The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a “city of the future” with its functions separated into distinct zones. To Modernists, it represented a vision of the city as a well-oiled machine. Upon completion, it was a massive expanse of 31 concrete towers. There were 13,000 apartments, many of them unoccupied. Just sitting there, totally empty.
The Bijlmermeer is noisy, thanks in part to planes constantly flying in and out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport nearby. And in the 1970s, many of those planes carried residents from Suriname, a small nation on the northern coast of South America.
Suriname, and a handful of islands in the Caribbean, had been Dutch colonies since the 1600s, serving as a lucrative source of revenue from slave labor. Slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that its predominantly black population become citizens of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
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