| Over the years considerable areas of the netherlands have been altered by large-scale housing development, new infrastructure, industrial estates, recreational facilities, extra sea-defences and nature development. Such changes not only apply to the desely urbanised Randstad area in the western part of the Netherlands but, increasingly, to the more peripheral provinces in the north, east and south of the country. The most striking example is North Brabant, a province where the soil archives and historically cultivated landscape have been affected at an alarming rate by such developments. In spite of the fact that the region is renowned for its tradition of scientific research in the fields of archaeology and historical geography, and that local authorities were already attempting to take preventative measures at a comparatively early stage, the severity of the problem has meant that these authorities have only partly succeeded in applying the scientific knowledge available to them to create successful policies with regard to the preservation and development of the cultural historical monuments that are still there. It is almost certain that very soon other sandy areas in the Netherlands will be confronted by similar changes in the use of open spaces to those already apparent in the Province of Brabant. One example is in the Eastern part of the Netherlands (Salland and the Achterhoek) where urbanisation and industrialisation have rapidly taken a hold of the area. This region is well situated for important routes to the economic centres of north-west Europe and, to an ever increasing degree, is now functioning as a satellite area for people from the west of the Netherlands looking for a more attractive living environment. All this points to the fact that in the coming decades, these regions will rapidly become transformed from an important agricultural area to a multifunctional eastern flank of the Dutch Delta Metropolis. It must, therefore, be quite obvious that the cultural historical monuments, still abundantly present here, will also be placed under tremendous pressure, even more so because water management and nature development are still undergoing large-scale change. |
