This report serves as one of the two background documents for the HvA/UvA research proposal concerning cultural interventions in the process of urban regeneration in Krachtwijken in Amsterdam. The report at hand, based on a review of the international literature on art and regeneration, and on international and Dutch practices, shows why the proposed research will be both valuable to the practice of Amsterdam and to international research. The report starts with a description of the role of the arts in urban regeneration (§2) and the objective of regeneration processes: ‘feeling at home’ (§3). Next, paragraph 4 further explores the role of the arts in urban regeneration by focussing on the forms and impacts of and critique on different cultural interventions. Finally, §5 summarises the preconditions for effective cultural interventions. This general overview of the functions of cultural interventions in the urban context provides the background against which our research agenda is presented.
This report analysis the geography of the tech sector in Amsterdam, with a focus on scaleups. After a literature review, it contains a quantitative analysis, showing and mapping the spatial clustering of various types of tech companies cluster in the Amsterdam region. Then, based on interviews, we analyse the growth dynamics, location preferences and geographical dynamics of tech scale-ups. Also, we identify which push and pull factors affect Amsterdam based tech scale-up companies in their locational decision making, on the neighborhood and building level.
This paper explores how residents of Helmond Brandevoort, a neotraditional neighbourhood in the Netherlands, socially construct a 'classed' place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries which were explored here by analysing residents’ narratives. Two prominent types of narratives were found: their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicized aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. In the neighbourhood explored, the way of boundary drawing based on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged.
