Let me begin with the contemporary. To be specific, we start out in the Netherlands at the turn of the twenty-first century, with an experience most of my readers will be familiar with. In 1999, during a provocative speech for the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, Francine Houben introduced the concept of the aesthetics of mobility as a new principle for spatial planning. Houben, architect and professor of architecture and mobility aesthetics at Delft University of Technology, pleaded for what she called an aesthetic rather than exclusively functional approach to designing roads and the spatial concerns related to mobility:

In the project Holland Avenue (2003) Houben and her colleagues at Mecanoo Architects made an inventory of the state of highways in the Netherlands for the Dutch Government, using four video cameras in a moving vehicle to generate a visual record of the highway infrastructure from the point of view of the driver. The primary outcome of this inventory was the important suggestion for urban planners that spatial design should develop visually attractive routes rather than strips or corridors. Perhaps more fundamental, however, was the formulation of principles as guidelines for design. According to this perspective, the road is a part of public space, so the design of the highway landscape and roadside space should be organized from the point of view of the experience of the mobile spectator.

Traditionally, in the Netherlands, as in other densely populated countries, space, development, and environmental issues are topics of heated public debate. The enormously high density in population, infrastructure, and mobility networks, the ever-increasing traffic congestion, constructions of so-called corridor roads, and diminishing green strips, all provide reason for dispute about the quality of the environment and landscape in the country.