Leidsche Rijn in Utrecht is the biggest urban expansion program, or one of the biggest programs, in Europe. Within 25 years the old city of Utrecht gets a twin sister or brother next to it, or perhaps one had better speak of the miraculous growth, outside of the maternal womb, of one slightly smaller member of a siamese twin. The twins are connected by many arteries and for the sake of their connecting, the A2 -- the major highway that connects the north of the Netherlands with the south -- will be roofed for about one and a half kilometer. On top of it will come the center of Leidsche Rijn, which will actually be on the margin of the entire expansion but will be right in between the newly built part and the border of the city on the other side of the Amsterdam-Rhine canal. Probably they hope to attract visitors form the old side  as well. As it is now, Leidsche Rijn is still without any center. It also lacks any consistent or coherent aesthetic concept or language. Or perhaps one had better say that it does not lack such a concept at all, but the question is whether one could call it an aesthetic one in any meaningful sense of the word. The entire area is a collection of urban fragments that are too small to be neighbourhoods (or blocks, even) and too big to be just streets. These all respond to the same logic that can be captured in the question: "Will they come with their two cars to house themselves -- small families -- in us?"
 
It is easy to get lost in Leidsche Rijn and hard to find yourself. In terms of analysis, it can be considered theatrically, in terms of narrative, of lyric, or spectacle, and if one does something will come out of it, but it will always be an awkward result. Perhaps the model of the game comes closest, because everything seems to be perfectly ruled. Question is: what is the game? When we biked through it many of the participants sighed at some instance that they would not want to be found dead in this area. If they would have dropped dead, it would certainly would have caused a stir -- but not on any common day, in between rush hours, for somebody would have had to be there in order to notice.
 
Let's put it like this: Leidsche Rijn embodies a major provocation to anybody desiring, positively, to see what it is. It is an excellent terrain for those who want to be involved with participatory research, anthropologically, sociologically. It needs lots of time before it will become something that matters. In this respect, in a sense, it can be considered as an interesting paradigm for the culture of organisation in Utrecht's urban planning history. From the Middle Ages onwards, Utrecht has never know large scale expansion programs. They just let time do its work. In the fifties and sixties of the previous century, for a very short time, they got involved with, and shocked by, modernist expansion programs. With Leidsche Rijn they have returned to what they know. Let's just build and let time do the trick of turning it into an urban environment in which people will want to be and live (instead of leaving it to work and coming back to sleep).