The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Contested Streetscape in Amsterdam
live very comfortably around the lawned quadrangle and proffer their services
to the ill and the elderly. Despite the flocking tourists, it remains a remarkably
peaceful spot, a reflective urban retreat that succeeds in being
both open and closed at the same time, just like so many other paradoxical
spaces and places in the refugee-filled Amsterdam Centrum.
I lived just around the corner in another of these artfully preserved
places and spaces, a relatively modest variant of the more than six thousand
“monuments” to the Golden Age that are packed into the sustaining Centrum,
the largest and most successfully reproduced historic inner city in Europe.
With a frontage that seemed no wider than my driveway back home
in Los Angeles, the building, like nearly all the others in the Centrum, rose
four stories to a gabled peak embedded with a startling metal hook designed
for moving furniture and bulky items by ropes in through the wide windows.
Given my sizable bulk (I stand nearly two meters high and weigh
more than an eighth of a ton), I had visions of having to be hoisted up and
in myself when I first saw the steep, narrow stairwell (trappenhuis) to the first
floor. But I quickly learned to bow my head and sidle in the doorway.
Golden Age taxation systems encouraged physical narrowness and
relatively uniform building facades up front, squeezing living space (and
stimulating expansive creativity in interior design) upward and inward
from the tiny street- or canal-side openings. The patient preservation yet
modernization of these monuments reflects that “original genius” of the
Dutch to make the most of little spaces, to literally produce an enriching
and communal urban spatiality through aggressive social intervention and
imaginative grassroots planning. In many ways, the preservative modernization
of the cityscape of the Centrum has been an adaptive feat on a par
with the Dutch conquest of the sea.
Simon Schama roots Dutch culture in this moral geography of
adaptation, an uncanny skill in working against the prevailing tides and
times to create places that reinforce collective self-recognition, identity, and
freedom. “Dutchness,” he writes, “was often equated with the transformation,
under divine guidance, of catastrophe into good fortune, infirmity into
strength, water into dry land, mud into gold.” 2 In Amsterdam, perhaps
more so than in any other Dutch city, these earthy efforts to “moralize materialism”
moved out from the polderlands to become evocatively urban, not
through divine guidance as much as through secularized spatial planning,
enlightened scientific management, and an extraordinarily committed civic
consciousness that persists to the present. The canal house simulates this
rootedness, enabling one to experience within it the very essence of a livable
city, the agglomeration of individuals into socially constructed lifespaces
that are always open to new possibilities even as they tightly enclose and