Devaluation of real estate is troubling the restructering of the Wallen in Amsterdam
image from wikimedia commons
This article is only available as short summary in english.
The municipality of Amsterdam is trying to gentrify the red light district “De Wallen”. They argue the current situation is to unsafe and attracts too much criminal activities. They proposed to cut prostitution related activities by 50 %. To gentrify the area they proposed some key projects that are developed by housing corporations. What is interesting is the fact that in most cases gentrification elevates the value of real estate involved. But what Tsaiher Cheng (from Boundary Unlimited) showed in her research is that in this case the value actually falls. The value will (probably) only rise after a very long time. This means the restructuring is a very capital-intensive enterprise.
Boundary Unlimited is researching other methods of gentrification in “De Wallen”. They are inspired by the typologies for housing variuos creative industries that surfaced in Asian cities. They do not cut prostitution, they work with the left over spaces above the windows or behind the streets. This smart strategy means the value of the real estate will not fall sharply during the transformation. They make a much more gradual transformation possible.
The Dutch article appeared in the ‘Blauwe Kamer’ -2010-nr. 1 – . Its the dutch ‘parent’ magazine of ‘scape.
