The fact that the changes, particularly outside the big cities, very often result in monotonous blocks of middle-class family homes is taken for granted apparently. We prefer to direct angry words at the VINEX housing areas. And what difference does it make anyway, since renewal is proceeding as fast as VINEX construction - to the delight of the new residents, incidentally. In the meantime the original residents are starting to become a nuisance. Toads, cows and blades of grass can't speak for themselves of course, but the environmental lobby against VINEX is strong, and sometimes successful. Resident groups in restructuring areas have a harder time it seems, no matter how hard they whine. After all, change is for their own good. Many post-war residential areas are run-down and afflicted by severe social problems. Nonetheless, there are plenty of dwellings and neighbourhoods built in the 1950s and '60s where people live perfectly happily, or would do so if only the problems of maintenance and deterioration were tackled. Obviously it's easier to smother protest with tempting relocation opportunities and premiums, as often happens now. The question why those people protest in the first place or why they are so attached to an old home and neighbourhood is never addressed. Why shouldn't people be allowed to live in a small and sparsely appointed though affordable home if they want to? Slums and abject poverty are almost a thing of the past now, but today's technocrats are no less zealous than their predecessors were 100 or 50 years ago.

Today's public-housing officials score a lot lower in one subject: elementary mathematics. Almost all renewal schemes are aimed at 'improving' the population make-up of a district, which in truth means reducing the percentage and number of 'underprivileged' residents, and attracting or retaining more high-income residents. Implicitly or explicitly, the aim is to bring the population make-up of problem neighbourhoods in line with the local or regional average. 

You don't have to be that bright to realise that success depends on either lowering average income elsewhere in the city or region or reducing the relative or absolute size of the problem group. Reduction can be achieved by relocating or educating people, or by bringing in wealthier residents from outside. But as we all know, nowhere in this country are public rental dwellings built to change the social make-up of uniformly wealthy districts. We don't hear any more about the populist idea to pass Rotterdam's poverty problem to neighbouring areas. And current economic and political reality is hampering well-intended efforts to improve the income and education levels of underprivileged groups. Obviously, and luckily, most restructuring projects have a social basis, but the desire to halt the march to the next problem district will never win from that to limit the influx into VINEX areas. Ideas about distribution and differentiation in the Netherlands rarely cross the boundaries of restructuring areas. Not in my back yard, would seem to be the motto.

As long as some youths misbehave, as long as they and their better behaved classmates lag behind at school and their parents don't fare any better on the job front, mass restructuring will unfortunately amount to nothing more than mass displacement and the creation of future problem districts. Renovation may attenuate the misery a little, but reducing the rental housing stock will result in an increasing concentration of those who cannot live anywhere else.

All the same, urban designers and architects can and will do their best to remedy the deterioration, to improve the quality of peoples' lives or to ease their misery if need be. But what is being achieved? After all, the social problems of groups and individuals cannot be solved with bricks and mortar and trees. As long as those masterminding the mass restructuring fail to grasp that, they'll just be beating their heads against a brick wall, or sweeping the dirt under the neighbour's carpet.