The Juliana park, a people’s park

26 august

“The juliana park is a people’s park” is the sentence that ends a new poster placed in the park 50 meters away from my house. And it is indeed. In the twenty-some years that we have lived here, the park has been part of us, as much as part of the life of many of our neighbors. Ours is not a luxurious neighborhood. Actually, the houses we live in were build around the turn of the XX century for the workers of a factory close by. It is a lot of time, more than a century ago, but our neighborhood has remained a humble one. It is a bit of a miracle and a bit of hard core politics. Utrecht, our city, gentrifies at high speed. The Netherlands is a good country to live, and Utrecht is close to all others cities, without having any of their problems. So there is a lot of pressure in the housing market. But our neighborhood still has many houses owned by a public-private corporation, that rents houses with a regulated price. Prices are about half of the prices that a private owner would ask (and get). So we remain a mixed neighborhood, with diverse incomes biased to the lower side of the spectrum. A people’s neighborhood indeed. 

Which came into existence by charity, of sorts. 

That’s actually one of the baffling things of The Netherlands. Think about it. This country invented the stock market. It has always been a country of merchants, people that basically do their thing for the profit that they can get. The darkest episodes of dutch history are about getting more money (like the slave-driven plantations of their colonies in Suriname). And yet. This country is also a place where capitals have driven lots of public services. I could expend pages describing education, health and transport services, all of them public, and most of them run by mixed organizations, with a relevant participation of private capital. Just like most of my neighborhood. 

And just like the Juliana Park. 

The tale that the poster tells is that the family Kol, owners of the first bank of the Netherlands, wanted a park around their farm, so they hired a famous designer to make an english garden. Which not surprisingly got to be called “Kol’s garden”. A generation or two later, heirs of the family decided to give the garden to the city Utrecht (under the condition that it would remain a park for at least 100 years), and voila! we got our people’s park. What the poster does not says is that the Kol that build the garden tried to sell it to a town close by first, and then to the city Utrecht, but his price was too high. Also interesting to know, years after the park was finally acquired by the city, around 1935, it was broaden. Those were years of crisis and great unemployment, so the local government created extra work by building public infraestructure. One of the projects that employed empoverished and out of work inhabitants of Utrecht was, indeed, the expansion of the park. 

So what is it then? is it charity what gave us our park? the compassion of the heirs of one of the greatest banking families of the country that invented modern banking? Or was it their forefather that wanted to have green spaces for the public, but at a profit? Or the governments that strived, in times of scarcity, to implement traditional socialist economic policy, aiming at full employment by financing public works? What is this country? the fiscal paradise that the Obama administration pointed? or the progressive paradise of great public services?

 

All of the above, I suppose. All of the above.