Some 40 percent of the Dutch population and almost 50 percent of the jobs are concentrated in an area that is about 20 percent of the national land surface: the urbanized ring connecting the four largest cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, located in the three provinces North-Holland, South-Holland and Utrecht. Without any doubt “Randstad Holland” (literally: “Rim City” or “City on the Edge”), as this area is called, is the country's core region.1 The image of this area as the center is reinforced by the common international practice to use “Holland,” the name of the largest two provinces in the Randstad, as an equivalent for the Netherlands.

The economic, political and cultural dominance that this part of the Netherlands has exerted for more than four centuries has manifested itself in a variety of domains. The standardized language that is now spoken in the Netherlands originated in Holland and gradually became the official language over the last two hundred years. This powerful Randstad, which not only dominates the Netherlands but is also one of the largest conurbations in Europe, justifies special attention in this chapter.

Urban Demography

A topographical map of the Netherlands from around 1900 shows an empty and scarcely populated country where only about five million inhabitants lived. It shows vast stretches of uncultivated land, innumerable and generally tiny fields and meadows, many unpaved roads, here and there a railway or a canal, and many small villages. Cities are compact and relatively far apart, mostly of the same size they had two hundred years earlier.

Around 1900 the Randstad as we know it today was in fact non-existent. The cities of Holland had been the largest cities of the country since the Golden Age, but they were modest in size and wide apart. Only Amsterdam was an exception: with about half a million inhabitants in 1900, it was much bigger than the numbers two, three and four on the ranking list: Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Table 1 shows that the top-four has not changed in order since then, although Amsterdam is not as advanced as it once was. Rotterdam has benefited from its excellent water-connections with the fast-industrializing Ruhr region in Germany and has become a globally important harbor.