The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Contested Streetscape in Amsterdam
The contemporary residential rejuvenation of Amsterdam’s Centrum,
more effectively than in any other place I know, illustrates the power
of popular control over the social production of urban space in general
and, in particular, over the ongoing process of urban restructuring. It has
been perhaps the most successful enactment of the anarcho-socialistenvironmentalist
intentions that inspired the urban social movements of
the 1960s to recover their “right to the city,” le droit à la ville, as it was
termed by Henri Lefebvre, who visited Amsterdam many times and whose
earlier work on everyday life inspired the Amsterdam movements. 5 Lefebvre
was particularly influential in the COBRA (Copenhagen-Brussels-
Amsterdam) movement that formed in 1949 to reject the arrogantly
rational modernization of state planning in the immediate postwar period
and to release the pleasure of art in popular culture and everyday life. CO-
BRA disbanded in 1951, but its inspiration continued to live on, especially
in Amsterdam.
More familiar contemporary paths of urban restructuring can be
found in and around Amsterdam, but the Centrum’s experience verges on
the unique. Uncovering this uniqueness is difficult, for it has been overlain
by more conventional wisdoms, right and left, that see today only either a
continuation of “creatively destructive” decentralization emptying the urban
core of its no-longer-needed economic base (and hence necessitating
more drastic forms of urban renewal to fit the core to its new role); or the defeat
and co-optation of the most radical urban social movements by the governing
powers (leading too easily to a sense of popular despair over what is
to be done in these once radically open but now closing spaces of resistance).
Both views can be argued with abundant statistics and effective polemics;
but when Amsterdam is seen from the outside, in a more comparative and
global perspective on the past twenty-five years of urban restructuring, a
third view emerges.
In 1965, while Watts was burning in Los Angeles, a small group of
Amsterdammers called the Provo (after their published and pamphleted
“provocations”) sparked an urban uprising of radical expectations and demands
that continues to be played out on Spuistraat and elsewhere in Amsterdam’s
“magical center” of the world. The Provos became active in the
previous summer and had rallied their famous “happenings” nearly every
Saturday evening around Het Lieverdje, a bronze statue of a smiling street
urchin that still stands in Spui square. At first the movement focused, with
conscious irony, on an antitobacco campaign (the statue had been donated
by a local cigarette manufacturer), but soon the Provos’ provocations spread
to antiwar, antinuclear, and antipollution protests.