spatial puzzle hard to solve, and on the rear sides of the homes—facing the courtyard—curtains and blinds were kept tightly shut.

How different it is in Amsterdam. Now that I live here, the contrast has become clear. From the houses in the narrow streets of the city center, you look out onto green inner gardens and shared courtyards. The building blocks are not completely filled in, leaving open spaces in the middle, so that from every home you can still see the ground. And this comes at no cost to the city’s density. Despite the fact that not every square meter is built up, the center of Amsterdam still achieves a higher population density than that of Antwerp.

The fully built-up building block is a remnant of the industrial era, when cities grew exponentially and housing policy was minimal. In Amsterdam too, this led to the construction of back buildings and shacks behind the respectable houses facing the street. The front housed the wealthier residents; the back was left for the poor. Daylight hardly reached the buildings facing the courtyard.

This changed in the Netherlands with the introduction of the Housing Act in 1901. From then on, the government placed strong emphasis on air, light, and space in urban development. In neighborhoods such as the Jordaan, the shacks and outbuildings in the middle of the blocks were demolished, and the many new districts built in the early 20th century—such as Berlage’s Plan Zuid—were designed according to the principles of modernist urban planning.

In Flanders, comprehensive spatial planning did not take shape until around 1970. As a result, neighborhoods were not developed block by block, but by private developers who built on their plots as densely as possible to sell the homes at higher prices. Moreover, the prevalence of private ownership meant that the government had limited power to improve the spatial quality of inner courtyards. To make any intervention, the authorities first had to convince—and financially compensate—dozens of individual owners.

In recent years, Belgium has begun investing more heavily in the urban quality of its cities. Newly developed housing projects in Antwerp now leave open space behind the rear façades, and the fully built-up building block is slowly disappearing from the cityscape.

Of course, most people would prefer a view of greenery and shared spaces over bare, decaying walls. Yet the tightly built blocks of Antwerp hold a certain nostalgia. As if these meaningless voids serve as havens of anonymity within the busy streets of the center. And while the neat façades along the streets form the stage set of the city for tourists, the peeling window frames behind them reveal what truly goes on backstage. What I saw from my old student room in Antwerp was not unique to my building. It was the direct result of centuries of urban planning and spatial choices—decisions that are only now beginning to change. An impassable piece of no man’s land: the influence of spatial policy has never been more visible.