Amsterdam S Red-Light District

Urban Struggle

Red Light District

Overview

Introduction 3

Outline of the paper 4

Theory 5

Eyes upon the street 5

Gentrification 6

Method 8

Observations 8

Interviews 8

Sample 8

Results 9

Eyes upon the street 9

Gentrification: The recreation of the Red-Light District 11

Discussion of the Findings 13

Conclusion 15

References 16

Appendix overview 17

Appendix A: Responsibility report 19

Appendix B: Interviews 20

Appendix C: Observations 65

Appendix D: Interview Guide 107

Introduction

The Red-light district could be described as a bubble in the city. It is a separate reality, co-existing with the rest of the city, but on its own terms. If passing by, the half naked brothel girls in the red illuminated windows seem unimaginable. They are a part of the cityscape with their flirting, smiling and knocking as they are trying to make a living by inviting men inside. Furthermore, we have the coffee shops filled with tourists, neon lights illuminating the street corners and the sex toys shops - the one more provocative than the last.

But behind this facade of promiscuous girls, neon lights and flocks of tourists something else is going on. The authorities of Amsterdam are trying to decrease criminality in the Red-light district. With Project 1012 they want to maintain the typical characteristics of the Red-light district but also add new types of businesses in order to create a more diverse area in order to attract a wider array of visitors.

When doing our observations, we could not miss to notice the designer shops and art galleries in the streets, just adjacent to the prostitutes and coffee shops. The City of Amsterdam has since 2004 also worked together with the police, residents and businesses to develop a safer environment in the area. The security cameras are an evident reminder of the efforts into making the area safer and so are the police strolling around in the streets. Buildings that earlier housed brothels have been sold to other types of businesses, like artists and designers.

We want to discover these well-intentioned attempts to recreate the area. Perhaps the tourists will benefit from a safer area, but what consequences will this have for the future of the area? With the project 1012 as our frame, we have found two themes – safety and gentrification. Our informants all felt very safe, so in that way the project have been a success. But we also discovered that the safety initiatives and house sales to designers forced other sections of the population away from the neighborhood. Unwanted people. This schism between an intention to increase safety, but on the other hand risking processes of gentrification, is the focus of this paper. The paper is thus structured around the question: How do the users of Red-Light District experience the changes following Project 1012, and how has it affected their perception of safety in the area?

To guide our research, we have investigated these sub questions, which constitutes the basis for our interview-guide and research in general:

1. What makes people feel safe?

a. Is there an effect of “eyes on the street”?

b. How do people feel about surveillance?

2. How can the initiatives of Project 1012 be seen as gentrification?

a. Are there some people who “benefits” more than others from these changes?

b. What indicators does the informants articulate regarding the “changes”

3. How can Project 1012 be seen as a contribution to safety in the area?

Outline of the paper

The paper reflects our twofold focus about safety and gentrification. First, in the section methods, we explain our choice of methods and how we framed and conducted our research. Second, in the section theory, we present the theories that have guided our focus in the research. These will be used to explain our findings and how we link these to the two themes – safety and gentrification. Third, a presentation and analysis of our results will follow. Fourth, in the discussion, we discuss our findings in relation to our theories, we also discuss two central paradoxes. Finally, a final conclusion will be presented.

Theory

In this chapter we will describe the theories we used as a theoretical background to our research

Eyes upon the street

According to Jane Jacobs (2010) a city can be characterized as a place of strangers with the important criterion for success that people must feel safe and secure on the street among all these strangers (Jacobs, 2010). Further, she states: “when people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle, what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks” (Jacobs, 2010, p. 273). This is for us an interesting perspective since our focus is on the Red Lights District – where there are a lot of strangers; both the inhabitants and the large number of tourist, and on how people’s perception of safety are in the area. For Jacobs, it takes certain qualities to make a street safe: The most relevant in this case must be eyes upon the street and that people use the sidewalks continuously (Jacobs, 2010). Jacobs will be elaborated further in the following part, while George Simmel and Michel Foucault will succinctly be featured to nuance and challenge her.

Especially important in creating safety are the stores along the streets, because they give people reasons to use the sidewalks and because the storekeepers have an interest in maintaining a secure environment. This interest stems from the desire of wanting people to buy things from their shops and from the fact that e.g. vandalism on shops is expensive (Jacobs, 2010). Therefore shopkeepers feel a responsibility for the streets and keep an eye upon it and thereby they generate safety and are great street watchers. On the other hand, “a deserted city street is apt to be unsafe” (Jacobs, 2010, p. 276). So there should be a certain amount of people using the streets frequently to make them safe. But public peace is not only a function of storekeepers and the number of users, or police for that matter; it is also a more complex phenomena being upheld by voluntary control of the people themselves. Thereby, people are more or less conscious involved in - or at least watching, the streets and each other (Jacobs, 2010). This notion can though be contradicted by the blasé attitude of Simmel (2010). According to him, people who live in the city relate to each other in a so-called blasé manner, because of over-stimulated nerves. As consequence people have a reserved and indifferent attitude toward each other and order exists because of precision and coordination, and not because of interaction or involvement (Simmel, 2010). This attitude might have an impact on safety as people act reserved toward each other. Foucault (2010) has a different approach to control which also can be related to safety, by him it can be explained through the metaphor of Panopticon: People are self-disciplined and controlled by the possibility of being observed; the few watch the many (Foucault, 2010). This is in line with Jacobs’s (2010) notion about the shopkeepers; where the few shopkeepers keep an eye upon the street, but it is also in contradiction, as she does not highlight external circumstances as being that important and with Foucault’s (2010) terms externalities as police and security cameras could be seen as the ‘few’ who watch the many.

Gentrification

Back in 1876, in London’s late-Victorian time, the prostitute was the quintessential female figure of the urban scene. For men as well as women, the prostitute was the central spectacle in a set of urban encounters and fantasies. From 1849, in the time of Cholera, sanitary reformers started to identify the prostitute as the conduit of infection to respectable society because she ‘carried the heavy scent of the masses’ and therefore they were perceived as not only a physical but also a moral form of pollution and in 1886 they started moving prostitutes to other quarters to keep them from the public eye (Walkowitz, 2010).

This can be seen as a form of gentrification. One result is a higher occupancy rate of the remaining windows, which implies higher rents charged to the women, who don’t charge higher rates to the ‘Johns’, and more money made by the building owners renting out the windows; in other words, the women carry the brunt of this equation (Aalbers & Sabat, 2012).

Gentrification is a dynamic that emerges in urban area’s when residential changes, urban planning and other phenomena affect the composition of a neighbourhood. Urban gentrification often involves migration of residents of a neighbourhood. In a community undergoing gentrification, the average income decreases (Smith, 2010).

Architecture and urban space are designed to show only what we want people to see.

Mike Davis’ (2010) extract looks at some of the micro politics of the treatment of the underclass, especially as it relates to the built form of the city, in what he calls the sadistic street environments of downtown LA at a larger scale, the redevelopment of certain neighbourhoods downtown effectively segregates rich and poor and eliminates all reference to its past (Davis, 2010). We are always hardening the streets against the people we don’t want there anymore to make sure people feel safer (Davis, 2010). We tend to erase traces of the lower class to increase the image of the neighbourhood (Smith, 2010).

One of the practices of Plan 1012 was to place artists and designers in spaces of the former light windows, the artists that have taken part in this project are known as ‘marginal gentrifiers.’ Marginal gentrifiers are groups with little economic capital, but a great deal of cultural capital, they may be seen as people who are not rich, but their presence reinforce or jumpstart gentrification processes (Aalbers & Sabat, 2012).

Method

This chapter describes out methods and the way we’ve collected the empirical data for this research

Our empirical data relies on two sources: qualitative interviews and ethnographical observations. These methods provide us the best opportunity to get insight to our informant’s personal experiences, combined with our own subjective insight. In total, we conducted 14 interviews and 14 observations; transcribed interviews and observation-notes can be found in the appendix.

Observations

The observations are done as our attempt to get a personal, subjective insight of the area, and

have also been used to form the design of the interview-guide. The observations were done on

different days and times. Because we wanted to take advantage of our subjectivity, we did not

use a specific observation-guide. However, we intended to make the observations as

descriptive as possible.

Interviews

The interviews are created in a semi-structured manner around the project’s sub-questions,

presented in the introduction. However, due to a (intended) diverse set of informants, we

allow our informants to form and shape the interviews, instead of following a too strict

structure.

Sample

The informants are chosen on the streets of Red-light district or in the adjacent streets. Before

we invite them for interview, they are asked about their relation to the area. In order to catch

the diversity of the area, we aimed at having a very diverse composition of informants, thus

the only requirement for them was to have a relation to the area (working, living, or

frequenting). We did, however, not include any tourists in our sample, because our

informants should have a longer experience with the area, and further because a tourist may

not be aware of any “change” in the area following Project 1012.

Results

The results show our findings from the fieldwork for this paper, the results are divided in two central themes; safety and gentrification.

Eyes upon the street

The main theme in our interviews was the perception of safety in the Red Light District. We have asked our respondents how safe they were feeling. While some people may think that the Red Light District is unsafe, some of the respondents described the area, as the safest place of Amsterdam. For example, a male, who is working as a bouncer in a live sex theatre states that: “This is actually maybe the most, lest say the safest place in Amsterdam.” (Middle-aged man, bouncer). All informants said that they felt safe during day and some of them – especially females – said that they felt a little less safe at night time. A local women we interviewed stated: “I have to walk over to Central Station at 05.45, and then there’s nobody around except for instance strange man who start talking to you (…) that just gives me an unsafe feeling.” (Resident (29), Female, p.31).

In general, informants felt safe and secure, the unanimous answer to the question why people felt so safe was: the amount of police on the street, the cameras that are recording everything that happens and the number of people on the streets. These aspects will be elaborated in the following part.

First of all, in the Red Light District a lot of police are supervising the streets and all the respondents were convinced that if something happens or goes wrong, the police will be there in any minute. The bouncer at the live sex theatre said: “There is so much control here. There is so much police. There are so much cameras. They say this like (…) a mat where the queen walks on? (…) They call this piece the carpet of Amsterdam.” (Live sex theatre bouncer (44), male, p.24) .