The more policymakers speak the language of a ‘creative city’, the less Swyngedouw recognizes his creative Amsterdam of the late 1960 and the early 1970s: “Amsterdam today is boring, uninspiring. Creative and progressive intellectual thought - although still brewing in some of the remaining interstices -  stifled, xenophobia rising, neoliberal austerity visibly present, new forms of uninspiring urbanity – like Amsterdam Zuidas –  became stale ruins even before their completion. Urban life seems cozy (at least for most), insular, self-referential, inward-looking.” His tale of Amsterdam is one of decline, of a paradise lost; this Amsterdam is not his Amsterdam anymore.

In sharp contrast to this negative view, stands Russell Shorto’s new book Amsterdam: A history of the world’s most liberal city.  In his account of the city, Amsterdam is still the most emancipated city in the world. His history is not one of decline, but of an unfolding individualism and liberalism: “From the building of the first canals in the 1300s, through its brutal struggle for independence and its golden age as a vast empire, to its complex present”, Shorto traces the “idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam and its surprising and profound effect on world history”.

I agree with Shorto that today’s Amsterdam is indeed very liberal and, to borrow Susan Fainstein’s term, a ‘just city’. I dare to claim that the city is today even far more emancipated than in the 1960s and 1970s. Swyngedouw’s Amsterdam is the Amsterdam of somebody who participated in the small, though very active, group of protestors of the 1960s and 1970s (but how many people where actually involved in Provo and Kabouters…?). For a sociologist, it is more interesting to look at the broader picture and to trace how changes that started in the 1960s and 1970s have had an enormous positive impact in the following decades on the lives of many Amsterdammers. Whereas most women, migrants, gays and lesbians lived through very tough and depressing times in the 1960s and 1970s, today their situation has incredibly improved. Swyngedouw, as part of the vanguard, seems to be blind for the liberalizing impact of the movements starting in the 1960s and 1970s  - resulting in better lives for so many people today: more equal relations between men and women, between children and adults, gays and lesbians from all social backgrounds having the opportunity to live ‘open’ lives, migrants who now have decent social housing, their situation drastically improved compared to the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But Swyngedouw is right that it is naive to only think in terms of progress and ‘unfolding’ as Shorto basically does in his book. The history of Amsterdam shows that periods of liberalism and freedom are followed by authoritarian times and suffocating conservatism. Moreover, Swyngedouw is right that some neoliberal trends manifest themselves these days in Amsterdam, potentially jeopardizing the ‘emancipatory desires’ he cherished in Amsterdam’s earlier days.

Hence, while Shorto gives a far more accurate picture of today’s Amsterdam, Swyngedouw ‘theory of history’ is more adequate: there is no necessary, teleological development in which Amsterdam was, is, and will remain the most liberal city of the world. That is something we have to fight for, every day, over and over again.

Jan Willem Duyvendak

Jan Willem Duyvendak is full professor in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam since 2003, after he had been director of the Verwey-Jonker Research Institute for Social Issues (1999-2003) and Professor of Community Development at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His latest books include The Politics of Home. Nostalgia and Belonging in Western Europe and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) andCrafting Citizenship. Negotiating tensions in modern society. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).