Image: Courtesy of the Helen and Newton Harrison Family Trust

The Green Heart (Groene Hart) is an open landscape at the centre of the Randstad, surrounded by the major Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. The concept was introduced in 1958 in the national planning report De ontwikkeling van het Westen des Lands, which envisioned the area as a green counterpart to the surrounding urban ring. From 1960 onwards, the Green Heart became part of successive national spatial planning policies. Its underlying aim was to concentrate urbanisation in the Randstad while maintaining an open central landscape.

Policy premises

• Concentration of urbanisation: National planning sought to accommodate urban growth in and around the existing cities while preventing the continuous urbanisation of the open landscape between them. The Green Heart formed the open counterpart to the Randstad urban ring.
• Open landscape as a planning value: Open space, rather than only agricultural or ecological productivity, was identified as a value in itself. The 1958 concept was associated with openness, tranquillity and recreation, alongside agricultural use.
• Protection from urbanisation: The 1958 national planning report already recommended protecting the central area of the Randstad from strong urbanisation. More explicit restrictive policy followed in the 1970s, while later national policy formalised the Green Heart through different instruments and designations.
• Multiple landscape functions: The Green Heart was not conceived as an untouched natural landscape. Its open landscape combined agricultural production, recreation, nature and cultural-historical values. When designated as a National Landscape in 2004, these qualities were explicitly defined as part of its identity.

Soil-related interventions

• Protection of agricultural land: Maintaining the open Green Heart indirectly protected its extensive agricultural landscapes, including the characteristic Dutch peat meadow areas. Agriculture remained an important land use within the protected open space rather than being displaced by urbanisation.
• Restriction of urban development: Spatial planning policies restricted the expansion of urban functions into the Green Heart. This maintained large areas of undeveloped land and therefore avoided the direct conversion and sealing of soils associated with urbanisation.
• Maintenance of the peat meadow landscape: The policy framework helped maintain the characteristic combination of open meadows, ditches, water and linear settlement patterns that defines large parts of the Green Heart.

Planning relevance

• Demonstrates how a large-scale spatial concept can organise the relationship between urbanisation and open land, rather than treating open space as residual land between development areas.
• Shows how landscape protection can operate through the concentration of development elsewhere, making spatial development patterns themselves an instrument of landscape protection.
• Illustrates an important distinction between protecting open space and protecting soil: the original Green Heart concept was primarily concerned with urbanisation, openness and landscape, rather than soil health or soil functioning as such.
• The case therefore demonstrates how planning can indirectly shape soil conditions through land-use decisions, while also showing the limitations of an approach in which soil remains implicit rather than becoming an explicit planning objective.