The Planning of Amsterdam City

A motley gathering of anarchistr (the Provos), rtudents, women, hippies, braws, and squatters pressured the local politicians to rethink the demolition of scare cheap inner- urban center lodging. Their resource to American-style "urban renewal" was the formulation of a series of modernized principles that were all based on the concept of an inner city where a cross-section of the population could live, work, and shop.

It is important to pause for a minute and reflect on the differences between this model of city planning and the dominant American approach. While the Americans built and widened freeways, rupture down old buildings, constructed new luxury housing, meats, offices, and retail outlets, as well as removing the local (usually minority) poor people, in capital of The Netherlands they emphasized the reduction of automobile traffic, the narrowing of streets, investment in public transportation, bike paths, and pedestrian walkways, and the construction of low-priced housing, or in the case of the squatters, the legalization of formerly ad hoc housing in deserted buildings.

The key difference seems to be the semipolitical activism of the progressive forces in Amsterdam.

In American cities the power players loosely get their way, whether it's putting a freeway through the rudimentary city, constructing a sports stadium, or a building a mall or Walmart sup

Jerde Master purpose Revitalizes Amsterdam's Amsterdamse Poort; Creates A Second City Center in Centrumgebied Zuidoost. stock Wire. 3/11/2005.

So one of the real determinants of urban planning is political power, or put another way, how more than democracy there is in a given place. By the 1980s the progressive forces in Amsterdam had managed to create a consensus on social policy that promoted neighborhood councils, the construction of affordable housing, tolerance for drugs, a legalized sex industry, and the legal recognition of gay couples.

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