While facing increasing urbanizing, in The Netherlands traditional urban-rural borders fade away. This development to a metropolitan landscape adds to the role of the interurban open space, as a leisure space valuable for the urban residents’ relaxation. However, accessibility and attractiveness of the open space are threatened, especially for hiking and cycling. These sustainable modes of mobility find barriers in the urban fringe, where they have to cross the grid of main infrastructure, linking the towns and cities. Further, the open space itself becomes ever more intersected by main infrastructure with limited opportunities to traverse. Finally, increasing utilitarian traffic flows by developments in agriculture and new land uses in the open space decrease the attractiveness of local roads for leisure traffic. And what makes these problems even more complicated: the conflicting demands do not represent conflicting groups of people, but conflicting demands within one person. The urban resident himself tends to the conflict, by using both the main infrastructure and the local roads. Infrastructure plays a paradoxical role: enabling the urban resident to travel to and through attractive landscapes simultaneously with reducing his experience of this very landscape. The pivotal question here is whether this conflict between accessibility and attractiveness allows a solution. This paper explores the mobility conflict in practice, provides a preliminary conceptual model and poses a number of corresponding scientific questions. (Author/publisher)
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