The Netherlands faces a conflation of spatial crises: from a shortage of (affordable) housing to transitioning the energy infrastructure and managing the effects of climate change. The responsibility of the development of space is currently distributed across no less than 6 different ministries, creating a massive bureaucratic gordian knot and hence a persisting stalemate, let alone assuring any form of quality control. The Ministry of Make tries to break with this stale mate by activating the Dutch architecture community offering solutions and act.
In its first iteration the ministry focused on the housing crisis, in which a need for 1 million additional houses. The ministry launched a call seeking 100 architects who could each develop a spatial plan for 10.000 houses in a 4km2 area in a site of choice, distributed across the nation. The 100 designers will receive a spatial testkit: a pre-prepared model with all the ingredients for developing a spatial plan. The results of the exercise will be presented in an extra-large model of the Netherlands during the 2022 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.
