The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Edward W. Soja
promise to return the money tomorrow. (I have reason to believe
that the two use hard drugs as well. They are often to be seen at the
“Bridge of Pills,” a spot near my home where hard drugs change
hands. Their hollow cheeked faces show small inflammations.)
Hashish and marijuana are offered here in prepacked quantities; in
small bags worth ten or 25 guilders. The ten guilder bags appear to
be the most popular. The shop owner turns to me and says, “Hey,
tell me, what do you think is the best coffee shop around?” A difficult
question. 4
My journey with Jansen opened up many spaces I would never have seen on my
own, or with any other tour guide. Thank you, Adrian. Here’s to your health.
Back on Spuistraat, the panorama being explored seems to concentrate
and distill the spectrum of forces that have creatively rejuvenated the
residential life of the Centrum and preserved its anxiety-inducing overvloed
(superabundance, literally “overflood”) of urban riches. At the center of this
rejuvenation has been the squatter movement, which has probably etched
itself more deeply into the urban built environment of Amsterdam than of
any other inner city in the world. To many of its most radical leaders, the
movement today seems to be in retreat, deflected if not co-opted entirely by
an embracing civic tolerance. But it has been this slightly repressive tolerance
that has kept open the competitive channels for alternative housing
and countercultural lifestyles, not only for the student population of today
but for other age groups as well. It has also shaped, in distinctive ways, the
more “acceptable” gentrification process and helped it contribute to the diversity
of the Centrum rather than to its homogenization, although this
struggle is clearly not yet over.
This contemporary residential rejuvenation of Amsterdam requires
some geohistorical explanation. Decentralization in the 1930s began emptying
the inner city of offices and manufacturing employment, and postwar
suburbanization continued the process in a heightened flow of residential
out-migration not just to the polycentered urban fringe but beyond, to such
new towns as Almere and Lelystad, planned and plotted in hexagonal lattices
on the reclaimed polders of isotropic Flevoland. As has happened in
every century after the Golden Age, the continued life and liveliness of the
Centrum was threatened by exogenous forces of modernization. A turning
point, however, was reached in the 1960s, as cities exploded all over the
world in often violent announcements that the postwar boom’s excesses
were no longer tolerable to the underclasses of urban society. A contrapuntal
process of urban restructuring was initiated almost everywhere in an effort
to control the spreading unrest and to shift economic gears so that the
expansionary capitalist momentum might be recovered.