The Belvedere Memorandum of 1999 provides a good example of how Genius Loci Amsterdam wishes to view its surroundings. The introduction is reproduced below.
“The Netherlands is a cultural country par excellence. As a cultural landscape, it is a creation of natural forces and human inventiveness that has taken shape over many centuries. Forces and counterforces, building, demolition, flooding and dike construction, cultivation and, nowadays, returning land to nature have shaped this creation. The space in which we live contains a wealth of cultural-historical information about the creation of this landscape. This also applies to our cities: the Netherlands has a high density and diversity of historic cities.
The soil, the landscape and the built environment are, in a sometimes complex but fascinating way, full of clues about the lives and work of people. Some cultural-historical features are small-scale, such as windmills in a meadow landscape, dolmens on the Drenthe heath or old buildings along a canal. Others, on the other hand, are large-scale, representing the “Grand Design” of our country. It is these canal belts, polders and reclaimed lands or military waterlines that strongly determine and colour the cultural identity of the Netherlands in an international context.
But there are also features that are less immediately physically recognisable, such as archaeological information or vague remnants of an earlier landscape. This cultural heritage
Sources
Sources: Authority Ministry of Education, Culture and Science Author
Ministry of Education, Culture and Science Type of authority Ministry
Date 1999 Publication no. ISBN90 322 7615 8 Keywords Policy, Cultural history, Government
