The Ministry of Spatial Planning
An institution with real power to shape land use, relegated to a meme
The most important meme account of the Dutch spatial design world is named after a defunct ministry of housing, spatial planning and environmental management - the Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieubeheer (VROM). On Instagram, ministerie_van_vrom serves its followers regular satirical commentary on real estate developers, building regulations, and the ego of architects. It has become an informal location where the Dutch public debate about spatial planning takes place. Does the account’s name signal a longing to go back to the good old days of Dutch government-led spatial planning, or is it a sardonic critique of such nostalgia? As is usual with memes, it’s probably both, neither or altogether a refusal of the question. But the ministry’s online afterlife may tell us something about the perennial tension between centralised and bottom-up approaches to spatial planning.
It also raises crucial strategic questions surrounding the struggle for food justice and ecological repair in a country like the Netherlands, where industrial agriculture is the norm, and where escalating ecological crises are met with a toxic cocktail of fascization, patriarchy and resurgent militarism. The three of us met at a workshop hosted by the University of Twente last month, where we grappled precisely with these issues. Asked to assemble different scenarios for a biodiverse food system future in the region, the split between those favoring centralized vs. those advocating decentralized or bottom-up approaches emerged as a major fault line in our conversation. Perhaps a network of small diversified farms would spring up organically, through the efforts of collectives, collaboratives, and leading agroecological lighthouse farms. In contrast, maybe a powerful authority could apply the best evidence in landscape governance to design food systems that match regional ecology and consumption goals. We gave a name to these contrasting visions: The Bioregional Mosaic and the Ministry for Spatial Planning. Thinking through these two scenarios reveals the importance of the politics of land in relation to food system change.
Key Challenges for the Bioregional Mosaic
Advocates of the Bioregional Mosaic scenario tend to argue that agrarian change is best brought about from below, rather than by means of state power. In the Netherlands, this approach is championed by individual regenerative entreprenuers like Bodemzicht and through organizations like Land van Ons—a citizens’ cooperative with several ten thousand members that buys up agricultural land in order to make it available for organic farming and other sustainable uses, such that “butterflies and birds feel at home again, (...) bees buzz and the soil teems with life.” The organization’s ambitious goal is to gain control of 300,000 hectares, that is around 15% of Dutch farmland, through an ongoing parcel to parcel battle. This would transform a significant chunk of the Dutch agricultural landscape and serve as a respite for species under pressure.
In the absence of a restructuring of dominant property regimes, and without an organized and numerically significant peasantry, however, the bioregional mosaic approach faces several limitations. Most notably, for individuals and initiatives striving to realise alternative acroecological models in the here and now, access to land remains a huge hurdle. Private land owners might live out their agroecological paradise in a corner of the country, but this does not challenge the broader, enormously unequal distribution of wealth, access to healthy food or nature. This model invokes the ideal of the yeoman farmer, using self-exploitation of their labor and mastery of their land management to produce self sufficiency and ecological balance. This theory of landscape change through autonomous enrollment into agroecological farming may create an intrinsic filter that leads to an exclusive movement based on localism, without a reflection of whose local is represented. If an individualist agroecology achieved through the standard property market has limitations, perhaps collective actors can overcome this challenge?
For collective ownership models, the challenge of who gets to decide the values of production are democratized to an extent, but may reproduce dominant visions of nature as an elitist, urban preoccupation. In a Land van Ons promotional video, CEOs, IT specialists and financial advisors and other members of the white middle class explain how they became members of the cooperative—juxtaposed with images of members playing music and cooking in their well-lighted, impressively designed houses. These images tell a story of urban actors shaping the fate of rural land. “You don’t have to do anything”, says the financial advisor, “you just need to spend a few bucks. Of course you can spend a lot more, too.” Netherland’s large and multiracial working class is notably absent. Ultimately, an approach built on convincing progressive urbanites to acquire land in the countryside and make it available for various sustainable uses raises evergreen questions of who gets to decide the structure or the benefits of the countryside. The democratization of the land trust model, and the reliance on access to property in the yeoman vision both struggle to articulate a route to landscape transformation, rather than what occurs within the boundaries of one’s fenced land.
Reconsidering Spatial Planning
During our discussion, we found each other in a shared recognition that structural conditions need to be changed for bottom-up alternatives to flourish and contribute to a wider ecological and just transformation. This brought us back to an old Dutch tradition: that of muscular and trusted spatial planning. This would require a government agency not only tasked with designating and (re)distributing land for various uses in line with a long-term and democratically legitimized plan, but also vested with the power to carry out expropriations if needed in alignment with public interest. The long-run of neoliberalism has tended to emaciate the institutions that would otherwise have the political legitimacy to dictate land-use, ownership transfer, and eminent domain. Nevertheless, increasing social and environmental pressures on land to deliver ecological resilience, economic opportunity, and basic needs such as affordable housing may create a new willingness to reengage the powers of the state to intervene directly on the pattern of the land.
What may sound utopian at first is not an entirely unrealistic notion: For most of its post-war history, this was precisely the role of the Netherland’s ministry of spatial planning. Its institutional roots lie in the Ministry for Reconstruction and Public Housing, which in 1965 was renamed to become the Ministry for Public Housing and Spatial Planning. With rising pressure to act on the ecological issues that accompanied the capitalist development of the post-war years, in 1982, the environment portfolio was added to the ministry’s tasks: This was the birth of the Ministry for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (the Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting, Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieubeheer, or VROM). As Wil Zonneveld, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, notes, that same ministry was dissolved rather quietly a mere fifteen years ago:
Unnoticed by the wider public and the majority of professional planners, a symbolic event took place on 12 November 2010. Directly following a reorganization of the public sector by the new government taking office that year, the letters of the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment — VROM according to its Dutch acronym — were scraped off the façade of the main building in The Hague. Compared to the United Kingdom, where the name, scope, aim and composition of ministries are changed virtually every election period, ministries in the Netherlands are relatively protected from the caprices and vacillations of party politics and prime ministers. VROM was an institution in more than one sense of the word, and “spatial planning” (the RO in VROM) had been part of its name since 1965 (Siraa et al., 1995: 64). In the title of the new ministry — Infrastructure and the Environment — spatial planning is conspicuously absent.
To Zonneveld, this illustrates the larger shift in the societal balance of forces: the dismantling of the welfare state and other aspects of economic policy, the weakening of agricultural policy under an increasingly neoliberal EU regime, as well as a general decrease of faith in government and technocratic expertise. Spatial planning became a matter for provinces and municipalities, if at all.
Recent years have marked a hesitant reversal of this trend, and not only through the establishment of the meme account, that through its snark, recognizes that the capacity of planners is absent in their efforts to respond to societal problems. Just last year, spatial planning was brought back under the unstable far-right government of Dick Schoof, which collapsed this summer. The new Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning (VRO - having lost the ‘M’ for environment or climate) is in many ways a shadow of its former version, holding little executive power and facing intense public scrutiny around the perceived “wastefulness” of the governments’ three new ministries. The return of the idea, however, carries symbolic weight. Last year, the Nieuwe Instituut, a Rotterdam-based architecture and design museum, held an exhibition in collaboration with the another spatial government body, the Board of Government Advisors, aiming to bring “spatial planning is back on the drawing board”, and “much-needed inspiration for a new vision of the design of our country.”
Democratic Spatial Planning?
A new consensus on the role of government and the importance of spatial planning seems to be emerging in the Netherlands, fueled by intersecting crises (housing, nitrogen, climate, biodiversity) that are increasingly hard to ignore. Without structural conditions that enable alternative forms of land use, food production and nature generation, bottom-up initiatives risk remaining highly localised in their effects instead of aligning into a broader transformation of nature-society relations. With that, it’s clear to us that some form of central planning is necessary.
Criticisms of the centralized approach to conservation and agricultural production often focus on the risk for power abuse and corruption that the centralization of power carries. Such criticism is not entirely unwarranted given the character of bourgeois states like the Netherlands with its history of technocratic planning, where a planning ministry might end up serving the interests of the capital-owning class rather than the vast majority of the population, let alone that of the majority world, of non-human beings and future generations.
But as a growing literature attests, democratic planning might be a way to reconcile the antagonism between top-down and bottom-up approaches, acknowledging the mutual interdependence between self-organised and informal civic initiatives, and centralised formal procedures and institutions. Mechanisms of citizen and expert involvement, as well as protocols to ensure transparency, accountability and equity will be crucial for any effective and well-functioning future ministry of spatial planning – one that is more than a meme.
With the Dutch parliamentary election of October 2025 producing a majority share of various right-wing parties in contest with a resurgent liberal democratic party, the question of who shapes the bioregion becomes more important than ever: We shouldn’t resign the future of spatial planning to the ruling class.
This essay was co-written by Elias Konig, Catherine Koekoek and Adam Calo:
Elias Konig is PhD student at the University of Twente. In his PhD project on the political theory of planetary futures, he explores pathways of abolition, repair and revolution under conditions of the capitalocene. His areas of interest are in Chinese philosophy, Critical Theory, and Marx. Prior to joining UT, he was a justice scholar at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) in Potsdam, Germany, where he conducted research within and about the climate justice movement and specifically the climate strike as a tactic. He has written about climate justice and related issues for a wide range of publications, including Jacobin Magazine, New Bloom, The Ecologist, Analyse & Kritik, Truthout, and Klimareporter.
Catherine Koekoek is a researcher, curator and facilitator in the fields of architecture, feminism, and political philosophy. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Knowledge, Transformation & Society research group at the University of Twente. Her PhD Towards an Architecture of Democratic Infrastructures (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2025) explored the spatial and practical conditions for democratic practice. She was co-curator of the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Nature of Hope, and co-produces feminist architecture podcast Respons.
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