31/Aug – 03/Sep

After Amsterdam, Bruges felt almost like a change of scale.

I arrived by bus and was immediately given a choice: around twenty minutes by public transport or roughly forty minutes walking to where I was staying. Tired, carrying luggage and having already spent much of the day travelling, I chose to walk.

That decision gave me something I probably would have missed otherwise: a gradual introduction to the city. At first, little suggested the Bruges millions of visitors come to see. Then towers began appearing above the roofs. The architecture became older, the streets narrower and the number of visitors increased almost step by step until, without any dramatic entrance, I realised I had entered the historic centre.

That first walk already revealed something that would become important during the following days. Bruges has an unusually readable historical geography. There are places where the transition into the old city can almost be felt physically, not because contemporary life suddenly disappears, but because streets, waterways, buildings and the surviving traces of the former fortifications begin to form a remarkably coherent landscape.

What exactly is World Heritage here?

The Historic Centre of Brugge was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000. The property covers 410 hectares and encompasses much of the historic urban centre, rather than a single monument or small architectural ensemble.

Its significance is closely connected to the long continuity of the city itself. Medieval Bruges became one of Europe’s major commercial and cultural centres, linked through trade to a wide network of cities and regions. Its economic importance supported civic, religious and artistic development, leaving a dense concentration of churches, public buildings, hospitals, commercial structures and domestic architecture.

The city also became an important centre of the Flemish Primitives, associated with figures such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.

Much of the medieval street pattern and canal network survived. Although most of the original fortifications disappeared, their line remains legible through waterways, ramparts and the surviving city gates.

UNESCO also makes an important distinction: Bruges is not valued because it has remained unchanged. Its heritage lies partly in the continuity between historical fabric and centuries of adaptation. The city is explicitly described as an active, living city.

Walking through Bruges, that continuity is immediately understandable. The skyline, canals, brick architecture, narrow plots and street network create one of the clearest historic urban landscapes I encountered during the trip.

Precisely because the physical city is so legible, it becomes interesting to look at how contemporary functions fit within it.

Following the postcard

On my second day, I deliberately followed the places through which most visitors encounter Bruges.

Markt, Burg, the canals and the monumental streets connecting them. It is difficult not to be impressed. Bruges has an unusual degree of visual continuity and, in some moments, the historic centre feels almost composed as one continuous urban scene.

The commercial landscape also becomes recognisable quite quickly: chocolate, waffles, fries, beer, souvenirs, restaurants, hotels and boat tours.

None of these activities is unusual in a major heritage destination. What interested me was their spatial organisation. In some of the most visited streets, visitor-oriented activities are especially visible. A few streets away, the balance can change considerably. Residential entrances, quieter cafés, pubs, small businesses and less specialised activities become easier to notice.

The distinction is not absolute. A café can serve both residents and visitors, a chocolate shop can be part of the visitor economy while also contributing to the contemporary identity of Bruges. Tourism itself is deeply integrated into the city’s economy and international visibility.

What walking made visible was therefore not a simple separation between “tourist” and “local” areas, but different degrees of functional concentration.

A street where many businesses respond to similar visitor demands can operate differently from another street where a broader range of functions coexist, even when both belong to the same historic fabric.

A few days later, while we were both in Brussels, I had the opportunity to discuss this with Karel Dendooven, Manager of the Department of Monument Preservation and Heritage Affairs of Bruges.

His perspective added an important management dimension to what I had noticed on foot.

He explained that the concentration of visitor-oriented activities within particular central areas also has a spatial logic. Keeping these uses relatively concentrated can help limit their spread throughout other parts of the city. At the same time, high concentration naturally gives some streets a much more specialised commercial profile.

What I had initially perceived simply as repetition therefore became more interesting as an example of urban management involving competing objectives rather than straightforward solutions.

The question is not whether tourism should or should not be present. Bruges’ attractiveness is itself closely connected to the success of its heritage preservation.

The more interesting issue is how different functions can continue to coexist within the same historic centre.

From postcard to neighbourhood

Whenever I moved away from the principal visitor routes, the city changed gradually.

Around Coupure, along the former ramparts and later towards the station, crowds became less prominent. Residential uses were easier to notice, streets became quieter and different types of everyday landscape emerged.

Near the cycling tunnel by Brugge station I even found a small green area with donkeys, an unexpectedly rural-looking scene after hours of canals, medieval towers and monumental streets.

This helped clarify something important for Beyond the Postcard. The aim is not to leave the visitor areas behind in search of a supposedly more “authentic” Bruges.

The central squares, boat tours, chocolate shops and hotels are as much part of contemporary Bruges as its quieter residential streets.

What changes is the relative presence of different activities and users. These landscapes coexist but do not occupy space evenly.

That becomes particularly visible in Bruges because the historic boundary itself remains unusually readable. Ezelpoort, Smedenpoort, Gentpoort and Kruispoort still mark passages through the line once defined by the fortifications, while waterways and the remaining ramparts reinforce the overall form of the historic city.

Experiencing these edges on foot made me think less about the World Heritage boundary itself and more about the functional geographies operating inside and around it.

Where do different commercial activities concentrate? Where is housing more visible? Where do visitors and residents appear to share the same spaces most naturally? How quickly does the intensity of the central visitor landscape change?

Unlike the UNESCO boundary, these patterns cannot be represented by a single precise line. They behave more like gradients.

For a spatial approach, this is particularly useful. A historic centre can appear as a coherent polygon on a map while containing several very different urban environments within that same boundary.

Continuity beyond the buildings

My conversation with Karel also introduced another dimension: residential continuity.

A living historic centre needs to accommodate different functions at the same time. Housing, hotels, businesses, services, cultural activities and visitor infrastructure all compete for limited central space, while responding to different economic conditions.

This does not mean that one of these uses is inherently incompatible with the others. Instead, it makes the balance between them part of heritage management itself.

The question becomes not only how buildings are conserved, but how a historic centre continues to perform as a contemporary urban environment.

That is particularly relevant in Bruges because the city has achieved such strong material continuity.

The skyline, canals, Gothic architecture, street pattern and historic buildings create a powerful sense of continuity, but a city is also made by less visible elements: everyday routines, economic activities, social relationships, knowledge of place and patterns of use.

These inevitably evolve. The important point is not to expect historical functions to remain frozen. Cities have always changed, and Bruges itself contains layers of adaptation accumulated over centuries.

What becomes interesting is understanding how contemporary changes interact with the functions already present.

Tourism illustrates this particularly well. It should not be understood simply as an external pressure on the city. People visit Bruges because its heritage has been preserved successfully and because the city offers an exceptional urban experience. Tourism is therefore partly an outcome of heritage value.

At the same time, visitor demand influences commercial activity, investment and the ways central space is used.

Karel’s explanation of concentration made this relationship more nuanced for me. Spatial concentration can help organise visitor activity and protect other parts of the city from the same intensity, while also creating very distinct functional landscapes within the centre.

Seen this way, the relevant questions become more analytical.

How are different activities distributed across the historic centre? How does commercial diversity vary between highly visited streets and quieter areas? Where does housing remain most visible? Which spaces seem to support overlapping uses rather than specialised ones?

My walks could suggest these patterns, but they could not explain them fully.

Observation shows where contrasts appear. Conversations with people who know the city help place those contrasts within a wider institutional, economic and social context. More systematic spatial and socioeconomic data would then be necessary to understand their scale and representativeness.

This is increasingly where I see the role of Beyond the Postcard: not as a complete assessment of a city, but as a way of identifying relationships and questions that become visible through movement, observation and dialogue.

What Bruges left me with

Bruges left me with a different emphasis from Amsterdam.

Amsterdam made particularly visible the coexistence of several intense urban systems within the same physical city.

Bruges made me think more about continuity.

The continuity of its streets and architecture is immediately visible, but the continuity of a living city also depends on how different functions remain accommodated within that fabric.

After three days, my strongest impression was not of a city frozen in the past, nor of one defined exclusively by tourism.

It was of a city where heritage, residence, commerce and visitation are closely interwoven, but become more or less visible depending on where you walk.

Moving between crowded central streets, quiet canals, residential areas and the edges of the former fortifications made those differences tangible. My later conversation with Karel helped explain why some of them may also reflect deliberate choices and wider management trade-offs.

For Beyond the Postcard, Bruges became an example of how preservation can be considered not only in terms of what physically survives, but also in terms of how a historic urban structure continues to accommodate change without losing the diversity of functions that make it a city.

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.