JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
DUTCH STUDIES DIV.
1984, just before I started my year in Edinburgh, I had a summer course in Dutch culture at the Nijenrode Institute, a converted medieval castle in the dorp of Breukelen, the original Brooklyn. To get a borreltje, a brewski, the best bet was to head upriver (which is the dreamy Vecht, a branch of the Old Rijn) to spend a few hours in Utrecht.
The moment you step out of the vast modern, Tannoy-blaring ding-dong- Central Station, the largest and loudest in the Netherlands, you are under the elms in one of the finest living, working, pedestrian cities in the world.
As with Edinburgh (or Philadelphia for that matter), a walk around town can be a master class in urban studies. What Jane Jacobs said about Lower New York, the very greatest of all the old Dutch cities, applies a priori to Utrecht, the very oldest of all the great Dutch cities:
“Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large…[small shops], small manufacturers…small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist. The diversity…generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets. Even small operations like proprietor-and-one- clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support them at short, convenient intervals, and in turn this convenience, and neighborhood-personal quality, are their stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, they lose this advantage. In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various, and the personal wither away.”
Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities.
Jan Hendrik Verheye, View of the Choir and Tower of Utrecht Cathedral
“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are living there for residence. The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.
Utrecht University 
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution
“Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps…”
The above photos were not great pictures; but in b/w they seemed more interesting, and I now realize why. There are, combined. about 600 years worth of architectural styles for townhouses in these two street corner views, from High Gothic to to trap-gabled Renaissance, to 18th Century, to creamy white Art Nouveau, each distinctly a Dutch house.
The sea is of course an intermittent threat, but it was the alternately roaring and slackening Rijn channels that had to be tamed. 
“I have often amused myself,’ wrote James Boswell in 1791, “with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium…but the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he put his finger on one of the chief troubles in dealing with them. it is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this — analysis of cities, use by use — has become a customary planning tactic…to understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.
Click below for a brilliant urban studies blog which explains in a few simple maps the ever-changing channels of the Rijn-Maas-Waal delta. Every river in Europe, practically, runs within a few miles. The Utrecht achievement was turning silted-up old channels into the unique sunken canal system that winds through town, allowing downstairs private wharf tie-ups to almost every house in town. This determined Utrecht’s growth, trade, and evolution. It started as a Roman fort, Ultra Trajectum, (the further ford), the ruins of which were taken over by St. Willibord as a missionary outpost to convert the Frisians. Thus it also became the center of Netherlandish Christianity, and an ecclesiastical state, the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe.
http://snailinthecity.blogspot.com/2014/03/utrecht-reworking-floodplain.html
I got another amazing chance to visit in 1997, when Sam Elias took me to Amsterdam (blessings!) and I took him to see Utrecht. He loves cities and architecture as much as I do. I took him to Het Kasteel de Haar; then he educated me, by taking me out to see Het Rietveld Huis, one of the landmarks of De Stijl in the leafy rich suburbs: another distinctly Dutch house, and it fits right in.
The Stadsbuitensingel, the old moat, was overdecked to lure car traffic into town in the 1980s. 
…but in the last twenty years they realized their mistake and started putting the canal back.
The canal in-filling began as a redevelopment scheme that put one of the largest malls in the Netherlands, Hoog Catharijne, next to the train station, along the Catharijnesingel, the long straight stretch of the moat. The re-designed mall is an even glitzier behemoth in the town center, but the parking lots are gone, and now you can once again sail your jacht down the ancient, restored bed of the Rijn, as it flows right under the mall, and tie up right there, to buy your Coach bags and Hermes scarves.
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/
“In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are (more healthily) domestic in character, with provisions for parks and gardens; even by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival. But too many [developments] reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past or present. In their too exclusive devotion to material interests they present the converse of those old Spanish and Spanish-American cities which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries. What is the remedy? For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell.”
Patrick Geddes, op. cit.
The Valley Village View 