The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part 2: Filtering Tactics
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Edward W. Soja
Notes
This essay has been extracted from “The Stimulus
of a Little Confusion: A Contemporary Comparison
of Amsterdam and Los Angeles,” a
chapter in my Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles
and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), pp. 280–320. That chapter, in
turn, was based on an original version published
by the Centrum voor Grootstedelijk Onderzoek
(Center for Metropolitan Research) of the University
of Amsterdam in 1991.
1 The “miracle” apparently occurred when a
sick man, unable to swallow the communion
bread, spat it into a fireplace where it remained
whole and unburned. The site of this holy event
is commemorated under a small glass window
embedded into the sidewalk near where the fourteenth-century
Chapel of the Holy City formerly
stood.
2 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches:
An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
p. 25.
3 A. C. M. Jansen, Cannabis in Amsterdam: A
Geography of Hashish and Marijuana (Muiderberg:
Coutinho BV, 1991).
4 Ibid., p. 14.
5 See Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in
Writing on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonora Kofman
and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
pp. 63–181.
6 Virginie Mamadouh, “Three Urban Social
Movements in Amsterdam: Young Households
in the Political Arena between 1965 and 1985,”
revised version (September 1989) of a paper presented
at the conference “The Urban Agglomeration
as Political Arena,” Amsterdam, June
1989, p. 15.