Dr. Leon Deben, what a distinguished gentleman!

Today, our activities and discussion focused on Bijlmermeer, a former ghetto in the south-east of Amsterdam.  We began our morning meeting at 8:30, as per usual, but as it had been a few days since our last scheduled early morning activity, I and many of my comrades seemed a bit out-of-sorts.  Nonetheless, we listened attentively to our expert of the day, Leon Deben, a self-described “Urban Sociologist” and “Urban Geographer.”

Leon began his lecture with a short history of his life, describing how he grew up in a small village in the south of the Netherlands where he spoke a German dialect, rather than Dutch.  Later in life, he studied at the University of Utrecht and then finally moved to Amsterdam in 1970, where he started working as a planning advisor in a private organization before he got a job as a professor in the Sociology & Anthropology Department at the University of Amsterdam specializing in urban sociology, which includes housing, building, city planning, and the way people live their lives in an urban environment.  Some of his research has involved living on house boats, living as a squatter, living as an urban nomad, and, most importantly to him, living as a homeless person, whom he saw as indicators of success or failure of social systems.  This research focused on counting the numbers of homeless living in the city of Amsterdam, those “sleeping rough” in his words.  He is now retired, but still teaches at the international school.

Next, he gave us some background on the Bijlmer itself.  Construction began on this unique urban planning experiment in December of 1966, which was planned after WWII as an almost luxurious housing district meant to house 100,000 people.  According to the most modern theory in urban planning at the time, the area would be segregated into commercial, recreational, and residential sections.  By 1969, the newly constructed apartment blocks had their first residents, but it soon becamse clear that the 18,000 units were not filling up as planned despite the shortage of housing at the time.  Due to unplanned-for maintenance costs and the unanticipated side effects of building streets above ground level, which created large out-of-sight areas perfect for the proliferation of criminal activity, the area quickly became run-down and unsafe, and by 1985 25-33% of the units were unoccupied.  The area soon began to attract people who couldn’t find or afford anywhere else to live.  Of course, this demographic included many of the Surinamers who emmigrated to the Netherlands after Surinam gained its independence around 1975, as well as many immigrants from the Dutch Antilles, and even today, the Bijlmer is home to the largest communities of Surinamese, Antillean, and Ghanan immigrants in the Netherlands.  A group of inhabitants, called the “Bijlmer Believers” took arms agains the problems of the area, focusing on the advantages of Bijlmer, including the large greens between the honeycomb-shaped apartment blocks, it’s spacious lay out, etc.  They campaigned for facilities like a children’s zoo, a local broadcast station, and bars run by local volunteers.  Despite this effort, many of the area’s issues continued into the early 90′s.

The kids love their new-fangled culture!

In 1992, the “reconstruction” of the area started, including spatial, social, and management renewal.  6,500 of the original 12,500 flats were demolished, storage spaces notorious for inhabitation by squatters were repurposed, and the elevated roads were lowered down to ground level to remove the unsafe places beneath them.  The demolished buildings were replaced with 7,2oo new units, 30% of which are free market rentals, 40% were owner occupied, and 30% were social housing.  Childcare facilities, facilities for ethnic minorities’ organizations, health centers, sports facilities, a new cultural building, and new primary schools were constructed, and art and culture were stimulated in the area.

Everyone loves a petting zoo.

Of course, now that we’d heard all of this, it was time to visit Bijlmer in person.  So we all hopped on the bus to the metro station and took our first (or at least my first) Amsterdam metro ride out to this strange and mysterious land that we had just heard oh-so-much about.  Arriving in Bijlmer, I could immediately tell that this place used to be a ghetto, and that it was probably not somewhere where I would want to be wandering aimessly around at night, but at the same time, compared to the description we had been given of the area in the 70′s and 80′s, it seemed downright tame, with children playing in the numerous playgrounds on the greens, nice art adorning the sides of the apartments, and even a petting zoo!  It seems as though the so-called “reconstruction” of the Bijlmer neighborhood was largely a success, turning the area into, if nothing else, a much prettier place to be.

Pretty, Pretty Art.

And so, we wandered through the neighborhood, stopping occasionally to listen to explanations by Leon, and noting as we went the difference between the older housing that hadn’t been torn down during the restoration and the snazzy new apartment buildings and town-houses, as well as the various childcare centers, parks, and otherwise reconstructed spaces that seemed to strive for a higher standard of safety than in their earlier days.  However, as we walked, I noticed something else: we were somehow very out of place.  How?  We were a large group of light-skinned, primarily European students wandering around a neighborhood where, I now realized, I had seen one, maybe two white people the entire time we had been there.  The description of this neighborhood as “the largest communities of Surinamese, Antillean, and Ghanan immigrants in the Netherlands” is something of an understatement.  The ethnic fabric of the Bijlmer is completely different than that of the rest of Amsterdam, and especially of the Netherlands as a whole, which is quite visibly predominantly ethnically Dutch.

Delicious Surinamese food served here.

This interesting realization set the stage for our entrance into the market and the Surinamese restaurant where we ate lunch.  I had never eaten Surinamese food before today and I was pleasantly surprised.  The first dish we ate was essentially just a little piece of toasted baguette with some meat and cucumber slices, which really just tasted like a French dip.  Nothing special, but not bad.  The second dish, however, was really different.  We were given a pile of pita-like, spongy bread “pockets” along with potatoes in a brown sauce, small seasoned green beans, and chicken, also in a red-brown sauce.   This was, despite sounding like something you would be served in a Mexican restaurant back in the U.S., a very unique and delicious dish.  “And what is this,” I thought to myself, “a mango chutney, or something?”  I was told that this sauce that had accompanied all of this great food was very hot, but I was caught a little bit off guard when, after dipping the end of my fork in the sauce, wiping it off, and then lightly touching the fork to my tongue, my mouth felt like it was on fire.  Of course, being me, I proceeded to put this diabolical condiment in my “Surinamese taco” so that I could experience, from time to time, the light kiss of what I now believe to be distilled essence of Habanero.  A word of advice, if you ever come across this stuff, do not, and I repeat, do not dip your pinky in it and lick it off as you leave the restaurant.   I could still feel the burn half-an-hour later as we entered the city center via the metro that left from the lovely Bijlmer train station.

This picture doesn't even begin to show just how cool this train station is... just trust me on this one.

Upon our return to the dorms, we had a short break in preparation for presentation of our progress on our research projects.  Without going into a whole lot of detail on this affair, it was nice to present our topics and research methods to local Amsterdam residents (as well as scholars), and they were incredibly helpful in providing constructive feedback.  They didn’t mince words and I felt that this really allowed them to get to the root of some of the nitty-gritty problems with our research thus far.  Personally, I think the most useful advice that they gave our group was that we needed to be very careful about how we framed the information and conclusions that we presented so as not to seem as though we were making baseless claims.

Wrap this evening up with a trip to Burgermeester and some Dr. Pepper floats in the courtyard and this turned into quite the eventful day.  I just hope the rest of our time here proves to be as eventful and stimulating.  That’s all for now.  I leave you with wisdom from Leon and his take on the work of the “Bijlmer Believers”:

My biggest concern for your project is the more origin-related questions. For example, by just looking, it may be hard to make any really good conclusions about “the purpose with which transportation networks have developed” or the way that transportation networks change in response to tourist movements through the city. I’m sure you can make this investigation work, but you would probably have to bring in historical research on Amsterdam’s transportation system as well in order to make really concrete conclusions on how the transportation has responded to such pressures through time, which may or may not be what you are going for.

What effect does the bicycling culture of Amsterdam have on the overall health of its citizens?

However, this question still is far too broad for the time we have and has an impossibly huge number of ways to test and answer it, so to focus it a bit more, I would suggest something more along the lines of:

How does frequent bicycle use in Amsterdam affect the health of the city’s urban youth?

With this question, we can limit our study to a much more specific group, making the investigation much easier to focus. By looking specifically at urban youth, we can create questions catered specifically to them rather than to the entire population. Also, to answer this question we could look at how frequently urban youth make visits to the doctor, how frequently they have to stay home due to illness, and even investigate appetite and average hours of sleep per night. I feel that focusing the question to a specific group like this will help to make it manageable in the time we have in Amsterdam. It doesn’t even have to be urban youth, I just think that they might be the most accessible.

However, because our focus is on healthcare as a whole, we decided to visit the UW Medical Center (UWMC) with the thought of social research as a study of variables with definable measures (from the Ragin article).  As with most medical facilities in the U.S., the defining feature of the UWMC’s facade is that of sterility.  Everything in the main thoroughfares and waiting areas of the Medical Center proper is white or muted in tone.  Individual clinics in the center make decor decisions that focus more on making patients and family members comfortable with warm tones and lighting, but everything is always made to look clean.  A specific way that this is achieved is through the cleaning stations and pedestals sporting anti-septic hand wash at regularly-spaced and always readily apparent locations throughout the hospital, encouraging the notion that the environment is completely sterile, regardless of whether anyone uses the hand wash (a good metric for this relationship would be to ask hospital visitors their feelings on how clean specific locations in the hospital are and comparing this to the number of washing stations visible from that point).  Even the lighting, which focuses heavily on the use of natural and light fluorescent lighting gives the place the feeling of sterility.

The arrangement is not logical, but is simple, with an information desk right at the front of the lobby and the major hallway of the hospital extending the length of the Meical Center on either side of the desk.  Centers are aranged regularly around this thoroughfare and up the elevators on either end of the lobby, but the facade and the clean quality of the place are definitely the primary focus of the entry space of the UW Medical Center.

This generically-titled blog is headed with a big blue banner proclaiming the title, then as you move down past some tiny links to significant parts of the blog, you reach the blog’s description, essentially boiling down to “[this neighborhood/real-estate blog] focuses on life and things to do in Austin,” and finally to the posts, with links and other miscellaneous items on the right side.  In terms of its use of space, this blog fits with every social norm I can think of for web layout.  The only slightly out-of-ordinary thing is that the text is displayed over a light blue background instead of a white one.

The blog makes good use of the standard individual-posting-dominated-home-page-with-miscellaneous-information-and-links-on-the-side…*deep breath*… format.  It seems custom designed with the posts taking most of the space in the center, but with very little deliniation between them, as though they were all a running post.  However, the author doesn’t seem to consciously use this facet of the website’s organization to much effect, writing each post as a discrete entity that doesn’t really ever refer to any others.  The real way the author  uses the customized formating is in the side bar, which give large picture-links to his contact information, blog facebook page, a rudimentary blog search option, and then recent posts and recent comments sections.  He makes the blog layout facilitative to getting ahold of him personally, and in this way, the blog directs its traffic toward him with its organization.

Of course, very little Concerning the blog’s content, the images and text focus primarily, not on any structures within the urban space of Austin themselves, but rather on those structures’ and spaces’ utilities and interactions with the people of Austin.  For example, the 4/29/10 post begins with a large schematic of a viaduct, but the actual text of the post begins with “downtown Austin’s stretch of I-35 will receive some much needed improvements,” indicating a focus on how the structure’s presence will affect the people interacting with it rather than the structure itself.

Finally, I think the biggest way I “played” in this exploration was through challenging myself to find a blog that matched my original explectations of what I was searching for most completely.  In this way, the play becomes, socially, a method of finding an object to meet one’s immediate needs and context.

This first image jumped out at me for a few reasons.  The first is the close proximity of the streetcar to the street-side businesses and the people in between.  At first, this may not seem so strange, but having lived in Seattle for my entire life, I can’t think of another place where I’ve seen this type of infrastructural set-up.  In the U.S. rather than running streetcars right by the sidewalk, we would always occupy that space with a lane for cars, or at the very least some parking spaces.  To me, the arrangement in this picture, along with the number of people on foot and multiple bicycles parked along the sidewalk, suggests that streetcars must be used much more often than cars in this particular setting.  Judging by the content of other pictures in the group, where cars are not only conspicuously absent most of the time, but there also seems to be little space for them in the streets in general, I would tend to think that this is true throughout the city rather than just in this particular location.  This is an interesting cultural difference in and of itself, but to me it suggests something else: that the people of this particular city tend to favor a more ambulatory lifestyle, with commonly occupied spaces much more closely situated and public transit well-developed and stream-lined within major urban centers.

Another detail to note about this image is the size of the shops and the constant presence of apartments situated above.  In Seattle, and the U.S. in general for that matter, businesses on busy urban streets are set up quite differently, often sprawling and taking up a subsection of the first floor of a large skyscraper primarily devoted to offices for various businesses on the upper floors.  Here, the set-up is quite different.  Each business of the street level only spans maybe 15-20 feet maximum and is contained within its own separate building.  Rather than renting out a portion of a huge building, these businesses occupy the bottom floor of an individual building that is seemingly squeezed into a tightly-packed latticework of other buildings, all of which seem to contain one or more living spaces on the floors above.  To me, this resembles an environment similar to that of the University of Washington, where housing is urbanized in this way out of necessity so that students, who can’t afford the luxury of a car, can live close to both the University and the businesses that they must frequent to buy food, clothing, etc.  However, this setting with its ACE Jewelers and high-end clothing store, seems like a more upscale area, suggesting to me that this set-up is the norm in this city, with people living within easy walking distance of their work, their sources of products, and any transportation they may need.

This image also speaks to me of this city’s vastly different mentality when it comes to housing and common methods of transportation.  If you’ve spent your life in Seattle, you might not find this image particularly odd, as Seattle has a relatively large and widely-spread houseboat community.  However, if you look closely, it becomes apparent that this set-up is quite different.  Notice the bridge in the background and the cement structure that Dr. Corser is standing on.  That is not a large body of water, that’s a canal!  These houses, like the apartments in the picture above, are tightly-packed individual structures, but in this case, they are fully integrated into the structure of this urban canal.  And notice the number of small boats attached to these houses and on the near side of the canal.  This canal is not just something to look at and appreciate, it is a legitimate thoroughfare for transportation through the city.  Even the inhabitants of houseboats on Lake Washington seldom commute by boat, they just appreciate living on the water.  Here though, the water has been put to use and incorporated into the city’s infrastructure, allowing the inhabitants of these houses as streamlined method of transportation from place to place along the canals of the city.

Together, these pictures paint a picture of certain cultural differences between the United States and the Netherlands.  In the U.S. a huge emphasis is placed on privacy of habitation and transportation, as well as space.  Generally, one would live outside of urban centers in an individual house unconnected to any others, and then drive your own car to work inside the city proper.  In the Netherlands, the attitude seems quite different: one would generally live within the city, necessitating tightly-packed living-spaces and stream-lined methods of transportation within the city itself.  Rather than using your own car, which besides just taking up a lot of space that a densly-packed city can’t afford to waste, is indicative of widely-dispersed and varied living and work environments that cannot be easily reached by major thoroughfares (and therefore public transporation), the people of a Netherlandish city would instead make efficient use of other, more rigid methods of transportation because they can easily get them where they need to go.

Some questions that these pictures bring out:  Are the canals actually still extensively used as a point-to-point method of transportation, or do people just boat to major transit centers and depart for their final destination from there?  Also, given the extreme density of the city, does it generally expand outward as the population increases, or are buildings just built higher to accommodate more living space?

One other question that I feel might be quite enlightening of cultural views of space of the people of the Netherlands is this: do the individual buildings share the walls in between them, with one built onto the existing structure of the other, or is each building its own independent structure, with its own external walls butting up against those of its neighbors?   The answer to this question I feel would give some kind of indication as to how the people view the permanence of these structures with relation to the structures surrounding them and how this permanence relates to conceptions of private property.