Introduction
Los Angeles is incontestably a global city; Amsterdam, when considered as part of the Randstat, can be regarded as similar if not in the same league. Both are financial centers and have endured the recent restructuring of their economies with the decline of manufacturing and port facilities and jumps in the size of their service, especially business service, sectors. They each have ethnically diverse populations and have absorbed major flows of immigration within the last thirty years, although Amsterdam differs from Los Angeles in the tapering off of that flow. A very brief comparison of the two offers some clues toward the possibilities of combining equality, diversity, participation, and sustainability in a cosmopolitan urban milieu.
Comparison of cities
Amsterdam offers the best available model of a relatively egalitarian, diverse, democratic city, with a strong commitment to environmental preservation. Its geographic situation, presenting the constant threat of inundation and requiring construction on land below sea level, means that urban development has, for centuries, proceeded as the result of conscious decisions. Within a country possessing a long tradition of bourgeois paternalism and a more recent one of working-class organization and social democratic leadership, Amsterdam deviates from the rest of the Netherlands in its greater population diversity and more extensive range of life styles. In this respect, Amsterdam also differs from other relatively egalitarian northern European cities. (Soja, 1996, p.285).
During the nineteenth century the Dutch reached a compromise between their antagonistic Protestant and Catholic fractions. The form of this consensus, termed “pillarization,” involves separate sets of civic institutions, including state-subsidized schools, based in the different religious communities. In the twentieth century, working-class mobilization and trade-union militancy produced a typical European multi-party system with coalition governments and socialist representation.
After the Second World War demands for income security and better living conditions were accommodated through corporatist negotiation. In the 1970s and 80s, urban social movements, especially as embodied in large-scale squatting, broad-based resistance to the eviction of squatters, and popular opposition to urban renewal, caused the Amsterdam municipal government to retreat from top-down planning methods.
Within the city of Amsterdam the overlay of struggle and compromise has offered a framework in which contemporary difference is negotiated. Amsterdammers, to use Patsy Healey’s phrase quoted earlier, live together but differently. They do so within a city remarkably integrated spatially by class, less so by ethnicity (Musterd et al., 1998). The state, both national and local, relies heavily on intermediaries, rooted in different communal groupings, as agents for the dispensation of social welfare. Although religion has faded in importance as a fault line in Amsterdam society, religiously based institutions continue to play a significant role.
The philanthropic tradition that derives from them combines with leftist political commitment to create a milieu resistant to marketization. Although there are now moves in that direction, they are limited, for example, the Dutch Government has largely retreated from construction of social housing. At the same time, however, it has substantially increased the rate of house allowance. By and large, the upper strata of Amsterdam society accept high levels of redistribution, mixed neighborhoods, and cramped housing in order to experience the benefits of a cosmopolitan, egalitarian city. And residential property developers are willing to accept planning and the security of assured profits instead of riskier, if potentially larger, speculative gains.
The willingness of Amsterdam’s citizens to tolerate their neighbors is part of a virtuous circle resulting from a generous welfare state. There is no severely impoverished lower class and even the most ghettoized areas of the city are neither homogeneously low-income nor populated entirely by immigrant groups. Consequently difference is less frightening than in other locales, where it is more strongly associated with crime and danger.
Tolerance of the use of soft drugs, medicalization of addiction, and police intervention to prevent hard-drug sales from getting out of control inhibit the association between criminality and poor communities that exists elsewhere. It is hard to imagine that similar conditions could exist if Amsterdam had the kind of income inequality found in Los Angeles.
The situation of Amsterdam bolsters the case of those who argue that local autonomy is possible and that globalization does not destroy the capacity of nation-states to achieve social goals. Although Amsterdam depends heavily on the Dutch national state to maintain income support for its inhabitants, local decisions on housing policy–including the legalization of squatting and of berthing of houseboats in central locations–contribute markedly to the city’s heterogeneity. Amsterdam in many respects does incorporate the values of equality, diversity, democracy, and respect for the environment. Amsterdam, of course, is not utopia.
It does display income inequality and ethnic segregation. Moreover, the substantial housing rights of sitting tenants make it very difficult for new comers to enter the city. Much of its postwar housing stock, which is occupied primarily by Turks and Moroccans, is well below contemporary standards and it is deteriorating, and few funds are embarked for its upgrading. The Green Heart, the large area of open space that makes the core of the Randstat and, along with the dominance of bicycle transport within central Amsterdam, represents the city’s environmental values is suffering from encroachments of various sorts.
Still, relative to the cities, Amsterdam does strongly embody progressive values. The explanation for its success lies in the intertwining of elements of politics, civic action, ideology, and planning. Whether this amalgam is transferable elsewhere and can be used to demonstrate the possibility of attaining the city we want is a vexing question. Indeed, whether Amsterdam itself can continue to sustain its current commitments in the face of middle-class demands for centrally located housing, the withdrawal of the central government from subsidizing new construction, the forces of international competition, and developmental pressures on open space remains to be seen.
Los Angeles offers a troubling contrast to Amsterdam. Despite an economic boom income inequality worsens, basic infrastructure deteriorates, the housing problems of low-income people worsen, school buildings crumble while class sizes grow, and a steady stream of incidents involving the police and people of color mark the racial divide. At the same time crime has dropped dramatically, survey results show Los Angeles people are feeling their city is improving, and the city has absorbed an astonishing number of new immigrants.
Los Angeles demonstrates that ethnic toleration can be quite compatible with economic inequality and, in fact, can foster it. Despite continued occurrences of racial and ethnic hostility, the city has readily absorbed millions of immigrants, mainly of color, in the last two decades. Its otherwise conservative mayor, Rudolf Giuliani, has welcomed them, and conservative thinkers have credited new immigrants with reviving deteriorated neighborhoods.
Unlike the other counterparts, Los Angeles politicians use nativist sentiments as a basis for electoral appeal. Although residential segregation persists, Los Angeles’s public spaces display an astonishing mixture of physical types, and except in certain ethnic enclaves, inter-racial relationships provoke little hostility. The city’s public bureaucracy disproportionately incorporates African Americans, and the school system celebrates the rainbow of identities represented in it.
Los Angeles shows the limits of diversity and tolerance of otherness as a basis for social reconstruction. Extreme income inequality and the persistence of “hyper ghettos” (Wacquant, 19xx) coexist with verbal recognition of multi-culturalism and a highly absorptive political system. Words cannot overcome inequalities in power fundamentally rooted in access to resources, even though a public rhetoric of exclusion and vilification would obviously make matters worse.
Bibliography
Musterd, Sako, Wim Ostendorf, and M. Breebart. 1998. Multi-Ethnic Metropolis. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell.