Leidsche Rijn is part of the Dutch government policy for urban expansion formulated in 1990, when the government mandated that 1,100,000 new dwellings be built by the year 2005. For the development of Leidsche Rijn, which is an extension of the city of Utrecht, the government required that 30,000 dwellings, 180 commercial spaces and public spaces, and an infrastructure be included in the plan – all to be realized by 2015. A project team was assembled that produced the masterplan, in which representatives of all relevant disciplines and official departments were included. They were able to become party to decisions at all levels. The actual design was in the hands of urban designers Maxwan, in association with the architecture historians Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout, of the firm Crimson.

Central to Maxwan and Crimson’s plan is a strategy called ‘Orgware’ (Organisationware), a term derived from economics that refers to factors of an administrative, political, or policy-related nature which precede the implementation of certain ideas and knowledge (software) and the deployment of physical elements (hardware). The designers state that: “The orgware of a plan has to be understood first before its software can be intelligible and its hardware made real.”

Instead of fixing the image and form of the new town in advance and then defending its formal integrity, the outcome of the project is regarded as the partially unpredictable result of dynamic processes. A major result of this strategy has been that the designers were able to turn bureaucratic obstacles into urban design itself. Instead of fighting the formalities and systems, they embraced them as part of the orgware. Van Stiphout calls this process 'urbanism of negotiation' and notes that Dutch urban designers used to feel frustrated spending the majority of their time meeting with other people.

In the current Dutch situation, in which the tradition of urbanism has changed from one dominated by the state both organisationally and financially, to a domain where private enterprise, the market, and the individual play a much bigger role, the strategy of orgware seems a logic outcome. As Micheal Speaks points out, the renewed emphasis on the analysis and manipulation of material and immaterial processes, logics, and codes in the practice of Maxwan (or Max1), Crimson and some other Dutch offices, have also been generated by the planning policy in general. The entire post-war reconstruction effort in Holland increases the importance of this type of ‘scenario planning.’

For more information on these strategies:
http://brooklyn.arch.columbia.edu/Projects/Courses/Fall98/Speaks/speaks.html

For more information on Crimson’s implementation of orgware:
http://www.crimsonweb.org/projecten/orgwars/orgwars.pdf