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The Resilience of the Amsterdam Canal Belt - By Prof. Robert Kloosterman & Prof. Ewald Engelen
Publication date 23-09-2013
The façade of the houses along the Amsterdam canals seems to have changed little in four centuries. Behind the doors, however, things are quite different. It is not just that the interiors are very different, but, even more important, significant shifts in the economic activities have taken place.
In the 17th century, when Amsterdam was at the apex of the Western
world system acting as an entrepôt and a financial centre, the canal houses were
home to (elite) merchants and bankers. One could even argue that the Amsterdam
Canal Belt was the very cradle and, for a while, the centre of a globe-spanning
merchant capitalism which would link faraway parts in Europe, Asia, Africa and
the Americas through flows of goods, services, capital, people and information.
The merchants combined living and working in their houses, presenting a function
mix that is typical for the pre-industrial era.
Nowadays, the canal houses are again home to fine-grained combinations of
functions. As before, people are living, working, and enjoying themselves in
what the famous urbanist Lewis Mumford in The City in History
(1961/1991: 504) called this “… miracle of spaciousness, compactness,
intelligible order.” Also again, the economic activities taking place in the
Canal Belt are very much part and parcel of the global economy. This time,
however, the Canal Belt of Amsterdam is not so much an entrepôt of goods or a
commanding global financial centre, but much more a place where high-end
activities in producer services and cultural industries are located. As in the
17th century, the Amsterdam Canal Belt with its compactness and
proximity offers an urban milieu which fosters easy face-to-face exchanges while
digital technologies and a modern transport infrastructure enables connecting
with other parts of the world. We will analyse the current economic function of
the Amsterdam canal belt and how they are related to their predecessors. We will
also assess its importance at different levels of scale, namely the local
Amsterdam economy, the Dutch economy, and the global economy. Why could this
iconic part of Amsterdam regain a significant role not just in the urban
economy, but even in the global economy?
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