Pieter Bakker Schut (1877-1952), manager in stedenbouw

Abstract

It is impossible to study the history of Dutch public housing and urban planning in the twentieth century without repeatedly coming across the name Pieter Bakker Schut. From 1904 onwards, he was chairman of the Sociaal-Technische Vereeniging van Democratische Ingenieurs en Architecten (STV, Social-Technical Society of Democratic Engineers and Architects) and from 1918 a member of the board of the Nederlands Instituut voor Volkshuisvesting (NIV, Netherlands Institute of Housing). In that same year he was appointed director of the Dienst Stadsontwikkeling en Volkshuisvesting (DSV, Department of Urban Planning and Public Housing) in The Hague. In this capacity he was directly involved in the problems of this, by Dutch standards, big city, which was also the fastest growing city in the Randstad urban cluster in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporary directors of municipal urban planning departments, he was neither a designer nor an academic. His career unfolded at the interface between practical work and the systematization and professionalization of urban planning as an autonomous discipline. His role in this period of transition was one of directing and inspiring. As such, Bakker Schut’s main significance for Dutch urban planning lies in what much later came to be regarded as a form of management. In effect, he anticipated a way of working that only gradually became common practice in Dutch urban planning after the Second World War. Recent decades have seen the publication of detailed studies of several urban planners and researchers, such as the biographies of T.K. Van Lohuizen (Arnold van der Valk, 1990), C. van Eesteren (Vincent van Rossem, 1993) and W.G. Witteveen (Noor Mens, 2007). Although more than one publication mentions Pieter Bakker Schut as an influential figure, he has never been the focus of a study. Despite his forward-looking approach, Bakker Schut’s influence on Dutch urban planning has yet to receive the attention it deserves. This article examines Bakker Schut’s career as a manager in urban planning. The emphasis is on the positions he held in the aforementioned bodies and his contributions to the main themes of the Woningwet (National Housing Act): public housing (1901), urban planning (1921) and regional planning (1931). The aim of this biographical sketch is to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the evolution of Dutch urban planning, and at the same time provide the initial impetus for further research into Bakker Schut. It is at any rate clear from this sketch that his extensive body of work and the offices he held during his career merit such a study. So too the career and work of his son, Frits Bakker Schut, who continued in his father’s footsteps and has likewise yet to be the subject of a study.