Urban Europe

Front matter

TA B

P . eed š E. y x

EDITEDsBY ~ a Virginie Mamadouh and Anne van Wageningen — Es Bz >

Part 1 Citizenship

2. At home in the city?

The difference between friendship and amicability Jan Willem Duyvendak and Fenneke Wekker

3. A tolerant social climate?

Questioning the validity of an overly positive self-image Thijl Sunier

4. Sex and the city Room for sexual citizenship Gert Hekma

5. The city as integration mechanism?

Active, integrated migrants require an active government Jeanine Klaver and Arend Odé

6. Undocumented immigrants Between exclusion and inclusion Blanca Garcés-Mascarenas and Sébastien Chauvin

7. From Mokum to Damsko and back again?

Deep language diversity and the new urbanity Virginie Mamadouh and Nesrin El Ayadi

8. Schools in the multilingual city 67 Not every language is equal

Orhan Agirdag

g. City kids and citizenship 75 Lia Karsten

10. Those who feel left behind 83

Fenne M. Pinkster

u. Exiles in the city: A triptych 89 Guido Snel, Sepp Eckenhaussen and Fien de Ruiter

Part 2 Urban nodes

12. Hub Cities 2.0 for the 21st century 105 Nuria Arbonés Aran

13. Competing cities and urban networks in medieval Europa 111 Arie van Steensel

14. Beyond anti-urban sentiments 117 Towards a new metropolitan European family Zef Hemel 15. Trendy coffee shops and urban sociability 123

Jan Rath and Wietze Gelmers

16. A quiet transfer 131 The disappearing urban prison, Amsterdam and beyond G. Geltner

17. Build something different for a change! How the people of Amsterdam resisted the sell-out of their city centre Tim Verlaan

18. Big is beautiful?

Small-scale urban projects for a new century Stan Majoor

19. Creative cities and shrinking cities: False opposites? Marco Bontje

Part 3 Creative cities

20. The creative destruction and recovery of cities Joost Jonker

21. Visions and symbols of the creative city From the patroness of the city to the 3D Print Canal House Claartje Rasterhoff

22. Smart cities value their smart citizens

Frank Kresin

23. The dangers of a tamed city Robert C. Kloosterman

24. Cities and creative unpredictability Moritz Föllmer

25. Cultural Incubators: The squats of the 21st century?

Jaap Draaisma

26. New cities as testing grounds for a new urbanity Arnold Reijndorp

Part 4 Sustainable cities

27. The social sustainability of European cities The importance of local government Sako Musterd and Jan Nijman

28. Bothersome and besotted The struggle against public drunkenness in urban space Gemma Blok

29. ProefGroen (Taste Green / Test Green) A healthy diet can also be tasty and sustainable Coosje Dijkstra, Jutka Halberstadt, Jaap Seidell and Arnoud Verhoeff

30. Cycling is an acquired skill A cycling city is created through trial and error Marco te Brömmelstroet

31. Growing socio-spatial segregation in European capitals: Different government, less mitigation Sako Musterd

32. The future of the city Amsterdam between growth and overexploitation? Jeroen Slot and Laure Michon

33. Welcome to Amsterdam! Well, not really The right to the city requires a city in balance Arie van Wijngaarden

34. More than just housing The importance of housing associations for a sustainable city Jeroen van der Veer and Dick Schuiling

35. The energetic city: Between dreams and deeds Matthijs Hisschemöller

Part5 Urban representation

36. The dreamed European city (urbo kune)

Eberhard van der Laan

37. Interlocking identities Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Europe in the built environment of the capital Michael Wintle

38. An eye for freedom: Spinoza and Terstall in Amsterdam Patricia Pisters

39. An urban geopolitics (or, the perils of using the city to rebrand the state — and Europe) Luiza Bialasiewicz

40. Decor and decorum in diplomacy Herman van der Wusten

41. Urban diplomacy in Europe Mutual engagement or business-minded pragmatism? Claske Vos

42. Town twinning Over the (ir)relevance of the paradiplomacy of European cities Virginie Mamadouh

Part 6 Cities in administrative and policy networks

43. The city as a tool to promote European integration: Napoleonic Amsterdam Martijn van der Burg and Anne van Wageningen

44.The European city as a bulwark of resistance against neoliberalisation P.W. Zuidhof

45. About bed, bath and bread Municipalities as the last resort for rejected asylum seekers Lia Versteegh

46. Safe cities in Europe: Making the leap to sustainable connections

Monica den Boer

47. URBAN Bijlmermeer How a European programme became the catalyst for a ‘black revolution’ in Amsterdam Southeast Thea Dukes

48. A Europe of peripheries

Federico Savini

49. An Urban Agenda for the European Union: About cities or with cities? 393 Wouter van der Heijde 50. 2031: The year the city disbanded the state 399

Anne van Wageningen

Acknowledgements

A collection of essays is obviously the work of many people. We would like to express our gratitude to the authors of the fifty essays as well as the many individuals who have made this project possible. We especially want to thank Gijs van der Starre at The Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE), who has supported the project from beginning to end and brainstormed so many times with us about the title and cover of this volume.

We also thank our colleagues at the University of Amsterdam who helped us start the project in 2015: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Jan Hein Furnée and Moritz Follmer at the Faculty of the Humanities, Joni Haijen at the Centre for Urban Studies of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, as well as Wouter van der Heijde and Mark Boekwijt at the Municipality of Amsterdam. We are grateful to the translators Emma Rault, Giles Rosbander and Marc Warmerdam at Metamorfose Vertalingen in Utrecht and Gioia Marini in Amsterdam who translated all essays except Chapter 1, 6, 16, 37, 39 and 48 into English, and to the team at Amsterdam University Press (AUP) especially Inge van der Bijl, Chantal Nicolaes and Asaf Lahat.

The original volume EU@Amsterdam: Essays over de Europese stad was published in Dutch at the beginning of the Dutch presidency of the European Council (January-June 2016); We thank the authors and our guests Nicolaas Beets, the Dutch Urban Envoy for the Urban Agenda, and Bas Verkerk, Mayor of Delft and Dutch representative at the European Committee of the Regions, who spoke at the series of public debates on the European city organised at this occasion at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam during the Dutch presidency (on 29 January, 15 February, 7 and 29 March and 18 April 2016), the moderators Natasja van den Berg and Michiel Hulshof (at Tertium) and the support team at Pakhuis de Zwijger (especially Charlot Schans and Floortje Opbroek).

Last but not least we would like to express our gratitude to the organisations that have financially enabled the publication of this volume: ACCESS EUROPE, the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS) of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) and the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History (ACHU) for the original volume; ACCESS EUROPE, CUS, the EFL Foundation (Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Stichting) and the Municipality of Amsterdam for the English version.

Virginie Mamadouh Anne van Wageningen Amsterdam, 1 October 2016

1. Urban Europe and the European Union

An introduction

Virginie Mamadouh and Anne van Wageningen

On 24 June 2016 the Council of Ministers of the European Union met in Brussels and discussed the result of the Brexit referendum the day before. Amidst the astonishment about the choice of the British voters, and the soul searching exercises about the future of the EU, the ministers also had to take care of the scheduled business, although most of their decisions that day went unnoticed. One of these decisions was the adoption of an Urban Agenda for the European Union with the formal endorsement of the Pact of Amsterdam. The Pact had been agreed at the Informal Meeting of EU ministers responsible for Urban Matters on 30 May in Amsterdam, during the Dutch presidency. Since then, the European Union has officially had an Urban Agenda.

This was the occasion to ask both Amsterdam academics and practitioners to share their views of the city and to compile this collection of essays to reflect the complexity of the roles, functions and problems of cities to address in the urban agenda. The aim of the volume is to contribute to the much needed public debate about the future of European cities. After decades of discussion, the role of cities in European politics has been formally acknowledged, but it is certainly not the conclusion of urban politics but on the contrary a stimulus for further deliberations. The sharing of knowledge and research insights about what makes cities what they are and how they function (and sometimes not) is in this context a fundamental step towards better cities.

Europe: A continent of cities

A large majority of Europe’s citizens live in an urban area — 70% if we include cities, towns and suburbs — and this share continues to grow. Europe is a continent of cities, and is one of the most urbanised areas in the world. Cities are the engines of economy and social innovation and play an important role in many of the most pressing social and environmental challenges Europe faces: unemployment, social exclusion, integration, energy transition etc.

Cities have now been given a formal say in EU decision making and will work together with the Member states, the Directorate- Generals of the Commission and other European stakeholders in 12 partnerships to make EU policies urban proof, to ease communication between EU institutions and municipalities, to enhance cities’ access to EU programmes and moneys and to improve the circulation of expertise and knowledge about urban issues.

This new formal position for cities in the EU is part of a general trend rooted in the awareness of the fact that a growing proportion of the (world and European) population live in cities but also in changing relations between the states and their cities. Many cities have developed their external relations to distinguish themselves in the world economy. More and more is expected of local authorities. Through decentralisation reforms, many European states have delegated policies to their municipalities, partly to dismantle an uncompetitive national welfare state, partly to bring policy making closer to the citizens and to acknowledge for local differences in needs and opportunities. Moreover, mayors and local governments are often expected to be better equipped than states and national governments to deal with the daily concerns of their citizens. As the American political scientist Benjamin Barber argues, many social and environmental problems would be more effectively dealt with, if mayors ruled the world. The United Nations has also acknowledged this trend and is working on the New Urban

Agenda, a global urban agenda to be adopted at the Habitat III World cities at crossroads Conference in Quito in October 2016 to ‘guide the efforts around urbanisation of a wide range of actors — nation states, city and regional leaders, international development funders, United Nations programmes and civil society — for the next 20 years’. The draft document available in September 2016 lists paradoxically much more ambitious and detailed goals than the Pact of Amsterdam, but remains of course more performative where the Urban Agenda for the EU entails a change in the constitutional architecture of the EU — even if it went unnoticed in the light of the Brexit and the reform needed to address the many crises the EU has to face.

An Urban Agenda for the European Union

It took twenty years to get Member States to agree on this urban agenda, which was a priority of three successive Dutch presidency (in 1997, 2004 and 2016). Member states widely diverge in terms of (non-)existence of their urban policies, the competencies of their local authorities and the relations between municipalities and other state levels.

The Urban Agenda is the outcome of twenty years of discussions. In the 1990s the European Commission proposed to adopt an Urban Agenda to tackle urban problems more efficiently. At the time urban problems (unemployment and economic restructuring, social exclusion, housing shortage, etc.) were dealt with only marginally in the EU15 because they were not Community competence (and they still aren't). They were covered to some extent but not systematically by the policies for territorial cohesion and by the structural funds.

In the course of time, it became clear that the Member States — especially in the post 2004 enlarged European Union — differ widely in this regard. Some like the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK were pleading for a EU urban policy (although different ones) while other were opposed to that. Some have extensive national urban policies, other don’t. Moreover their cities, their strengths and their weaknesses are completely different. As a result they fell to reach an agreement about what a common urban agenda could be, but statements regarding cities were regularly adopted by the Council during successive presidencies, stressing themes that were dear to them.

A new élan came from the European Commission, with a report Cities of Tomorrow: Challenges, Visions, Ways Forward in 2011 and in 2014 a formal initiative of the Commission, followed by a wide Public Consultation. With the wide support of other EU institutions (the Parliament, the Committee of the Regions, the Economic and Social Committee), the Council of European Municipalities and Regions and the input of influential city networks such as EUROCITIES and the Mayors of EU Capital Cities, the Urban Agenda under construction became more and more a programme with cities than for cities, and with local authorities as the local states (called urban authorities in the Pact of Amsterdam), rather than only with the larger cities — hence the use of the term ‘urban areas’ rather than cities in the document.

The Public Consultation revealed huge divergence about what cities were (large cities, towns, suburbs, urban areas, etc.) and the importance of the relations of cities with their hinterland, as well as some consensus on the fact that the urban agenda should not be a new EU policy competence, not a new programme or budget line. Instead the attention was put on better regulation, better funding and better knowledge through an integrated approach both vertically (between levels of governance from the EU to the local) and horizontally (between policy domains). More specifically it enhances the urban proofing (or the urban mainstreaming) of EU policies, which means taking early on in the decision making process the impact ofthe shaping policy on local authorities and to the direct engagement of Commissioners and EU civil servants with cities.

Whether the 12 partnerships between representatives of the Commission, the Member States, cities and stakeholders

— which have been established for three years to launch this urban mainstreaming exercise for domains ranging from urban poverty to circular economy through asylum seekers and digital transition — will be successful falls out of the scope of this volume. Instead it seizes the opportunity to draw the attention to the multidimensional character of European urban life and the many challenges it currently faces.

Stories about European cities

To mark the Dutch presidency and the preparation of the Pact of Amsterdam, academics and practitioners working in and from Amsterdam were asked to share their expertise in short pieces to illustrate the diversity of approaches to the city as socio-spatial reality. This volume thus brings together fifty essays on European cities for the sake of Europeans and others wishing to enhance their knowledge of these cities. These essays offer tales of European cities, Amsterdam and others, from a wide range of perspectives. The authors often present a concrete case, but the processes they discuss are at work in similar ways in other cities just as well. Local specificities need to be acknowledged to capture the very diversity of European cities, but the aim of this volume is to stress the diversity of perspectives to study them. Most contributors are trained and/ or work in the social sciences (geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, urban studies, migration studies, urban and regional planning) and the humanities (history, law, media studies). These multiple disciplinary perspectives offer different clues to read the city and investigate its many facets. The essays have been grouped in six sections dealing with key urban questions: citizenship, nodes and connections, creativity, (social) sustainability, representation and identity, and governance networks. This reflects the diversity and the complexity of the roles, functions and problems of cities to be addressed in the Urban Agenda.

Virginie Mamadouh is associate professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam. She studies the political and cultural aspects of European geopolitics and integration at multiple scale levels.

Anne van Wageningen is assistant professor of European Public Law in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He conducts research on constitutional developments in European higher education law.

Barber, B. 2013. JfMayors Ruled the World. Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. New Haven: Yale University Press.

European Council. 2016. Establishing the Urban Agenda for the EU (Pact of Amsterdam) 30 May 2016 Agreed at the Informal Meeting of EU ministers responsible for Urban matters

http://urbanagendaforthe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Pactof-Amsterdam_v7_WEB.pdf

Habitat III. 2016. New Urban Agenda-Draft outcome document for adoption in Quito, October 2016. 10 September 2016 United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development www.habitat3.org/file/535859/view/588897

Parti Citizenship

The first theme, citizenship, is about the city and its inhabitants. Jan Willem Duyvendak and Fenneke Wekker get straight to the point: how do we feel at home in the city? They make a case for amicability as a common foundation that allows a diverse group of people to feel at home in the city and to share the city with each other without immediately resembling one another. The tolerance that goes with this and that characterises the big city, and Amsterdam in particular, is analysed by Thijl Sunier. Using the example of places of worship for new religions, he shows how newcomers to the city have had to fight for their place. Another facet of Amsterdam’s legendary degree of tolerance — sex — is critically scrutinised by Gert Hekma.

In each of the chapters in this section, the city is seen as an integration machine with the mandate and the capacity to involve new groups in society. Jeanine Klaver and Arend Odé show that this integration is difficult, even for highly educated EU citizens from Central and East Europe, while Blanca Garcés-Mascarefias and Sébastien Chauvin identify exclusion and inclusion mechanisms for migrants without valid residence permits. International migration has steadily made the city more diverse. Virginie Mamadouh and Nesrin El Ayadi argue that linguistic diversity has become a fundamental feature of the city: multilingualism is now commonplace. However, as Orhan Agirdag shows in his contribution about schools’ language policy, not every language is treated equally. Urban children have a life also after school, but these city dwellers are often overlooked. This is something that Lia Karsten is trying to change. Another group that tends to be invisible are the city dwellers who come under pressure as the city changes rapidly — for example, the residents of those working-class neighbourhoods that are becoming increasingly attractive for gentrifiers. Fenne Pinkster gives the inhabitants of such a place a voice, some of whom feel like exiles in their own neighbourhood. In the final chapter, Guido Snel, Sepp Eckenhaussen and Fien de Ruiter look at Amsterdam through the eyes of foreign exiles. Once again, the city’s dynamism plays acentral role here: as home base and passageway, fixed and fluid.

2. Athome in the city?

The difference between friendship and amicability

Jan Willem Duyvendak and Fenneke Wekker

The home is all the rage. We see it in the media, where Ikea commercials and romantic movies remind us that there is no place quite like home; we come across it in the pamphlets of political parties that argue that ‘everyone should feel at home in the Netherlands’; and we see it all around us: everyone is trying to make themselves at home — in their house, in the neighbourhood, in the city, and in the nation. State policy is supporting citizens in this. Policy interventions and welfare projects ensure that citizens integrate, meet each other, begin to feel connected with one another, and identify themselves with the neighbourhood, the city and the country. In so doing, politics seeks to promote active citizenship and to encourage people to become involved in their neighbourhood, city and country — as if it were their own home.

These policies and social projects show that there is nothing noncommittal about feeling at home. Feeling at home is necessary and compulsory. There is, of course, the political hope that the quality of life in so-called ‘disadvantaged neighbourhoods’ will improve by increasing a sense of home among their inhabitants. Feeling at home and experiencing a sense of interconnectedness are seen as preconditions for a ‘good’ and livable neighbourhood and city. And successful neighbourhoods — characterised by sustainable, local networks of residents — are considered to be the building blocks of a sense of belonging at the national level.

More and more policymakers believe that the nation, the city and certainly the neighbourhood should feel like home to its residents. On the basis of this idea, politicians — in collaboration with welfare workers and local organisations — are calling upon residents to become actively involved in their ‘collective house’ by jointly countering deviant behaviour, by serving in neighbourhood committees, by participating in neighbourhood activities and by taking care of neighbours in need of help. The increased social control and social cohesion are meant to lead to a greater sense of security, more trust among residents and a livable environment that everyone can justifiably call their ‘home’.

A livable Netherlands is a country in which everyone feels at home — this is what is written in countless policy documents produced by rural and local politics and also in the ambitious plans of welfare institutions and neighbourhood organisations. But is that even possible? Paradoxically, the will and the drive to make a neighbourhood a safe and peaceful ‘home’ all too often lead to open conflicts between residents over what that ‘public home’ should look like and especially who should be able to determine what it looks like: conflicts between renters and buyers, between established residents and newcomers, between young and old, between ‘antisocial’ people and the ‘well-adjusted’ are the order of the day in urban areas and city streets. As soon as one group of residents appropriates too much of the common or public space, the feeling of security and familiarity of the other residents melts away like snow. Accordingly, the balance between the point at which a sense of belonging begins for one person and ceases for the other is extremely precarious.

The preoccupation with home — shared by citizens, policymakers and welfare workers alike — is understandable. Wanting to feel at home is a basic human need that every citizen, community social worker and politician recognises. But is the (ultimate) aim to make everyone in the public space feel at home and feel connected with everybody not an overambitious ideal? Is it appropriate to stimulate a sense of feeling at home — and with it a strong degree of appropriation of the public space — if that brings about more conflicts and if it drives some people to withdraw from that space? Would it not be more desirable for people to maintain a certain social distance from each other and to refrain from bonding strongly with their (social and physical) environment outside the home? In other words, is it possible to create an ‘open house’ out of public space? Doesn't the attempt to define the city or city district as ‘home’ simply create a breeding ground for social conflicts in a society as diverse as the Netherlands?

Limits to feeling at home

A sense of home is a very widely shared and deeply felt emotion that is almost impossible to describe. There is, however, one thing that researchers emphasise without exception: a profound sense of home can only be experienced in a small circle of people. It turns out that we feel at home only with certain people and under certain circumstances. The depth of the emotion thus appears to lie in its selectivity: we are capable of feeling at ease with quite a few people and in many situations, but can we really feel at home with them? When ‘certain people in certain places’ are present, this can spoil our sense of home, our trust and our sense of security. It is precisely such encounters with these ‘other people’ that can undermine those feelings of belonging and social interconnectedness so sought after by community social workers. Perhaps a reasonably ‘good sense of home’ in an urban setting requires relationships that are ‘lighter’ and more aloof than the long-term, chummy relationships that policymakers would like city dwellers to cultivate.

Within a heterogeneous setting of renters and buyers, of different cultures and lifestyles, the only real option appears to be to relativise the ultimate aim — i.e. a sense of home in the city. Physical proximity can then be combined with keeping one’s social distance, which in effect means that the ideal of the home is primarily ‘localised’ in one’s own house. One lives in a neighbourhood with ‘others’, but precisely because the ‘others’ may be very different, social proximity is not always appreciated.

In order to coexist in spite of this, what should be sought is not a common ‘home’ but rather ‘public familiarity’.

Talja Blokland and Julia Nast posit that public familiarity is sufficient for urbanites. They argue that at most what is needed is the ability to navigate public space in order to feel that you are safe and that you have a certain amount of control. This navigating occurs en route — on your way from home to the rest of your life. You move through your neighbourhood, you stop in a shop, you stand at a bus stop, and all the while you run into people you know by sight or because you sometimes chat with them at the school playground or the park where you walk your dog, or because you know them from your work or school and they live in the same neighbourhood as you. Blokland and Nast claim that it would be overambitious to strive to get to know one another on a more than superficial basis purely on the basis of the coincidence that you live in the same neighbourhood. People generally do not expand their networks by adding friends from the neighbourhood; they find friends elsewhere. Government interventions that insinuate that you really should be friends with your neighbours in fact generate the wrong expectations. After all, true friendship requires like-mindedness and a certain degree of homogeneity, which is by definition rare in an urban setting.

Towards a ‘light’ form of a sense of home — the importance of amicability

In our view, Blokland and Nast are right in arguing that public familiarity — which they identify in terms of safety and being familiar with ‘strangers’ — is key to living in a city. But many people in a neighbourhood, district or street seek something more than merely living together: they want, in fact, to feel at home. And for that, public familiarity is a necessary precondition but is insufficient — at least in the way that Blokland and Nast define it. We believe their definition of the term familiarity is too parsimonious, for familiarity not only refers to something that one is accustomed to, it also signifies amicability. This latter aspect of familiarity denotes a friendly interaction — the way friends treat each other — without the depth and emotional weight of True Friendship. When people treat each other kindly, they treat each other as if they are friends and assume that they can trust each other. They presume that they have things in common, and they treat each other in a way that exudes trust and ease. There is trust in such a relationship unless proven otherwise, instead of the opposite, distrustful variant in which people view each other with suspicion until ‘common ground’ is found.

Research has shown that amicability does not mean that you have to be ‘the same’ in terms of a shared lifestyle, cultural background or socio-economic position: the common denominator can be that you both have a child or a dog, that you both love to swim, that you visit the same church or always put the trash out on a Wednesday or take the same bus to the city centre. Amicability is more about what you do (together) than who you are: it is much more about activity than identity. This makes it also an ‘attainable’ ideal for people living in heterogeneous neighbourhoods. Such people probably do not have much in common in terms of ‘identities’ — ethnic, religious, cultural — but this does not mean that they have no activities in common with each other. Many successful social interventions are therefore focused on activities that residents undertake together: they create a form of commonality that form a basis for amicability.

To deal with someone amicably is somewhere between ‘amiable’ and ‘chummy’: it is more than simply being friendly, but it is not based on — nor is its aim — true friendship. It is this ‘mild form of friendship’, this amicability, that can fulfil the various needs of people to feel at home in a public space.

Our conception of familiarity goes beyond the narrow conception of public familiarity in which everything appears to revolve around being able to survive in the urban ‘jungle’. While Joke van der Zwaard advocates a limited definition of public familiarity, focused on feelings of security among ‘familiar strangers’, we would adopta broader definition that includes amicability. Amicability adds something that allows people to feel at home while simultaneously giving others space to also feel at home. A person who treats you amicably is giving you space and the recognition that you belong there. And often it is a very familiar pattern: a friendly relationship develops over the course of time. It is like a dance on the sidewalk that becomes so familiar that you immediately notice if something or someone is missing. Certain people simply belong, not because you are so emotionally connected to them, not because you recognise them as someone who is ‘just like you’, but because they actively make the neighbourhood what it is — a neighbourhood that everyone can call their own to some extent.