Imagining Amsterdam

"Tourism imaginaries renegotiate political and social realities. [There is a] fierce local (and national) power struggle over globally circulating tourism imaginaries seeking to redefine peoples and places"

(Salazar & Graburn, 2013, p. 17)

Imaginaries have been defined as “representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and that are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices” (Salazar and Graburn, 2013, p. 1). Unlike personal imaginings, imaginaries are widely shared by people and have widespread global circulation. Tourism imaginaries can be studied through what people say and do but also through their material incarnation in hotels, museums, heritage sites, media and cultural productions (Salazar and Graburn, 2013).

Tourism imaginaries may have their genesis in wider sociocultural frameworks outside of tourism itself, such as the family and the school and feed from schemata such as general world-views, understanding of geography and fixed notions of self and alterity. They are produced and propagated by professional image-makers and marketers, by popular media and artistic production; for instance, Irvine Welsh’ novel, "Eurotrash" and Ian Mcewan’s noir novel, "Amsterdam" (Booker prize, 1998) popularized the image of Amsterdam as a laboratory for alternative lifestyles with a dangerous edge (de Ward, 2012, p. 12). Other media include maps, press reports, blogs, Youtube channels, testimonies and photographs of returning tourists, NGOs and development campaigns posters. Tourism imaginaries are ongoing narratives being constantly updated by tourists accounts and new events.

It is not uncommon that tourism imaginaries, however they are generated, objectify human groups and places in line with hegemonic discourses as is the case with the West’s exoticisations of ‘remote’, non-Western cultures. When professionally produced with consumption in mind, tourism imaginaries tend to exaggerate novelty and difference and to neglect or even hide commonality while placing a high value on ‘authenticity’. The pursuit of the latter in combination with novelty tends to produce staged or fake authenticity.

The concept of tourism imaginaries is considered relevant for the understanding of the situation in which our stakeholders find themselves because imaginaries are agentive: they ascribe meaning to physical places and determine how places are to be perceived and experienced by tourists. ‘Branded’ places become part of a global iconography and the act of visiting them can be central to the accumulation of symbolic (cosmopolitan) capital. Furthermore, imaginaries are grounded on relations of power and therefore cannot be politically neutral, as proven by many cases where those of tourists, residents and tourism intermediaries clash (Salazar and Graburn, 2013 p.16).

In the following subsections we present vignettes of instantiations of Amsterdam imaginaries, we address the associated phenomena of touristification and disneyfication and analyse whether and how they manifest themselves in Amsterdam as based on our fieldwork findings.

When Cool Goes Grass

The section, "Evolution of Tourism in Amsterdam" already enumerates sales pitches under which Amsterdam has been deliberately marketed as well as other aspects of the ‘Amsterdam mythology’ that pre-date marketing campaigns but have been later repackaged by them such as a sub/counter- cultural vibrant artistic scene with its ‘‘authentic’, ‘off-beat’ feel.

For many, a trip to Amsterdam represents an exercise in indulging their fantasies of freedom that borders on ritualistic (Stronza, 2001, p.266). British stag parties have come to encapsulate what appears to be a mutation in the consumption of Amsterdam liberal scene caused by the mainstreaming and commodification of this offer. This is voiced by Tiers Bakker (Socialist Party) in the political debate March 1st 2018, lead by AiP and by interviewed falafel shop employees in the red light district. Already in 2010 the BBC reported that more than 3 million British people go on stag and hen parties each year, with more than 70% of them going overseas and that Amsterdam is the most popular British stag party venue. (Boazman, 2010).

The Venice of the North

The Canal Belt itself, regardless of any specific attractions it may contain, is too poignant and distinct a landscape to not be prioritized and repeatedly visited by tourists. It is the city’s signature, its strongest visual marker; the busiest area in heat maps based on data from social media (photographs). In the absence of a red light district and of the so called ‘coffee shops’ or specific artistic heritage sites, it would continue to attract a high volume of visitors. Tourism studies have recently acknowledged that rather than just visiting attractions, “tourists consume place identity in a much broader sense, immersing themselves in the distinctive ambience of cities.” Amsterdam canals are indeed one of the main ambience-making features of the built landscape (Pinkster and Boterman, 2017, p.458).

We are All Tourists

When asked about ‘authenticity’ Steven Hodes (AiP), who worked for many years in tourism and planning, dismisses the whole idea as nonsense and instead proposes his vision of what make a tourist happy: the serendipitous encounter with a local, the unexpected bond with someone outside the industry, who fakes nothing. He recounts an anecdote where a local in a bar off the beaten track in Thailand became his one-time confidant for a couple of hours of genuine communication. All the while we were thinking that such serendipity and the truthfulness of the referred encounter is but another version of authenticity, the elusive exclusivity that de-touristifies the visiting experience.

An Amsterdam case study identifies in Canal Belt residents’ strong sense of belonging, the workings of “a carefully constructed imagery” of the area, constituted by the aesthetic, sensory experience and by the symbolic and practical rewards of a central location. Residents are aware that tourists share that imaginary and this, argues the study, secures a certain level of tolerance of tourism, in spite of the clearly perceived threats. The study posits that this ambivalence may owe to the fact that middle class residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods themselves “ look at the landscape of the neighbourhood with a tourist gaze and understand its appeal” and that the popularity of the Canal Belt adds to their symbolic capital (Pinkster and Boterman, 2017, p. 464).

The above ambivalence is made more complex by the fact that the boundaries between tourist and non-tourist practices in cities have become increasingly blurred as have those between travel, leisure and migration. The conventional divide between work and leisure, ‘home’ and ‘away’ has also been re-shaped as have the consumption patterns and preferences of middle and upper-class city dwellers: “Affluent city residents have been found to increasingly behave ‘as if tourists’ in their own cities, that is to engage in activities that are indistinguishable from those of visitors (...) Tourists visiting cities are increasingly likely to be frequent and experienced travellers who are familiar with the places they visit and/or seek to experience ‘ordinary’ or mundane spaces as locals would.” (Colomb and Novy, 2016, p.6)

While on an immersion visit to Amsterdam, observing the crowds at Dam Square and in the streets leading out of it, we wondered, how do we know these are tourists, even the ones gathering around tour guides or taking selfies? Our question was more concerned with their own identification as tourists than with the customary activities of tourism or with whether you reside in the city or not. For example, do millenial Europeans born after the Schengen agreement in borderless Western and Central Europe or Erasmus exchange students spending a semester in Holland or a neighbouring country consider themselves as tourists when strolling along Amsterdam canals, or is Europe just their turf? One of the most visible figures of AiP was himself a seasoned tourism marketing professional who has travelled extensively and said in a lively informal chat after the March 1 political debate that he used to have a passion for destination marketing as he relished in creating special, unique travelling experiences.

Despite the above described convergences and dustlands between residents and tourists vis a vis their subjectivities (imaginaries and construction of place) and behaviours, the Canal Belt situation, as perceived by our team during fieldwork visits and as described by our stakeholder, is not one of ambiguity but one of clear disruption of the subjective, existential, sensorial and material and economic orders that configure the residential experience in this area. Touristification and its Disneyfication strand are to different degrees identified, and described by our stakeholders as well as by local authorities and national and international press.