Normalizing Displacement: Cinematic Representations of Gentrifying Amsterdam

Focusing on recent cinematic depictions of Amsterdam, this paper discusses the relation between the socio-spatial processes of gentrification and their popular culture representations. Formerly taken as an exemplar of inclusive, democratic urbanism, in recent years Amsterdam has been characterized by increased socio-spatial polarization. Gentrification is evident in the rapidly growing middle-class residential presence in the historical city center and in the associated assertion of consumptive and cultural middle-class practices. Drawing on popular Dutch films in which Amsterdam’s city life is a central feature, we argue that these representations not only document or reflect the recent social transformations. In addition, they serve to normalize and even glamorize urban gentrification. This normalization of a classed and ethnicized urban order is produced through narrative structure and – even more forcefully – through visual techniques.  In the recent productions on which this paper focuses, the city of Amsterdam plays an important role, not so much in terms of plot and decor, but as a spatial imaginary in which urban inequalities are mapped onto symbolic sites and landscapes.  While the spaces and agents of gentrification are glamourized, peripheral , non-gentrifying neighborhoods and their inhabitants are visualized and stigmatized as underworld spaces of vice and squalor. The films portray middle-class, White protagonists, while Urban Others in terms of class and ethnicity serve mainly as a foil to these “normal” Amsterdammers. Parallel to the forms of physical and social displacement that gentrification causes in Amsterdam, these cinematic representations can be understood as effecting the cultural displacement of racialized and ethnicized non-White and lower-class White residents. Studying gentrification processes in Amsterdam in light of their cinematic representation, we argue that in their celebration of urban middle-class and elite consumptive practices and life-styles, these representations serve to legitimize a newly unequal urban order.