Borneo-Sporenburg is the closest a city has come to letting people draw their own street and then building it. In the 1990s West 8 took two empty harbour piers and made a dense low carpet of housing — and then, on one quay, handed sixty plots to sixty families and said: design your own. Three kilometres of the result, and the best architecture walk in Amsterdam that isn't about canal houses.
Start on Sporenburg and walk to the Pythonbrug, Adriaan Geuze's red steel wave over the Spoorwegbassin — cross it for the view from the top of the hump. On the far side is Scheepstimmermanstraat, the self-build street: sixty houses, sixty minds, one narrow plot repeated and never once repeated. Walk the whole length and read them.
Loop the Borneo-eiland quaysides, where front doors meet the water, then look back across the basin at De Walvis — Frits van Dongen's whale of a block, raked to look like it's surfacing. End at Rietlandpark, where tram 7 takes you back.
