Schiphol Airport Amsterdam to understand the past is to….pdfVIP

Schiphol Airport Amsterdam: to understand the past is to secure future economic growth Paper 46th European Regional Science Association 30-03 August/September 2006 Volos, Greece Bart de Jong, Utrecht University, Faculty of Geosciences. Adres: P.O. Box 80115, 3508TC, Utrecht Netherlands. Tel: +31(0)30-2532738 E-mail: b.dejong@geo.uu.nl Abstract Schiphol Amsterdam, the main airport of the Netherlands, is a dynamic node, where the space of places and space of flows meet. The days that Schiphol was just an airport are long gone. This makes it a complex entity. The different governments concerned with the future development of Schiphol appear to be indecisive. Next to the government a growing number of public and private actors exists that try to influence spatial planning to their advantage. The rise of the network society has made the process of policy making much more difficult. Decision-making was once the domain of the governments, but nowadays it takes place in more informal, network type configuration. This year Schiphol exists 90 years. At the same time the government decided to extend the quantity and quality of the airport by letting it grow to 600 000 airplane movements per year. To illustrate this growth: in 2005 Schiphol had 400 000 airplane movements. The civil society and the opposition reacted furious. In a climate of distrust formed by a lack of communication, the Schiphol file seems complex and obscure: an administrative stalemate arises. In this paper I try to discover how this stalemate came into existence. The aim is to create and analyze a problem inventory. To come to this problem inventory, it is important to understand the changing context in which the policy making process takes place. First I will introduce some theories that help us understand this changing context. Secondly a historical evolution of Schi