Sleepwalkers

Read in Forum (VNO NCW magazine) of 20 August 2015:

Bingo! Three in two days: first ‘Alle kaarten op Amsterdam?’ (‘Amsterdam only?’) in Forum, magazine of Dutch employers union VNO NCW, second, on saturday, the Vonk-special of de Volkskrant on ‘De verhipte stad’ (‘The kinky city’) and three: ‘Rotterdam is hot’ in the Amsterdam based newspaper Het Parool. Which city wins? (Which city do you hate?) You get the feeling a national battle between cities is going on, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the first place. Forum journalist Paul Scheer comes from Rotterdam, so his interview with me was very much biased. Headline: ‘Alleen Amsterdam kan meekomen’ (‘Only Amsterdam has a chance’). Stupid of course and, yes, something to feel sorry about. De Volkskrant made fun of it: ‘Dure huizen, rijke mensen, koffietentjes en yoga. Veel yoga’ (‘Expensive houses, rich people, coffee shops and yoga. Much yoga’). Message: Amsterdam works like a magnet (picture: Jasper Rietman). According to the national newspaper there are two categories of people nowadays: those who are living in Amsterdam, those who are not yet living there.

De Volkskrant presented five statistics that illustrate there is something going on in Amsterdam: fast growth of the Amsterdam population, local workforce is becoming international, lots of immigrants from western countries, housing prices steeply rising, housing market becoming a buyers market. These are all facts you cannot deny. The difference between Amsterdam and the rest is growing bigger. Amsterdam should double its size. In Het Parool though the Rotterdam marketing machine behaved in an agressive way: ‘Amsterdam thinks it is happening there, but that will change. When I see Amsterdam news, it is often negative’. How sad. This national battle between the Dutch lilliputter cities is pitiful and lacks the global dimension. By the way, Rohan Silva warned Mr. Cameron that London could follow New York and lose its creative class. “In New York, people are decamping to LA and I think we’ve really got to be careful in London that people don’t pick another city and choose to go there. Because the moment a city starts to lose its artists, things can fall apart and the city might lose its edge." (Dezeen 23 May 2015). But Rotterdam is not LA and Amsterdam is not New York. It made me think of Christopher Clark’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’, in which this Australian historian described the confrontational attitude of European nations and empires on the eve of the Great War: cities behaving irresponsible, like nation-states.