by Zaida Muzi e Mireia Simó (translated by Julia Manacorda)
Abstract
Women architects and urban planners have not been represented throughout history in equal conditions, not even in equal order by merit. Therefore, it is necessary to review the history of architecture and cities, to rewrite it by incorporating the women who have been part of it but whose voices have been made invisible.
One of the many figures that historiography and, with it, academia have forgotten when constructing the history of modern urbanism is Jakoba Helena (Ko) Mulder (1900-1988), one of the first women to graduate in the specialty of urban planning from the Technische Hogeschool in Delft. Jakoba Mulder worked at the Amsterdam Department of Urban Planning from 1930 to 1965, becoming its director in 1958. Her contributions were essential in the designs of residential complexes built in the city, after all, her projects incorporated the detail of everyday life into the planning, incorporating a trans-scale way of working that considered the impact that urbanistic configurations would have on the lives of the people who would inhabit the resulting spaces.
Keywords: Women Urbanists, Jakoba Mulder, Amsterdam, planning, landscaping, gender, childhood, and city.
Jakoba Mulder, urban planner
Jakoba Mulder graduated in 1926 as a construction engineer from the Technische Hogeschool in Delft, becoming the first woman to graduate from that university and work as a town planner. Entering the world of men was not easy. One can observe by some experiences such as the scorn of some professors who considered female students insignificant or the rejection in some of her first job applications because she was a woman. In 1927, Charlotte Perriand was initially rejected by Le Corbusier, who told her that "no embroidery is done for the cushions in his studio"; around the same year, Jakoba Mulder was also rejected in one of her first job interviews because you can hardly send a woman to go climb scaffolding.
She always denied having suffered discrimination and yet she was aware that she moved into a man's world. She was part of entities such as the Delft Association of Women Students (DVSV), where she became president, later she was a member and part of the management team of the Association of Academically Educated Women (VVAO). She was also part of the local group of the international network "Soroptimists" formed by prominent professional women dedicated to the advancement of women. For the latter organization, in 1947 she wrote an article motivating other women to study urbanism. In her opinion, the job of urban planner was not specific to men or women, "it is enough to be suited for it and to have a deep social interest."
In 1930 she began working at the Amsterdam Department of Urban Planning, founded two years earlier in response to the need to have a public team dedicated specifically to the study and urban planning in the city. Her work in the department can be grouped into three main areas: landscaping, playgrounds, and urban planning.
One of her first jobs at the Department of Urban Planning was the Boschplan, now Amsterdamse Bos (Amsterdam forest), which made her known, to the public, as the forest lady. In this case, a park was needed to ensure green spaces in a rapidly growing city. At the same time, the crisis of '29 had left many people out of work, so the creation of the park was also an employment policy, including the creation of a municipal nursery that made it possible to continue to provide jobs beyond the construction of the park.
The Amsterdamse Bos and the Beatrixpark (built between 1936 and 1939) are the two projects that gave her the most visibility and recognition. The reason for this: park and garden projects have been works more associated with the female role within urbanism because they are more connected to nature, but, as we will see, these works are only a tiny part of her professional career.
The second relevant milestone in her career was the creation of a system of temporary playgrounds, in which she brought together her great interest in play spaces and playgrounds with the public policies carried out to implement them. Jakoba Mulder observed one day from her window a little girl playing on a street corner with no resources other than imagination, dirt, and a can. This experience led her to worry about the lack of suitable places for play in the city, so in 1947 she proposed a 'bottom-up' system for creating public spaces for children's play.
The demand came directly from citizens, who had to identify, on the one hand, the presence of boys and girls without a playground and, on the other, the existence of small spaces of opportunity, be they lots, corners, or sidewalks, that were unused or poorly used. With this information, the city administration verified the viability of the site and took charge of its transformation. In this way, it was possible to create small, inexpensive spaces full of possibilities for children's play.
With this system, between 1948 and 1978 more than 700 playgrounds were created scattered [fig.1-fig2] throughout the city of Amsterdam. Aldo van Eyck, from his job in the city's public works workshop, designed a series of simple elements that allowed him to form in his play spaces combinations suitable for each surface, each one resulting different and with a wide variety of shapes, textures, and possibilities capable of provoking the creative use of said elements by boys and girls.
Third, it was in urban planning that Jakoba Mulder made a difference, making changes of great significance to the city. The team he was part of in the Urban Development Department of the Public Works Department of the City of Amsterdam was created in 1928, under the research department of Theo van Lohuizen (1890 - 1956) and the project management of Cornelis van Eesteren (1897 - 1988), also formed by LSP Schefer. This team drew up between the two world wars the most recognized Dutch urban plan, the Amsterdam Expansion Plan (AUP). The plan laid the foundation for the growth of so-called garden cities (tuinsteden) such as Slotermeer. After 1945, it was implemented much faster than anticipated and, according to Stephen Ward, must be considered one of the most successful plans for a major European city in the interwar period, marking an extremely interesting trend in the professional evolution of planning, as it is the first plan consciously prepared and presented as a team effort.
Jakoba Mulder contributed to the plan's development by working on the revision and definition of the different neighborhoods before their final construction. One of the most significant redefinitions was the one she proposed in 1947 for the Frankendaal surroundings, located in the suburb of Watergraafsmeer. She presented a change from the system of parallel housing blocks, which had been applied until then according to the planning established in the PSA, to a new system based on L-shaped buildings arranged to form a rectangular public space between them. These spaces between blocks could be used to situate green areas and children's games that would allow for care from the residences. In interventions like this, one can appreciate Mulder's way to understand urban planning: as a tool to improve the daily lives of all people. [fig.3]
Since then, this urbanization system and construction were both used in the new neighborhoods in the western part of the city, such as Slotemeer, Slotervaart, Geuzenveld, and Osdorp built between 1950 and the mid-1960s. According to Helma Hellinga, this return to more enclosed spaces can be explained as a derivation of the idea of neighborhood raised by A. Bos in 1946 in The city of the future, the city's future.
In 1958, Jakoba Mulder succeeded Cornelis van Eesteren as director of the Amsterdam urban planning office. Under this position, she coordinated and designed the Buitenveldert and Noord neighborhoods.
The tendency in these new neighborhoods is, progressively, to distance themselves from the previous ones, becoming denser and with taller buildings. Mulder, who was part of the commission in charge of studying them, has consistently defended the use of mixed densities, addressing constructions of different scales that gave the city a heterogeneous character.
However, the Department of Housing had a very different view, as concerns over costs, construction times, and the number of dwellings led them to focus on high-rise buildings. Under this premise, in 1962 the Bijlmermeer project was executed, a neighborhood of hexagonal high-rise buildings. Mulder always maintained a critical position towards this plan, as she considered that the human dimension in the project had been lost, to the point that in an interview in 1984 she declared that Bijlmermeer was her sentence ("nagel aan mijn doodskist"). [fig.4]
In 1965, she retired from the Department of Urban Planning, remaining as a consultant until 1972. [fig.5] In 1966, she was appointed professor extraordinaire of technical and architectural problems of urban planning at the University of Amsterdam until she retired for good in 1972. [fig.6]
For the acceptance of the academic position, she delivered on November 8, 1966, a speech entitled "On the threshold" (Op de drempel), in which she presents a diagnosis of the challenges of the city of Amsterdam. She warns that, despite the title, it is not a novel but will describe a series of problems, which are not new in themselves, but which require prompt attention and solution. She acknowledges all the work that has been done since the new post-war neighborhoods but warns of the abandonment of the previous city, the historic and 19th-century city, also the fast growth of urban mobility by private vehicles, which involves at least three problems: territorial expansion, city congestion, and pollution.
The ideas behind her projects.
Only by briefly analyzing Jakoba Mulder's professional trajectory in a very condensed way is it evident the repercussions it had on the city of Amsterdam. Mulder was not content to fulfill the tasks assigned to her but questioned and rethought each one of them, generating concrete proposals that broke with the usual forms of urban planning of the time.
In all his projects and contributions, regardless of scale or scope, one can always confirm an evident concern with the project's impact on people's lives. Thus, there is an unquestionable effort to improve the quality of life of these people through urbanism.
This sensibility involves first paying attention to the small details of everyday life, as in the case of the little girl he saw playing in the street, and then the proactive ability to come up with alternatives that involve the entire population as a whole, as in the urban playground project. Mulder managed to engage the different political levels that participated in the regulation and production of the city, involving the citizens in the administrative process of improving the city.
This care for the more social aspect of urbanism is still present when we go to the larger scale. As an urbanist, she has always maintained a critical position towards more homogeneous and massive urban plans. That was the case, for example, with line planning, which she considered not only monotonous and boring but also did not create space for neighborhood relations. Jakoba Mulder advocated as ideal the mixture of rows and blocks with an inner courtyard, not only for the richness generated by the diversity of urban spaces but also for the advantages that the block courtyard represented for the life of neighborhood residents.
Her action was in line with Dutch pragmatism. Her proposals for socially based urbanization, forming courtyards, were economically equal to successive ones, which proved to the Housing Secretariat the viability of this in economic terms, therefore, she was able to do what she wanted: projects with positive social impact.
This firmness is also evident in discussions such as the one on the Biljmermeer neighborhood, where she defended to the end the lack of humanity that occurred in such a massive and excessive height planning. She felt that tall buildings were not suitable for certain types of housing units, such as those for families with children, given the lack of relationship between housing and public recreational space. Therefore, she consistently advocated a mix of heights and typologies, as this would accommodate all types of living groups, generating a more diverse and inclusive city, as we saw in her "Op de drempel" conference.
From all this, one can observe a clear pattern in Jakoba Mulder's criticism: it has always been based on the more social aspects of urbanism, which have not been forgotten in the economic or industrial dimensions. This concern is often repeated in the contributions made by women architects and urban planners of the first half of the 20th century. Unlike some of their contemporaries, they highlight the tasks of care and their importance, thus recognizing the experience attributed to the role of the female gender and, consequently, they act as professionals, seeking to solve the needs that arise from this experience in their projects.
Biographies like the one of Jakoba Mulder teach us to appreciate the importance of this outlook in our cities. Her contributions notably improved the quality of life of the inhabitants of post-war Amsterdam, especially children, and consequently of the people responsible for them. A look based on small gestures, both on a small and large scale, improves the daily lives of the citizens of the time and undoubtedly sets a precedent in urban planning's world. It is in our hands to recognize these contributions and use them to our advantage, learning from them to apply them in our cities and make them a more diverse, welcoming, and inclusive space.
Illustrations:
Fig 1. Joop van Bilsen, Nationaal Archief, Opening 250ste kinderspeelplaats in Amsterdam aan de Eerste Leeghwaterstraat. Kinderen op de speelplaats, archive number 912-6630 , inventory number 912-6630
Fig 2. Patricia Reus. Amsterdam playgrounds in the present day. (2018)
Fig. 3 Own elaboration (Mireia Simó). Based on the original: Jakoba Mulder, Amsterdam City Council Archive, Ir. J.H. Mulder, 1327- 52, article Het tuindorp Frankendaal in de Watergraafsmeer (1952)
Fig 4. Amsterdam City Hall; Monumenten & Archeologie (2017) Van licht, lucht en groen word je een 'beter' mens.
Fig 5. Joop van Bilsen, Nationaal Archief, Mejuffrouw ir. J.H. Mulder afscheid genomen als hoofd afdeling Stadsontwikkeling PW, Amsterdam, archive number 2.24.01.04, inventory number 918-7157
Fig 6. Joop van Bilsen, Nationaal Archief, Mevr. ir. J.H. Mulder achter katheder in de aula van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, archive number 2.24.01.04, inventory number 919-7704
Fig 7. Elaborated by the author (Mireia Simó).
Authors:
Zaida Muxí, Ph.D. architect, Professor ETSAB-UPC, Barcelona, Spain.
Mireia Simó, BA in architecture, student of the Habilitating Master in Architecture ETSAB-UPC.
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