Normalizing urban inequality: cinematic imaginaries of difference in postcolonial Amsterdam

Wouter Van Gent,Rivke Jaffe

doi:10.1080/14649365.2016.1197303

Abstract

Combining insights from critical urban studies with geographies of race and racism, this article examines the role of spatial imaginaries in normalizing urban inequalities, showing how such imaginaries make the associations between places and populations appear natural. We extend analyses of the interplay between material landscapes and imaginative geographies to examine how these connections feature in processes of gentrification and displacement and emphasize the necessity of an intersectional approach in understanding the cultural underpinnings of urban change. We propose that such analyses of dominant spatial imaginaries benefit from attention to their colonial roots, given the persistence of monomythical explorer-hero narratives and the mapping of reworked colonial imaginative geographies onto contemporary postcolonial cities. Our analysis focuses on Amsterdam, the popular Dutch film Alleen Maar Nette Mensen and the spatiality of difference that its ‘monomyth’ narrative presents. It justifies an unequal urban order by contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour. This culturally essentialist depiction contributes to the depoliticization of state-led gentrification and normalizes changes to the material cityscape.

Highlights

Geographies of race and racism have sought to understand the ways in which race is co- constructed with, and made material through, space and place
While significant attention has been paid to the intersections of race and class in urban imaginative geographies, we argue that such analyses must take into account the role of gender and sexuality
Goldberg sees such imaginaries as resurfacing in Western cities as ‘periphractic marginalization’, the process ofproducing circumscribed spaces of raced and classed marginality that contrast with mainstream norms and practices. Such periphractic spaces are found in the ‘idea’ of high-rise housing projects such as Amsterdam’s the Bijlmer, which ‘present a generic image without identity: the place of crime; of social disorder, dirt and disease; of teenage pregnancy, prostitution, pimps and drug dependency; workless and shiftless, disciplined internally, if at all, only by social welfare workers’ (Goldberg, 1993, p. 53). These analyses of the effects of colonial and urban imaginaries on material landscapes have tended to focus on race in relation to class, while underemphasizing the extent to which these categories of difference are co-constituted by gender and sexuality

Summary

Introduction

Geographies of race and racism have sought to understand the ways in which race is co- constructed with, and made material through, space and place. We examine how these connections play out in multi-ethnic urban contexts, Social & Cultural Geography 555 where gentrifying cityscapes are normalized by spatial imaginaries that incorporate colonial dichotomies.1 While significant attention has been paid to the intersections of race and class in urban imaginative geographies, we argue that such analyses must take into account the role of gender and sexuality.

Results

Conclusion