The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Edward W. Soja
constrain. The lived spaces of the Centrum are popularly designed to make
density beautiful as well as accommodating, to flexibly enculturate and socialize
without imprisoning, to make the strange familiar, and to add somehow
to one’s regular habits of thought that entertaining stimulus of a little
confusion.
To live in a canal house is to immediately and precipitously encounter
Amsterdam. The past is omnipresent in its narrow nooks and oddangled
passageways, its flower-potted corners and unscreened windows that
both open and close to the views outside. Everyday life inside becomes a
crowded reminder of at least four rich centuries of urban geohistory being
preserved on a scale and contemporary intensity that is unique to Amsterdam.
At home, one is invited daily into the creative spatiality of the city’s
social life and culture, an invitation that is at the same time embracingly
tolerant and carefully guarded. Not everyone can become an Amsterdammer,
but everyone must at least be given the chance to try.
The prevailing atmosphere is not, however, that of a museum, a
fixed and dead immortalization of the city’s culturally built environment.
The history and geography are remarkably alive and filled with the urban
entertainment that makes Amsterdam so attractively familiar and yet so peculiarly
incomprehensible; neat and clean and regular but curiously tilted,
puzzling; an island of mud not quite entirely turned into gold but transformed
enough to make one believe in the creative alchemy of Amsterdam’s
modestly democratic city builders. From my vantage point on Spuistraat a
moving picture of contemporary life in the vital center of Amsterdam visually
unfolded, opening my eyes to much more than I ever expected to see.
The view from my front windows affirmed for me what I continue
to believe is the most extraordinary quality of this city, its relatively (the
Dutch constitutionally refuse all absolutes) successful achievement of
highly regulated urban anarchism—another of the creative paradoxes
(along with the closely related “repressive tolerance” and “flexible inflexibility”)
that two-sidedly filter through the city’s historical geography in
ways that defy comparison with almost any other polis, past or present. This
deep and enduring commitment to libertarian socialist values and participatory
spatial democracy is openly apparent throughout the urban built environment
and in the social practices of urban planning, law enforcement,
popular culture, and everyday life. One senses that Amsterdam is not just
preserving its own Golden Age but is actively keeping alive the very possibility
of a socially just and humanely scaled urbanism. Still far from perfection
itself, as the Dutch never cease telling you, Amsterdam is nonetheless
packed with conspicuously anomalous achievements. There is little or no
boosterism, no effort to proclaim the achievements or to present them as a