This book seeks to understand the urban transformation of Amsterdam over a 40-year period. In addition to charting social and economic changes associated with gentrification, it analyses the electoral dynamics and middle-class politics that have underpinned Amsterdam's change to a middle-class city. Willem Boterman & Wouter van Gent are Urban and Political Geographers at the department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 'How can we explain urban transformations of the past decades? Boterman and Van Gent take on the challenge to explain how and why Social-democratic Amsterdam became a middle-class city. They conceptualize the socio-political cycle of urban transformation to meticulously analyse the growth and growing domination of middle classes that has transformed politics, the local state and urban policies, and has undermined Amsterdam's quintessential social-redistributive characteristics. The book presents a terrific case study to bring to light the key processes that are reconfigurating European cities...and beyond.' -Professor Patrick le Gales (SciencePo, Paris) 'Making the Middle-Class City is the result of a ten-year long ambitious project linking social-economic restructuring, electoral and political shifts to housing, neighbourhood and city-wide transformations. The key innovation of the book is that Boterman and Van Gent demonstrate how the different changes add up to nothing less than the gentrification of not only the city but also of City Hall. They dissect how policy makers and bureaucrats embody middle-class interests and act upon those interests. The paradoxical result is a city that is increasingly unaffordable to both working- and middle-class households. This book speaks to current tensions in many cities: between different class interests, between tourism-led growth and housing affordability, and ultimately between social justice and neoliberalism. It will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got there.' -Professor Manuel Aalbers (University of Leuven) 'A superb book that tells us what is distinctive about processes of gentrification in Amsterdam. Outs the peddling of 'soft gentrification' by a left-liberal Dutch state and evidences the hard edged impacts of this. The striking correlations between social and electoral change point to the possible futures of gentrifying and diversifying cities elsewhere in the world, beyond Amsterdam. An excellent addition to the gentrification studies literature.' - Professor Loretta Lees (Director of the Initiative on Cities, Boston University, USA)

nexusstc/Making the Middle-class City: The Politics of Gentrifying Amsterdam/b8595a205836c58bbc3a07bce61eb743.pdf

lgli/Making the Middle-class City.pdf

lgrsnf/Making the Middle-class City.pdf

zlib/no-category/Willem Boterman, Wouter van Gent/Making the Middle-class City: The Politics of Gentrifying Amsterdam_24337115.pdf

Boterman, Willem (author);Gent, Wouter van (author)

Macmillan Education UK

Red Globe Press

The contemporary city (Print), New York, NY, 2023

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Contemporary city, Cham, 2022

Springer Nature, Cham, 2022

1st ed. 2023, PT, 2022

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 10.0.1

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Preface and Acknowledgements 6
Contents 9
List of Figures 12
List of Tables 15
1: Introduction 16
1.1 Introduction 16
1.2 Explanations for Urban Transformation 18
1.3 The Socio-Political Cycle of Urban Transformation 20
Class, Politics and the Production of Urban Space 22
1.4 Outline of this Book 24
2: Class, State and Urban Space 28
2.1 Introduction 28
2.2 Social Class in Context 30
Social Class in the Netherlands 31
Defining the Middle Class Today 34
An Emergent Professional Middle Class 36
2.3 Spatializing Class, Classes in Space 37
2.4 Urban Transformation and Social Class 40
Urban Space as Constitutive of Class 42
2.5 Class, State and Space 44
2.6 Two Mechanisms of Urban Transformation 49
Institutional Politics: Policy Regimes and Elections 49
Symbolic Politics 54
2.7 The Socio-Political Cycle of Amsterdam’s Transformation 57
3: Social and Spatial Transformations 58
3.1 Amsterdam Diversifying and Gentrifying 58
3.2 Demographic Change 60
3.3 Ethnic Change 64
3.4 Economic Change 68
3.5 Social Class Change 71
Disappearing Working Class 72
Rise of the New Urban Middle Class 73
Income Developments 75
Regional Dynamics 77
3.6 Neighbourhood Transformations in Amsterdam 79
Early Gentrification: The 1980s and Before 79
Expanding Gentrification: 1990–2001 81
Ubiquitous Gentrification: 2001–2009 84
Post 2009: Transformations in the Wake of the Crisis 86
3.7 New Spatial Inequalities 88
3.8 Conclusions 90
4: The Electoral Geography of Amsterdam 92
4.1 Introduction 92
4.2 The Dutch Political Landscape 95
4.3 Class-Based Voting and Spatial Polarisation 99
4.4 The New Middle-Class Vote(s) 101
4.5 General Electoral Patterns in the Netherlands and Amsterdam 102
4.6 Electoral Dynamics in the City Until 1989 105
4.7 Electoral Dynamics in the City 1989–1998 108
4.8 Electoral Dynamics in the 2000s 110
4.9 Local Elections and Political Dynamics in the City 2010–2012 112
4.10 Trends in Electoral Geographies 1980–2012 114
4.11 Conclusions 118
5: Political and Institutional Transformations 120
5.1 Introduction 120
5.2 A Red Past: Urban Politics Until 1988 122
Representational Politics: PvdA Rule 122
Social Housing City 125
Compact City and Nascent Gentrification 126
5.3 Third Way City: Housing Market Liberalisation in the 1990s 128
Party Politics 1989–1995 129
National Housing Policies 131
Changing Political Landscape and New Urban Policies 1994–2002 134
The ‘Discovery’ of the New Middle Class 136
5.4 Revanchism and Urban Boosterism: Amsterdam 2002–2008 139
New National Political Landscapes 139
Amsterdam’s Revanchist Interlude 2002–2006 140
Return to Red-Green Coalitions 144
5.5 Post-Crisis Amsterdam (2009–2018) 148
Institutional Restructuring in the Wake of the Crisis (2009–2013) 148
Post-Crisis Housing Framework 151
Post-Crisis Boom 2014–2016 154
2016–2018: A New Direction? 155
5.6 Conclusion 158
6: Symbolic Politics Within the Local State 160
6.1 Undivided City: Social and ‘Middle-Segment’ Housing 162
6.2 Shaping the City in One’s Mirror Image 169
The Gentrification Debate 172
Displacement 175
6.3 Neighbourhood Transformation Through Symbolic Politics 178
Renewal Policies 180
Networks of Neighbourhood Organisation 182
Middle-Class Representations and Practices 184
Residents’ Perspectives 188
Middle-Class Politics in Van der Pekbuurt 191
6.4 Conclusion 192
7: Conclusion 195
7.1 Social and Spatial Transformations 197
7.2 Changing Electorates and Repositioning Parties 199
7.3 Political Transformation: Institutional and Symbolic Middle-Class Politics 201
The Middle-Class Project 202
A New Way of Looking at the City 203
7.4 Expanding Our Understanding of the Middle-Class City 206
7.5 Beyond Amsterdam: Three Theoretical Implications 208
7.6 Future Transformations 211
Overview Maps 216
Bibliography 218
Data Sources 244
Index 249

2022-11-25