Enlightened neoliberalism. Or: the neoliberal city with Dutch characteristics (original) (raw)
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This city profile provides a multi-dimensional overview on the most recent social, economic, political and spatial changes in the city of Amsterdam. We map the social-geography of the city, discussing recent housing and spatial development policies as well as city-regional political dynamics. Today, the city of Amsterdam is more diverse than ever, both ethnically and socially. The social geography of Amsterdam shows a growing core–periphery divide that underlines important economic and cultural asymmetries. The tradition of public subsidies and regulated housing currently allows for state-led gentrification within inner city neighborhoods. Public support for homeownership is changing the balance between social, middle and high-end housing segments. Changes in the tradition of large-scale interventions and strong public planning are likewise occurring. In times of austerity, current projects focus on small-scale and piecemeal interventions particularly oriented to stimulate entrepreneurialism in selected urban areas and often relate to creative economies and sustainable development. Finally, underlying these trends is a new political landscape composed of upcoming liberal and progressive parties, which together challenge the political equilibriums in the city region
Overcome Gentrification: New Dutch Urban Paradigms
Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture
The study is related to the city of Rotterdam, investigated in relation to the spatial changes caused by the massive immigration that took place since the 1940s and of which contemporary spatial planning is taking place. The urban regeneration program, promoted by the Municipality of Rotterdam, provided for the reconnection of the district to the urban dynamics of the city and the improvement of public spaces and private accommodation to encourage a process of social gentrification. The social challenges that characterize contemporary cities, especially caused by the violent immigration, have defined a new urban paradigm and new forms of collaboration; as urban planners, we must continue to promote the formation of inclusive, multi-faceted and multitasking cities that are able to capture the diversity of sociality that inhabits the strategic character that makes them different and unique and to experiment welfare and social governance models that allow the shared experience within the urban analyzed contexts; only by making the immigrants protagonists of sociality and of urban civilization can we build stainless cities that resist to climate change and above all to social changes.
Cultural Regeneration & Global Neoliberal Political Economies: Amsterdam – A Case Study
2006
This paper seeks to explore the practice of urban design as a function of cultural policy for regenerating declining central city cores. I argue that the practice and implementation of cultural policy for the purpose of economic development and inter-city competition in the global marketplace reinforces the globalized neoliberal political economy. A discussion of the city of Amsterdam is used to provide an example of how the process is playing out, in terms of its urban design, place-marketing, and disassembling of its social welfare state. This paper will look specifically at the tools of urban design as they are used by city planners as a means to appeal to the so-called “creative-class”. Additionally, this paper places Amsterdam in the larger context of the global political economy and looks at how globalization has shaped, and is shaping, the city.
2011
This book investigates the process of change in European neighbourhoods over the last twenty years, both newly and purposely built neighbourhoods and redeveloped ones. It shows that change takes many varied and complex paths, rather than the mainstream simplified model of general urban evolution. Changing Places collects a series of case studies, and includes various European cities such as Marseille, Rome, Naples, Warsaw, Frankfurt, Athens, Copenhagen, Lisbon, and Ørestad, thus providing a broad European overview. Since the end of the 80s, new neighbourhoods have been built or modified in all parts of Europe. These changes are commonly either uncritically acknowledged, or heavily condemned, and their complex nature is rarely investigated. The presentation by the news and papers of some of the following case-studies elicits some considerations. A semi official web-site emphatically insists that in 1993, it was decided to build and develop “a mini metropolis” outside of Copenhagen, in the new Ørestad areas. At the turn of the millennium, a collection of flats, hotels, shopping centres and malls, retail stores, the new IT University and the Southern Campus was built. The traditional image of Psiri in Athens is one of a “village within the city”, but also one of decay and falsification. The storyline says that artists and cultural groups gathered there in the late 1980s; soon, however, the night-time economy took over. Nowadays, the neighbourhood struggles against the “fake” image of many commercial districts. Again, Lisbon held an Expo in 1998, reconverting a major industrial area as an extension to the city. A plan was designed, influenced by major intellectuals, to recapture “the past, the present and the future” of the nation on the banks of the Tagus River. One could go on quoting the enormous amount of expectations and hopes linked with the promotion of new neighbourhoods in Europe in the last years. What do all of these developments of neighbourhoods and redevelopments of places have in common beyond rhetoric, symbolism and storytelling? What if such stories are an integral part of these areas’ material changes? To paraphrase an oft-quoted Shakespearean line, neighbourhoods and places are “such stuff as dreams are made of”. In present day usage, "the stuff of dreams" refers to wishes and desires: in the poem and in this book, the "stuff of dreams" refers to the materials that create an illusion. Are the new neighbourhoods developed across Europe just an illusion? Not at all, of course: on the contrary, they are the material, often dull, contested, heavy substance that fashions the dream of the 21st century city. This latter is often sold as an illusion, the appeased image of the renaissance city, hub of creativity, tolerance, growth and competitiveness. These are profound ideological images, deeply rooted inside the common wisdom of urban policies that often misguide urban research. This book looks at some of the new neighbourhoods, either newly and purposely built, or redeveloped from ashes and scratch, to address the nature of the ongoing urban change and of their ideology, where discourse and reality are strictly interwoven and hard to unravel. The following chapters, based upon original pieces of research carried out by a group of researchers from different countries and backgrounds, try to reveal some of the materials that have created such an illusion: political, economical, design materials, and more symbolic “stuff” as well. In doing so, the case studies re-combine the reconstruction of the practices of planning and design, and the critique of the discourses that have paved the way to such practices, in both the technical arena and the public opinion. Eventually, the investigation of matter and dreams, built space and public images, leads to a better understanding of the political constitution of new neighbourhoods.
Wither the ‘Undivided City'? An Assessment of State-Sponsored Gentrification in Amsterdam
Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2014
Like many other governments, the Dutch government has simultaneously pursued the contradictory goals of liberalising the housing market and countering the concentration of low-income groups. This paper discusses how the tension between promoting market forces and countering segregation has played out, using Amsterdam as a case study. The findings suggest that the policy may have mitigated but did not prevent a deepening division between the city's increasingly privileged core and its periphery. This is at least in part because social mixing was pursued also in neighbourhoods already prone to gentrification.