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Social and Spatial Transformations

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Making the Middle-class City

Part of the book series: The Contemporary City ((TCONTCI))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the social and spatial changes in the city of Amsterdam from the early 1980s until 2015. It does so along three dimensions: social class, ethnicity and demography. The socio-spatial transformation of Amsterdam in those decades has been substantial and is characterised by an ever stronger concentration of highly educated and more recently also more affluent households. Furthermore, the city is increasingly ethnically diverse, but also socio-economically polarized. High-skilled migration from happens alongside lower-skilled labour migration. These processes have resulted in a gradual expansion of gentrification processes over in the pre-war city that are increasingly fuelled by international migration, leading to a spatial polarization with the peripheral post-war neighbourhoods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the Dutch ethno-national classification, ‘native-Dutch’ refers to a person whose parents were both born in the Netherlands. When one or both parents were born abroad, a person is classified as ‘non-native’. In this book, we prefer to use ‘Dutch from a migration background’ as much as possible. In the Dutch ethno-national classification, a distinction is also made between “non-natives” who are either ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’. ‘Western’ encompasses North America, Europe (excluding Turkey but including the countries of the former Soviet Union), Oceania, Japan, and Indonesia; ‘non-Western’ the rest.

  2. 2.

    OIS annual reports.

  3. 3.

    Workforce is here defined as ‘beroepsbevolking’, which includes the population aged 15–64 that are employed or unemployed (total of 329,000 in 1995 and 461,000 in 2015).

  4. 4.

    Before the adoption of the Bologna Accord for higher education, four or five year university programme graduates were awarded a doctorandus title. The proliferation of the new professional middle class in the service economy and in public administration led to a slight devaluation of the degree and to the term (and its diminutive) sometimes taking on a mocking connotation in Dutch.

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  1. Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Willem Boterman & Wouter van Gent

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  1. Willem Boterman
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  2. Wouter van Gent
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Boterman, W., Gent, W.v. (2023). Social and Spatial Transformations. In: Making the Middle-class City. The Contemporary City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55493-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55493-2_3

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