Many cities are facing challenges in finding an equilibrium in the use of urban consumption spaces. Urban consumption spaces comprise different sociospatial relationships, bringing together work, consumption, recreation and habitation in a delimited area within the city. This mixed character is a potential source of creative urban quality, but this quality is not always realized, leading to on the one hand 'overheating' in some urban consumption spaces faced with excessive, imbalanced usage, and on the other ‘undercooling’, with declining visitors and vacant lots. We focus on Amsterdam as our living lab, in our aim to develop a new perspective toward reinstating the sociospatial relationships between local community stakeholders and to restore the equilibrium of Amsterdam city center as an urban consumption space. In doing so, we address the research question How do residents, entrepreneurs and visitors perceive ‘hospitality’ in their lived-in experience of Amsterdam as urban consumption space, and how does this contribute to community connectedness?
LINK
This study proposes a framework to measure touristification of consumption spaces, consisting of concentration of retail capital, business displacement and standardization of the consumption landscape. This framework is tested using business registration data and rent price estimates for consumption spaces in Amsterdam between 2005 and 2020. Touristification emerges from concentrations of retail capital and standardization, but occurs without causing significant business displacement. A cluster analysis identifies different variations of touristification. Besides the more typical cases these include nightlife areas, gentrifying consumption spaces and specialized retail areas. This suggests that local contingencies cause consumption spaces to respond differently to increasing tourism.
DOCUMENT
As multifunctional places that combine shopping and hospitality with public space and residential functions, urban consumption spaces are sites where different normative orders surface and sometimes clash. In Amsterdam, such a clash emerged over touristification of consumption spaces, eroding place attachment for local residents and urging the city government to take action. Based on policy analysis and interviews with entrepreneurs and key informants, we demonstrate how Amsterdam’s city government is responding to this issue, using legal pluralism that exists within formal state law. Specifically, the city government combines four instruments to manage touristification of consumption spaces, targeting so-called tourist shops with the aim to drive them out of the inner city. This strategic combination of policy instruments designed on various scales and for different publics to pursue a local political goal jeopardizes entrepreneurs’ rights to legal certainty. Moreover, implicitly based on class-based tastes and distrust towards particular minority groups of entrepreneurs, this policy strategy results in institutional discrimination that has far-reaching consequences for entrepreneurs in itself, but also affects trust relations among local stakeholders.
DOCUMENT
Fashion has become inextricably linked with digital culture. Digital media have opened up new spaces of fashion consumption that are unprecedented in their levels of ubiquity, immersion, fluidity, and interactivity. The virtual realm continuously needs us to design and communicate our identity online. Unfortunately, the current landscape of digitised fashion practices seems to lack the type of self-governing attitude and urgency that is needed to move beyond commercially mandated platforms and systems that effectively diminish our digital agency. As transformative power seems to be the promise of the virtual, there is an inherent need to critically assess how digital representation of fashion manifests online, especially when these representations become key mediators within our collective and individual public construction of self. A number of collectives and practitioners that actively shape a counter movement, organized bottom up rather than through capital, are questioning this interdependence, applying inverted thinking and experimenting with alternative modes of engagement. Starting from the research question ‘How can critical fashion practitioners introduce and amplify digital agency within fashion’s virtual landscape through new strategies of aesthetic engagement?’, this project investigates the implications of fashion’s increasing shift towards the virtual realm and the ramifications created for digital agency. It centers on how identity is understood in the digital era, whether subjects have full agency while expected to construct multiple selves, and how online environments that enact as playgrounds for our identities might attribute to a distorted sense of self. By using the field of critical fashion as its site, and the rapidly expanding frontier of digital counter practices as a lens, the aim of this project is to contribute to larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society, such as new modes of consumerism, capital and cultural value.
