With D66’s victory in the recent elections, the party has a mandate to pursue its ambitious plans. One proposal stands out: building ten new cities. That’s certainly a bold idea in one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Beyond the obvious land constraints lies a deeper normative question: what do we value when we decide where to build? The notion of brede welvaart (inclusive prosperity) can help us answer that, but only if we start by confronting the hard choices it entails.
Traditional planning fixates on economic feasibility, marginal costs, and housing targets. Brede welvaart asks a broader question: how do planning decisions affect people’s well-being, the environment, and local economies, now and later? Practically, that means looking beyond cost per dwelling or units per hectare to consider many more dimensions, including natural capital (ecosystems and their services), produced capital (homes, rail, roads, utilities), and human capital (knowledge, skills, health).
Understand the real trade-offs first
These stocks aren’t interchangeable chips we can play in a game of poker. Paving over a high-value ecosystem can’t be "paid back" with an equivalent euro value of buildings, at least not in any meaningful ecological or social sense. Displacing a thriving neighborhood, as most recently shown with the Moerdijk village that faces demolition for industrial expansion, isn’t a simple relocation but it erodes local communities rarely captured on balance sheets. If we’re serious about ten new cities, or the expansion of our industrial base, we must first understand the real trade-offs our choices imply.
This tension is still under-addressed in current debates on brede welvaart (inclusive, or literally 'broad' prosperity), because as the name implies, it has been promoted as a means to look broader. Yet if everything counts, nothing truly does. The CBS Monitor Brede Welvaart offers a rich dashboard of indicators but does not aggregate them. The question is then, how do you decide across 30+ variables? Almost ten years after the term started to gain a foothold in Dutch policy circles, brede welvaart is at best still a perspective of how we should see the world; it has not yet matured as a framework for decision-making.
Aside from the methodological challenges in examining the correlations between very different dimensions, which is certainly hard, there are also cognitive challenges. Whether we talk about sustainability or inclusive prosperity, it is far more appealing to celebrate the synergies between people, planet, and profit rather than accounting for the trade-offs and hard choices. Policymakers rather talk about 'green' growth while business leaders promise us that bringing a 'purpose' into the company is paired with handsome profits (for which evidence remains almost exclusively anecdotal). As long as we focus on synergies, we can avoid the trade-offs.
The Brede Welkaart
With the Brede Welkaart project, recently awarded a Resilient Delta Kickstarter grant, I am mapping the distribution of capital stocks across the Netherlands. We adopt the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) approach developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and adapt it to a 100×100-meter grid. In this framework, a region’s 'inclusive wealth' is defined as the monetary value of its capital stocks: produced, human, and natural. We combine a rich set of data comprising official local statistics on education, demographics, and income, together with the Atlas Natuurlijk Kapitaal, the World Bank’s wealth accounts, and spatial allocation models based on satellite data including nighttime lights.
Mapping capital stocks in the Netherlands (source: Brede Welkaart, with data from CBS, Atlas Natuurlijk Kapitaal, World Bank, NASA, Worldpop)
Utrechtpolis in the Veluwe
To bring this down to earth (pun intended), I built a practical tool on top of the Brede Welkaart data: the City Planner. It lets you express your priorities directly and watch the map respond by planning 12 new provincial cities for about 100,000 citizens each. You can weight nature capital (avoiding ecological damage), produced capital (considering the factories and railroads that would need removal), or human capital (accounting for displaced settlements), or keep things balanced. The tool then scores all 100-meter cells across twelve provincial cities with a 3km radius, finding optimal locations based on your chosen values.
I have had some fun experiments with the tool. Set natural capital to zero weight, and you see the new provincial capital Utrechtpolis sprouting in the Veluwe and the new town of Flevocity consuming the north of Oostvaardersplassen. Flip it to 100% nature protection, and the map suggests entirely different locations: Zuid-Hollanderdam on the Maasvlakte!
Obviously, the point of this experimental tool is not to provide actual planning strategies for the D66 (I certainly hope not), but as an attempt to put value choices on the table so that we can push brede welvaart to the next frontier - which it so urgently needs if it wishes to stay relevant. Inclusive prosperity does not mean we include everything. Brede welvaart does not mean our horizon is infinite. If we want to take brede welvaart seriously, we need to start thinking about the inevitable decisions about trade-offs and sacrifices and build the methodologies for that. Try out the Brede Welkaart Planner here.
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