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Inequality in the gentrifying European city
Abstract and Figures
Gentrification plays a key role in the class transformations many major cities are currently experiencing. Urban neighbourhoods are remade according to middle-class preferences, often at the cost of lower-income groups. This dissertation investigates the influence of gentrification processes on socialspatial inequalities in urban regions, focusing specifically on Amsterdam and Rotterdam. It shows that gentrification constitutes a forceful process of urban change, affecting many neighbourhoods in different ways. These urban processes ultimately produce growing disparities between booming central areas and struggling peripheries and suburbs. In doing so, gentrification amplifies inequality between poor and affluent groups, but also exacerbates increasingly pressing inequalities between and within generations.
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... Indeed, multiple accounts have shown this to be the case for Amsterdam as well (e.g. Hochstenbach, 2017;Kadi & Ronald, 2014;Uitermark, 2009;Van Gent, 2013). These studies may make gentrification seem general and universal, yet the process is very much related to local political context. ...
... In affluent parts of Oud Zuid, the continued increase of wealth may be described as supergentrification (Lees, 2003). Gentrification trends in many parts of the No data more than 25% lower 10-25% lower around mean 10-25% more 25-50% more > 50% more No data more than 50% lower 10-50% lower around mean 10-50% more 50-100% more > 100% more a b city have accelerated and are also increasingly tied to transformations in the rental housing market (Hochstenbach, 2017). Almost all neighbourhoods within the pre-war city now have much higher shares of highly educated than nationally and income levels are also generally higher. ...
... While the tenure structure has been subject to significant alterations, a large share of the rental housing stock, designated for lower-income to lower middle-income households, is still there. Yet, the geography of this housing stock and consequently the sociospatial patterns are changing (Hochstenbach, 2017). ...
Between 1980 and 2015, Amsterdam changed from a poor city under a radical left-wing government to a city dominated by middle classes. Our central concern is to explain and understand this transformation; the (re-)making of Amsterdam as a middle-class city. This book asks the question how can a city ruled by the socialist or social democratic Labour Party for a century, and internationally famed for its social policies, become a place where gentrification sets the tone and (neo)liberal urbanism takes hold again? To answer, we focus on the interlocking socio-economic and political dynamics that have reshaped Amsterdam’s social geography.
... Since the 1990s various gentrification policies have been pursued by Rotterdam's local government (Custers, 2021;Hochstenbach, 2017), whereby gentrification has been explicitly mentioned as a policy goal in municipal documents (Doucet et al., 2011). These policies signal a break with the earlier urban renewal programmes that catered to workingclass households (Stouten, 2010). ...
... This policy turn, exemplified by the Rotterdam Act, can be interpreted as an attempt to restore social order and national unity with little relation to neoliberal politics (Van Eijk, 2010), but in the same period social mix policies were either continued or intensified in a way to fit a revanchist agenda (Uitermark & Duyvendak, 2008). The gentrification policies serve to exclude 'unwanted' groups (e.g., the unemployed, new migrants) from the city, or certain parts of it, in order to create space for middle-class households and achieve a more 'balanced' class structure (Custers & Engbersen, 2022;Hochstenbach, 2017;Van Den Berg, 2013). These tactics are also employed in other cities such as Glasgow, for instance in the development of waterfront flagship projects (Doucet et al., 2011). ...
This City Profile presents a multidisciplinary perspective on the development of Rotterdam, analysing its transformation from a "sick man" to the "capital of cool" between 1995-current. Our profile integrates insights from five policy domains and presents them as a new framework. First, Rotterdam witnessed the rise of the populist right and established a new safety regime through a zero-tolerance mentality. Second, Rotterdam's superdiversity initially triggered anti-migration sentiments , but has more recently been normalised. Third, state-led gentrification policies have uplifted Rotterdam's status and provided space for middle-class households, thereby restricting access for working-class households. Fourth, the local administration has initiated large-scale urban regeneration projects as new flagships in former port areas and the city centre. Fifth, the city has been using water safety improvements to guide urban development and to create an attractive city. Overall, these developments have contributed to Rotterdam's new, hip image. However, we argue this image is Janus-faced. The populist and repressive form of urban disadvantage management is highly politicised and considered discriminatory, whereas the new flagships and water-led urban development are depoliticised and technocratic. These two sides often operate autonomously from each other, but together they contribute to new divisions in Rotterdam.
... Burgers & Musterd, 2002). A second-tier global city, Amsterdam has strong financial, service and leisure sectors; its rapidly growing population and demand for housing have led to growing price differences between Amsterdam and the rest of the country (Hochstenbach, 2017). In contrast, Rotterdam's economy has historically been organized around heavy industry, and the city is struggling to adapt (Van den Berg, 2017). ...
This paper examines the impact of public policy on different dimensions of spatial inequality. We not only study residential segregation but also housing market access and inequality in terms of neighborhood status. We chart the impact of urban redevelopment policies in two Dutch cities—Amsterdam and Rotterdam—through a unique longitudinal and full-population dataset that enables us to distinguish the contributions of demolition, new construction, and tenure conversion to various dimensions of spatial inequality. We find that policy measures that reduce segregation may reduce access to housing (as happened in Amsterdam) while measures that promote upgrading may exacerbate inequalities between neighborhoods (as happened in Rotterdam). Distinguishing between different kinds of policy measures and dimensions of spatial inequality, we argue, allows for a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of urban redevelopment and better insight into the trade-offs involved in policy decisions.
... Verlaan and Albers argue that together these developments led to a commodification of the bohemian roots of gentrification into the present-day appearance and functioning of Amsterdam' s central districts. Their findings demonstrate that while the structural underpinnings of gentrification have arguably remained roughly the same, the footprint of the process has massively increased (Hochstenbach 2017). In previous decades, gentrification did occur in larger cities, but was typically limited to only a handful of centrally located neighbourhoods. ...
Gentrification is one of the most striking urban developments of our time, radically impacting residential, consumption and investment patterns, and urban culture more broadly. Commonly explained as the transformation of working-class or vacant areas of central cities into middle-class and/or commercial areas, it has become a key term in both academic and popular debates. Yet despite its contemporary significance, little is known about gentrification processes predating the repopulation of Western cities from the 1980s onwards. While geographers and urban sociologists are more inclined to focus on recent developments, historians seem wary of using the term when examining the social transformations of bygone eras. Although a limited number of historians have forayed into the field, so far historical approaches have been undeniably scarce. At the same time, the latest gentrification handbook counts up to 500 pages, but only mentions the history of the phenomenon as a backdrop against current events. This historical backdrop is, furthermore, distinctly Anglophone. This leaves us with a remarkable gap in the historical understanding of gentrification, which we believe is attributable to disciplinary boundaries and—from a historical perspective—the relative newness of the term.
Between 2019 and 2021, volunteers of a local Protestant congregation in Amsterdam, professional artists, and (other) local residents organised the interactive exhibit A(t) home in the Staats. In this project, community art and diaconia joined forces using multidisciplinary methods to strengthen relations in the neighbourhood and to discern issues of belonging and lines of division in the changing neighbourhood. The project was situated at the intersection of an “up and coming” neighbourhood and a shrinking congregation. By analysing the exhibit, this article contributes to the development of creative, arts-based research methods in diaconal studies. Within this approach, art is never a mere illustration or a vehicle for reflection but rather a generator of knowledge. The central question is: how can alliances between community art and diaconia contribute to overcoming segregation in urban contexts? This question is informed by the process of gentrification and the search by city churches for ways to engage with urban changes. After the introduction and methodological reflections, the article describes the background and practice of the project, followed by the outcomes of the interactive exhibit. It concludes by answering the central question and mapping theoretical and practical challenges concerning alliances between art and diaconia in urban contexts.
This chapter discusses the social and spatial changes in the city of Amsterdam from the early 1980s until 2015. It does so along three dimensions: social class, ethnicity and demography. The socio-spatial transformation of Amsterdam in those decades has been substantial and is characterised by an ever stronger concentration of highly educated and more recently also more affluent households. Furthermore, the city is increasingly ethnically diverse, but also socio-economically polarized. High-skilled migration from happens alongside lower-skilled labour migration. These processes have resulted in a gradual expansion of gentrification processes over in the pre-war city that are increasingly fuelled by international migration, leading to a spatial polarization with the peripheral post-war neighbourhoods.
This chapter lays the conceptual groundwork for the analysis of the transformation of Amsterdam, through two mechanisms: the socio-political cycle of urban transformation which unrolls through institutional processes (voting, representational politics, spatial (urban planning) policy), and the symbolic politics of class within the State. First, the chapters establishes what class and middle class mean in the Dutch context. Second, it conceptualises the link between class and State. Third, it seeks to establish how class-state dynamics can impact the social structuring of (urban) space. Hence, this chapter unpacks the class-state dynamics of cities and transformation focusing on the structure and spatialities of class; the relationship between class and urban space, and the significance of class for urban politics and statecraft.
Challenging the prevailing assumption that gentrification is a recent development, this contribution explores the (re)discovery of central urban living in Amsterdam by using the concept of marginal gentrification. Two inner-city neighbourhoods that have experienced the influx of marginal and middle-class gentrifiers, the Jordaan and de Pijp, will serve as case studies. In historiography, the transformation of both areas is portrayed as an unexpected and sudden development kickstarted by neoliberal housing policies in the early 1990s. However, historical research on Anglophone case studies has demonstrated that gentrification should be understood as a long-term process of social, cultural and economic change, already beginning in the 1960s. Through the use of newspaper articles and policy documents from the period under research, this contribution will reveal how the changing living preferences and consumer cultures of ‘urban pioneers’ can be understood as a case of marginal gentrification. Thus, this contribution will offer a deeper understanding of the ways in which structural changes in Amsterdam’s urban society shaped the everyday life of its citizens, and identify some of the inequalities in which these changes resulted for specific social strata.
The Netherlands has traditionally been considered an iconic ‘unitary’ rental housing market in which social and private sectors directly compete. More recently however, this unitary market has been undermined by changes in the status of housing associations, the privatization of social housing stock and the promotion of home ownership. It has subsequently been suggested that the Netherlands is drifting toward a ‘dualist’ system in which social and private sectors are critically unequal. This paper takes on this claim, providing, on the one hand, palpable evidence of the waning influence of the unitary housing system in the Netherlands and, on the other, a deeper examination of processes of dualisation as well as the outcomes. We focus on Amsterdam, where housing privatization has been most intense. We specifically draw on a geospatial analysis of changing tenure distributions at the neighbourhood level as well as a household analysis of the shifting profile of tenants and home owners to show how the unitary rental market, which helped establish Amsterdam as an iconic ‘just city’, has been unraveling. We demonstrate the relevance of the unitary/dualist model to understanding contemporary urban processes, especially those featuring social and economic polarization.
Homeownership has been declining in favour of private renting in most developed English speaking countries since the early-2000s. Public debates in countries like Britain, Australia and the US have subsequently focused on the ostensible coming of age of ‘generation rent’, constituted of younger individuals excluded from home buying and traditional routes to housing asset accumulation. While the focus of this paper is the significance of access to housing assets as a means to offset potential economic and welfare precarity, our concern is landlords rather than tenants. Drawing on British survey data, we show that the rental boom has been accompanied by increasing multiple property ownership among classes of largely middle-aged and relatively affluent households. Over one-million small-time landlords have emerged in the last decade alone, who, we argue, are part product of historic developments in housing markets and welfare states. Generations of British have not only been orientated towards their homes as commodity assets, they have also begun to mobilise around multi-property accumulation in a context of shifting welfare and pension expectations.
Why does a social housing provider bet on interest rate fluctuations? This article presents a case study of the financialization of both housing and the state. Social housing in the Netherlands is provided by non-profit housing associations that have since 1989 been set apart from the state. Many associations started developing housing for profit, borrowing on global capital markets or buying derivatives. Whereas other semi-public institutions moved into the world of finance due to financial constraints, housing associations did so to capitalize on the possibilities offered by their asset-rich portfolios. Vestia, the largest of them all, is an extreme––but not exceptional––case of what can happen when public goals are left to be realized by inadequately supervised and poorly managed private organizations. As a result of gambling on derivatives, Vestia had to be bailed out to the tune of over 2 billion euros. To recoup the losses, housing was sold off and rents were raised. Almost half of Dutch housing associations used derivatives, although most refrained from using them purely speculatively. The changes in the housing sector that led to its financialization cannot be separated from the wider financialization of the state.
Encouraging neighbourhood social mix has been a major goal of urban policy and planning in a number of different countries. This book draws together a range of case studies by international experts to assess the impacts of social mix policies and the degree to which they might represent gentrification by stealth. The contributions consider the range of social mix initiatives in different countries across the globe and their relationship to wider social, economic and urban change. The book combines understandings of social mix from the perspectives of researchers, policy makers and planners and the residents of the communities themselves. Mixed Communities also draws out more general lessons from these international comparisons - theoretically, empirically and for urban policy. It will be highly relevant for urban researchers and students, policy makers and practitioners alike.
