AMSTELO-DAMUM AMPLIFICATUM

Map of Amsterdam with design for the expanded city by Daniel Stalpaert. A. Besnard after Daniel Stalpaert, 1657, collection Rijksmuseum.

The question I am asked most often these days: How has Amsterdam changed? The questioner most often hardly pauses before offering their own answer: it is much more crowded [with foreigners] than before. There’s no doubt about that: the number of tourists and of foreign residents has grown enormously and the impact on the city is unmistakable. Not only is the center of the city virtually impossible to access at times, but the tourists, lured by the online recommendations and offers of strangers, are turning up in the most surprising places. And those rich foreigners are driving up the housing prices, making it increasingly difficult for the Dutch to live in their own capital. My blushes. What annoys me about this is that it’s gotten to the point where one can’t even be certain that the cashier speaks Dutch, so increasingly everyone in the shops simply speaks English.

But “more people” is an observation I could have made while visiting or even from afar, and it’s a fact of life for virtually any city you care to think of. Much more interesting is how this city is coping with these problems. The city mothers (the current Mayor is a woman, a first for Amsterdam after all these centuries), with their typical good sense and very much in keeping with previous practice, are fighting addition with multiplication: they are building an entire set of new mini-cities around Amsterdam, in the process, vaulting it back into the global premier league for arguably the first time since the 16^th century.

Amsterdam began as a village and grew, quietly and unplanned, for long ages before shipping riches demanded, and paid for, its first ring of expansion. The "grachtengordel" that those masses of tourists are coming to see represents only a fraction of the footprint of the city, but when we last lived here almost all of the entertainment, food, and other pleasures of life were to be found either within or very near the outer bound of that ring. Now, that monopoly has been broken: neighborhoods formerly destitute of such are now bursting with hip restaurants, hotels, clubs, galleries, and so forth. One arises on a weekend morning and chooses a direction, confident that wherever you land the borough will be worth visiting. In this Amsterdam is becoming like New York or London, but it is doing so not via organic growth but by building and populating its own Brooklyn and Mayfair and Staten Island and Camden Town all at once. And, in some instances it's not just building those places, it's actually creating the earth upon which they rest.

The Dutch process, or Amsterdam’s at any rate, has evolved considerably. No longer is housing the first thing built, with all that makes life worth living left to sprout on its own. Rather than being forced there by a desperate need for a place to lay their head, people are lured to these up-and-coming neighborhoods by new beaches built next to reservoirs, by restaurants and bars inside converted warehouses and factories, by quirky ateliers systematically subsidized by public funds. As the artists run out of subsidy they may be relied upon to turn entrepreneur, creating the hip enterprises that draw the next wave of pioneers—mostly young families and mostly Dutch, or Dutch-speaking at any rate. The really early adopters have to keep their doors closed to stop the sand from construction sites blowing into their living rooms, but it's not long before things are sealed back up with a pristine layer of shops, offices, playgrounds, and bike lanes.

The foreigners, they still think Amsterdam is the ring, and the tourists, once confined to the Red Light District within the ring, are at least (mostly) held at bay by the Prinsengracht or, worst case scenario, the Amstelkanaal. Still, that leaves a lot of the city, including the part I live in, overrun, and plenty of Dutch people within it, long-time Amsterdam residents and active voters, unhappy with the changes around them. Political pressure is intense, with demands that more be done to “control” tourism in particular. (The Dutch are less interested in stemming foreign investment in, say, real estate, as it’s making a lot of them rich.) Amsterdam is actually trying to redirect some of the tourist population away from the city—they’ve arranged to name Muiderslot the “The Amsterdam Castle,” for example, even though it’s @17km from the city center, in the hopes that some tourists will head out on what inevitably turns out to be an all-day bike ride to a museum that closes at 4:30 PM—but the thing about tourists in the online age is that the more of them there are the more reviews get written drawing still more after. The question, to my mind, is not how to get rid of the tourists but how to keep them from running into the locals. That’s a much harder question to answer, the sort of thing you’d need a lot of data for, a lot of data and Smart Infrastructure. Ah, but that’s a topic for another time and another forum.