am Isterdam? - Wij-Amsterdam

http://www.wij-amsterdam.eu/

Wij-Amsterdam is a federation of co-operating neighbourhood associations in Amsterdam. It acts as an umbrella organization and represents more than twenty neighbourhood associations. The name, which can be translated to We or Us-Amsterdam, is a kind of jab/sneer to the 'I Amsterdam’-campaign of Amsterdam Marketing and the red and white letters at the museum square that attract thousands of tourists every day. Wij-Amsterdam tries to battle against the growing nuisance caused by tourists in their beloved city. However, tourism is not their only point of interest. They are concerned with the general liveability of the city, which is affected by more factors than just tourism. The inner-city centre is small, and the residents are concerned that the intensive use by all people that work, visit and make use of the city is disturbing the balance. Wij-Amsterdam admits that this special balance between work, living and recreation is what makes Amsterdam unique. However, this balance should be carefully monitored to ensure a liveable and pleasant surrounding for the residents of Amsterdam, as well as all users of the city.

Residents that have lived in Amsterdam for quite a while now started to notice that their city was changing. The streets fill up with more tourists every year, their surroundings change dramatically, and neighbours move away because of increasing rents and the continuous nuisance, which they cannot escape from. In addition, the economic infrastructure established for the residents is being suppressed and replaced by shops aimed at catering tourists. Because of these issues, some residents decided to take action and small neighbourhood associations were formed by volunteers. These initiatives inspired others to do the same but they often could not get the municipality to react to their complaints. That is why these different smaller associations decided to organize themselves as a co-operating federation in 2015 in order to present a stronger and more unified voice towards the municipality. Wij-Amsterdam started out with five organisations, but that number has now increased to twenty-seven.

Although every neighbourhood is different, mutual problems can be recognized. In voicing these problems together, the neighbourhood associations represent a more powerful claim. The municipality has shown a tendency to address complaints or remarks voiced by big companies, entrepreneurs, but residents often go unheard as shown in a recent report by the municipal ombudsman or counsellor. This states that residents often do not immediately address their complaints towards the municipality and may not be taken seriously. However, residents often have the possibility to offer expert knowledge on their neighbourhood which can be put to good use by the municipality when formulating policies. The goal of Wij-Amsterdam is to bring neighbourhood associations together and create a strong voice to improve liveability in their beloved Amsterdam. They see themselves as a "Platform of and for neighbourhood associations”.

“We (City of Amsterdam) are being destroyed by our image”

- Amsterdam resident

To achieve their goal of increasing liveability in the city, Wij-Amsterdam wants to exchange knowledge between the different associations, to strengthen each other but also to join forces to lobby and influence the municipality to investigate the complaints and form new policies to tackle the problem. In addition, the federation works together with independent organisations or other associations such as Amsterdam in Progress, with Stephen Hodes in particular as a consultant, and Stichting De Goede Zaak Amsterdam because of their specific expertise. Both these groups could be of great help in achieving their goals. In contrast to Amsterdam in Progress, Wij-Amsterdam is not an independent federation. They worked hard to get acknowledged by the municipality and now receive a small amount of funds to keep their organization running.

Wij-Amsterdam works hard to be a professional federation and operate in an efficient structured way to prove their competence towards the municipality and the outside world. The seven members of the Wij-Amsterdam board meet once a month. The bigger meetings, with all the member associations and partners take place four times a year. Our research group had the opportunity to follow one of these bigger meetings and this was a very enlightening experience.

The board distributes the agenda some time in advance to all the members via email. This agenda presents the main topics to discuss, announcements of upcoming events and the minutes from the previous meeting. The actual meetings are chaired by Isabel Blekxtoon, Jacob Stroet as the secretary and treasurer, Teun Hubar is vice-chairman and recently they have been reinforced by communication advisor Aaron Mirck . This division of tasks ensures that the meetings are productive and that discussions, remarks and solutions are written down correctly in the minutes. There is room at the end of the meeting to add complaints, suggestions, achievements that members want to share with the rest of the group. This protocol makes the meetings clearly regulated and highly productive.

Wij-Amsterdam shows concern for the future of Amsterdam. They see the city of Amsterdam as a smaller city that cannot handle these big numbers of tourists. They are demanding for something to be done now, because predictions state that these numbers (of tourists) will only increase in the future. They believe this means that overcrowding will only increase along with the nuisance the residents experience on a daily basis. Members of Wij-Amsterdam have expressed multiple times, in the press, during interviews and in writing to the municipality, that they are fed up and immensely annoyed by all the nuisance caused by tourism.

Most residents state that a monoculture has come to exist in the city centre. Local and diverse shops have had to close their doors because of an increase in rent, which became unaffordable for these small shop owners. Their shops have been replaced by franchises focused on catering to tourists such as Nutella and waffle shops, souvenir stores, etc. According to the residents, the city is being adapted to the needs of the tourists and they are often forgotten. They want to prevent the disneyfication and touristification of their city at all costs.

“Amsterdam is not a theme park – and I want to keep it that way, because I live here.”

- Jacob Stroet (board member)

A lot of residents mention that they think tourists show aggravating behaviour. They walk in the middle of the roads, pedestrians block the sidewalks by constantly stopping to take pictures or to look something up on their smartphones and most of the tourists that rent out bikes do not even know how to ride them properly. So they ignore traffic regulation, hinder passageways and make it increasingly difficult for residents to move around in their city. A short video, created by the team of the municipal ombudsman/counsellor portrays the situation, examples of traffic violations, honking at night and public urinating, in one particular area of the city centre.

Noise disturbance is one of the complaints that has come even more to the foreground. Residents express that they have already been battling these problems for decades. Bars and clubs stay open until late in the night, providing people with alcohol which causes a lot of drunken tourists to wander the streets causing nuisance. The residents feel like these people act in an inconsiderate manner and do not think of the effect of their behaviour has on the surroundings, they just go ahead and do as they please. They see Amsterdam as the city of freedom. They visit but do not respect the city or its residents.

Holiday rentals have also come up more during meetings as a lot of new hotels have opened the doors in the past years in Amsterdam. These hotels can have a huge influence on the dynamics of a city’s neighbourhood. However, the recent ‘hotel stop’ policy, which prohibits new hotels from opening in the city centre, seems to promise some progress in that area. Airbnb has also been a source of contention over the past few years. It is a lucrative way for residents to make some extra money, but it has also been one of the causes of increasing rent prices and pricing people out of their homes. Recent regulation says that you can rent out your home for a maximum of 60 days a year. Wij-Amsterdam has been trying to reduce these years to at least 30 days, but preferably even none.

Wij- Amsterdam does not want to just complain, they are looking for solutions, ways to implement them or ways to change policies. Therefore, they are open for dialogue with the community, municipality and state government. Although Wij-Amsterdam thinks the municipality has ignored and denied the problem for too long, and while they believe them to work very slow, the federation is still trying to find a constructive way to improve the situation within the available (political) system and institutional structures although they know this is a slow process and a lot of lobbying is needed.

The municipality and the policy makers believe that the current situation is providing a flourishing economy, besides few of them live in the city centre. “They work in the centre, but in the evening, they go home to villages just outside Amsterdam,” says Jacob Stroet. “They do not experience the city as a resident, they don’t notice what is really happening. For a long while they have denied the changes we as residents saw in the city.” The proposed solutions by the city council have so far also proven to be inefficient according to Wij-Amsterdam. Take for example the proposition to increase the tourist tax. The members of Wij-Amsterdam think that increasing this tax from 5 to 6% will not stop the tourists from coming, it would only be a symbolic measure. They believe that this will increase the income of the city, but it will not reduce the tourist influx. If the money would flow into repairing some of the negative results of tourism, such as cleaning the streets or more law enforcement, maybe the situation would improve. Yet, so far, the promised benefits Amsterdam would get out of tourism are not noticed by the residents.

"Wij-Amsterdam tries to help and communicate with the municipality and other parties in a critical but constructive and positive way.”

Twice a year, at council meetings, they receive a time slot of three minutes to voice their findings, opinions or concerns. Wij-Amsterdam voices multiple complaints with the increasing touristification being one of them. In light of the upcoming elections, Wij-Amsterdam has published an evaluation document of the election campaigns manifestos of the different political parties. The evaluation is based on six aspects they consider important: 1) Business and balance, 2) Touristic rentals, 3) Monoculture of shops, 4) Events, 5) (law) Enforcement and 6) Resident participation. In this twenty-two pages long document, Wij-Amsterdam analyses the political parties, to see if they talk about the six aspects, and if so what promises they make. At the end of the document they have provided a summarising overview of the results in the form of a table with different colours, ranging from red, negative, to green, positive. With this evaluation, Wij-Amsterdam does not want to influence the voter, but they want to create awareness amongst the residents and politicians of Amsterdam and raise interesting questions during the election debates.

“I think it is a shame that politicians are still so ignorant on the subject of tourism."

- Jeroen van der Hulst (board member)

In the past they have tried to shed light upon the subjects of livability and touristification by regularly talking to news media and giving interviews to local newspapers, television and radio stations. They have a website where they share general information, official documents and letters. These include letters of complaint directed towards the municipality concerning the 24h-opening hours of shops, propositions about stricter policies, their position on the new event policy and opinion pieces about the situation concerning mass tourism. Aside from the website they also have their own Facebook page through which they inform and communicate with their followers and share interesting newspaper articles related to the topic of tourism and liveability, accompanied by a short opinionated text. Just recently Aaron Mirck has started Wij-Amsterdam’s own Instagram and Twitter account under the name ‘@hetishiergeenvenetie’ (which translates to This is not Venice) to compliment the Facebook page in their presence on social media. Wij-Amsterdam wants to reach as many people as possible in the city centre to stand with them and create awareness even beyond these borders of the highway. They want people to realize that there are problems emanating from tourism in Amsterdam.

In addition, a member of Wij-Amsterdam is working on translating interesting court cases and minutes of meetings of neighbourhood associations in Valencia, Strasbourg and other European cities. This serves as inspiration to come up with new ideas to tackle the problem of tourism. Further, this can prove helpful in creating a larger European network. For example, in Valencia, the municipality has to pay a fine to all the residents that lodged a complaint but were never answered. Because one of the residents had enough of the city’s negligence, he decided to take the case to the International Court of Justice where they ruled that the noise disturbance from the busy, unregulated streets was a breach of privacy and that the noise entering his house prevented him from enjoying the comfort of his home. This creates jus predentia, and can be used by Wij-Amsterdam to compel the municipality to take their complaints more seriously.

Wij-Amsterdam and its individual associations have achieved some positive results in the past years. They regard these as small victories and in their eyes a lot more needs to be done to increase the city’s liveability again. The following wins are examples of little steps in the right direction: Wij-Amsterdam was asked to join the meeting with the city council to debate the new event policy; it was able to convince the members to lower the maximum allowed decibels from 85 to 80, and the event’s ending time from 12 a.m. to 11 p.m. Additionally, some associations have been successful in transforming some streets and squares in their neighbourhood into car free zones.