28/Aug – 31/Aug

Amsterdam was the first stop of my Beyond the Postcard journey, and an appropriate place to begin asking what it means for a World Heritage City to remain a living city.

I arrived from Lisbon on a rainy Friday afternoon, took the train from Schiphol and walked from Amsterdam Centraal to my hostel under the rain. Waiting for me was an envelope from Aafje Moonen, from the World Heritage Office of the City of Amsterdam, containing a suggested route, postcards, brochures and personal recommendations.

Her route became an important starting point. Rather than simply connecting landmarks, it followed the historical development of the Canal Ring and invited me to notice relationships between architecture, water, movement and everyday urban life.

That fitted particularly well with the broader question behind my project. Heritage is not only what remains physically preserved. A historic city is also made by the functions, movements, practices and relationships that continue to take place within it.

Before exploring any of that, however, I needed dinner. I found a version of stamppot without pork and, while dealing with the receipt afterwards, learned an early practical lesson about Amsterdam: do not handle small and important objects too close to a canal. My hostel locker key disappeared directly into the water. Fortunately, the staff found the situation more amusing than catastrophic, opened my locker and gave me a new padlock — this time with three keys.

Later that evening, while wandering without much direction, someone knocked on a window to get my attention. Only then did I realise I had entered the Red Light District.

Earlier in the evening, the area had contained several forms of urban life at once: tourists finishing their day, residents and workers crossing the neighbourhood, curious visitors and groups gradually gathering. When I returned later, the same streets had changed almost completely. They were densely occupied, movement was more difficult and most people seemed to be there for a much more specific purpose.

This became one of my first observations in Amsterdam: the same physical place can perform very different urban functions according to time, users and expectations.

What exactly is World Heritage here?

Amsterdam as a whole is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The property at the centre of this journey is the Seventeenth-Century Canal Ring Area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2010. It emerged from the enormous expansion of Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth century, when marshland around the existing city was drained and transformed through an ambitious system of concentric canals, streets and building plots.

UNESCO recognises it not simply because the canals are beautiful, but because the ensemble represents an exceptional example of hydraulic engineering, town planning and urban expansion. Amsterdam was becoming one of the most important commercial cities in the world, and the Canal Ring gave physical form to that growth. Its model subsequently influenced urban planning far beyond the Netherlands.

This distinction became important for the project. The World Heritage boundary may be precisely defined on a map, but the processes that make the area live (tourism, housing, mobility, commerce, infrastructure and everyday routines) do not stop at that line.

The Canal Ring as urban infrastructure

The following morning, still under heavy rain, I began Aafje’s route.

From Amsterdam Centraal I walked towards Brouwersgracht, Noordermarkt, the Jordaan and Prinsengracht, passing the Anne Frank House, crossing the Negen Straatjes, continuing through the canals around Reguliersgracht and eventually reaching Magere Brug over the Amstel.

I did not follow the route strictly. Getting lost was useful.

It is easy to read Amsterdam’s canals primarily as scenery. Walking them for several hours makes that interpretation increasingly difficult.

The canals were part of the mechanism through which the city expanded. They organised transport and drainage, but also streets, parcels, housing, commerce and the relationship between the city and its port. The UNESCO Urban Heritage Atlas describes the Canal Ring as an urban landscape structured by canals, streets, building lines, plots and vegetation — not simply a collection of monuments.

Centuries later, water continues to structure movement.

Every few metres, pedestrians, bicycles, cars, trams and boats negotiate the same narrow geography. Bridges concentrate crossings. Some canal streets function as almost intimate residential corridors; others rapidly open into highly commercial spaces or major visitor routes.

The canals therefore operate simultaneously as heritage, infrastructure, public landscape, mobility network and destination.

Aafje had also suggested looking at the canal houses themselves, particularly how their dimensions and architecture changed through different phases of the expansion. Once noticed, those variations became difficult to ignore. Yet I increasingly found myself looking at what happened at street level.

The city behind the façades

Cannabis shops, souvenir shops, cafés, restaurants, hotels, hostels, museums and highly specialised visitor experiences occupy considerable parts of central Amsterdam.

Around the Anne Frank House, visitors accumulate around entrances and queues. In the Negen Straatjes, the density of people can transform the experience of a narrow street within minutes. In other places, only a few canals away, the rhythm can become unexpectedly residential.

This is where tourism becomes especially interesting from a spatial perspective because the question is not simply how many visitors are present, but how particular concentrations of visitors and businesses alter the functional geography of the city.

A seventeenth-century ground floor occupied by a grocery store and the same ground floor occupied by a souvenir business can be architecturally identical. Yet they sustain very different relationships with neighbourhood life.

Amsterdam itself recognises this problem. Its City Centre Approach explicitly identifies areas where tourist-oriented retail has produced forms of economic monoculture and seeks a better balance between housing, work, local services, culture and tourism.

A façade can therefore remain beautifully preserved while the social and economic function behind it changes considerably. But describing central Amsterdam as a city simply surrendered to tourism would also be misleading.

Residents cycle home through the same streets that visitors photograph. Shopping bags cross bridges. Deliveries squeeze between bicycles. Domestic windows sit only metres from some of Europe’s most internationally recognisable urban spaces.

There is no need to decide which Amsterdam is the authentic one. They coexist.

Several cities within the same city

This coexistence became particularly visible around Chinatown and the Oude Kerk.

One of Amsterdam’s oldest monumental buildings stands almost directly beside the red-lit windows that constitute another internationally recognised image of the city. The area can almost be read archaeologically.

Urban periods and functions have not neatly replaced one another; they have accumulated. Religious heritage, housing, nightlife, tourism, commerce and contemporary regulation occupy nearly the same space. It produces a kind of urban stratigraphy. This idea gradually became central to Beyond the Postcard.

A World Heritage City can appear as one object when seen on a map or in a postcard, while on the ground it contains several overlapping landscapes: residential, tourist, commercial, institutional, infrastructural and patrimonial.

They are not separate layers, they compete for the same buildings, streets and public spaces. Sometimes they support one another. Sometimes they create friction. Different people may also experience the very same place as completely different cities.

That is one reason why understanding heritage requires more than documenting its physical fabric.

It also requires paying attention to who uses the city, how, when, and what they recognise as important.

Managing a city that cannot stop changing

My conversations with Aafje also made clear that tourism is only one part of the management challenge.

Climate change introduces questions around heat, drought, storms and water. Historic infrastructure has to be maintained and adapted. The electricity grid must evolve as the city electrifies, while interventions such as solar panels or energy-efficiency improvements need to respond to protected buildings and views.

Historic quay walls add another layer: what initially sounds like an engineering problem quickly becomes an issue involving heritage, mobility, public space, budgets, safety and long-term urban management. In other words, preserving a living historic city cannot mean preventing change, it means negotiating change.

And those negotiations involve much more than heritage professionals alone. Residents, businesses, visitors, public authorities, infrastructure providers and different communities can all make legitimate, and sometimes incompatible, claims on the same space.

That has become increasingly important to the direction of my project. Spatial data can tell us where people live, how land is used, where visitors concentrate or how mobility systems operate. But those datasets do not automatically explain how a place is experienced, which changes people perceive as important, or which everyday functions they feel are disappearing or emerging.

Walking, observation and conversations do not replace systematic analysis. They can help reveal where to look more closely.

Walking beyond the postcard

My final day provided an unintended spatial experiment.

I had to move from the historic centre to accommodation near Sloterdijk before travelling onwards to Bruges. The direct route was already long, so naturally I made it longer.

I passed Dam, Singel and Prinsengracht again before gradually entering areas where the canals appeared less strongly oriented towards visitors. Around Lijnbaansgracht, some sections remained historic but felt quieter, more residential and occasionally rougher around the edges.

This mattered because World Heritage can create an expectation of visual perfection: restored façades, monumental perspectives and carefully maintained public spaces.

A functioning city contains something else as well:

deliveries, rubbish, scaffolding, maintenance, deterioration, construction and adaptation.

These are not necessarily failures of heritage management. They can also be evidence that a place continues to perform functions beyond being looked at.

As I moved farther from the most intensely visited areas, tourism did not disappear at a clear boundary, nor did everyday life suddenly begin outside the World Heritage property.

Instead, the relative weight of different activities changed gradually.

One of the most useful lessons Amsterdam gave me was to realise that administrative boundaries are precise on maps, but urban landscapes rarely are.

A World Heritage property can be represented as a polygon. Tourism, residential life, commercial specialisation, perceived crowding, belonging and everyday routines behave more like gradients, networks, concentrations and overlapping territories.

For someone approaching cities spatially, that distinction is fundamental.

Keeping the centre alive

The City of Amsterdam’s current approach to the inner city reflects many of these tensions.

Its stated ambition is not simply to preserve the historic centre, but to keep it somewhere residents feel at home while remaining open to visitors. Its programme deals with housing, visitor pressure, public space, greenery, economic diversity and the retention of services for people who actually live and work in the centre.

Retail is particularly revealing. If businesses serving residents progressively disappear and are replaced by activities aimed almost entirely at visitors, the architecture can remain unchanged while the capacity of the neighbourhood to support daily life weakens.

A protected façade does not guarantee a living neighbourhood. Residents need housing, groceries, services, mobility and some degree of quiet. Businesses need viable economic conditions. Visitors need access. Historic buildings require protection. Infrastructure requires renewal. Climate risks have to be addressed.

All these demands occupy the same city and reducing that negotiation to “residents versus tourists” would be far too simple. Tourism contributes to employment, culture and Amsterdam’s international character, and visitors are themselves part of the contemporary city.

The more useful question is how the scale, concentration and interaction of different uses affect the possibility for others to remain present.

This is also where I increasingly see the role of Beyond the Postcard. The project is not intended to replace more systematic urban analysis. Housing data, mobility flows, demographic indicators, visitor numbers and land-use information are essential.

But walking, spatial observation and listening to the people who inhabit, use and manage these places can reveal aspects of the city that those datasets alone cannot capture.

They can point to places where apparently abstract urban processes become tangible, identify contradictions worth investigating and, eventually, help decide which questions deserve more structured participatory or analytical work.

What Amsterdam left me with

Amsterdam contains several cities within the same physical city.

There is the Amsterdam of seventeenth-century canals, museums, Red Light District windows, cannabis shops, Instagram queues and canal boats.

There is also the Amsterdam of groceries carried home by bicycle, residential windows above intensely visited streets, quieter canals only minutes away from visitor concentrations, and professionals trying to adapt centuries-old infrastructure to contemporary environmental and technological demands.

These versions do not exist independently. They overlap spatially, compete economically, change through time and are experienced differently by different people.

Amsterdam is therefore not simply preserving a historic city. It is continuously negotiating which functions, users and forms of change can coexist within the same extraordinary urban landscape.

Perhaps this is also a useful way to approach habitability in World Heritage Cities: not as a fixed quality that a place either possesses or does not, but as the continuing ability to accommodate different forms of urban life without allowing one to erase all the others.

And perhaps understanding that balance starts not only with mapping the city, but also with listening to the different cities people experience within it.