Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [150]
Mohammed Bouyeri’s crime provoked a new sort of politics at the local level, too, and spurred the creation of a different type of arrival city. Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, whose life was threatened in the note pinned to van Gogh’s corpse, realized that these were the politics of failed arrival. At the same time a number of Slotervaart’s ex-migrants realized that their arrival city had, for far too long, been planned and managed from outside. They began to govern themselves. Their first Slotervaart City Council chair from within their ranks, Ahmed Marcouch, was elected in 2006 and immediately shattered preconceptions by doing a number of things that the rural arrivals had long wanted: making police and security more intensive and engaged, including anti-gang patrols and a bicycle-borne truancy force dedicated to making sure teenagers were all in school; cracking down on rogue mosques and extremist organizations; and lobbying for improvements to the dismal schools and services. He met up with Cohen,* and this unlikely bond between a former Moroccan villager and a Dutch Jewish lawyer resulted in an astonishing transformation of the neighborhood, one that sought to demolish everything it had been.
Five years after the van Gogh slaying, Slotervaart had become a sea of construction cranes, diggers, and wrecking balls. Gone was the neat, orderly plan. Gone were the quiet, meandering lanes. Gone were the green spaces between buildings. In their place were noisy, shop-filled market plazas, straight streets designed for vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and blocks of buildings, all in different plans and designs and heights, packed tightly together in a solid wall facing the street, with apartments on top and commercial spaces below, playgrounds and shopping courts behind. This vertical canyon of buildings, the most radical corner of the new development, resembles an industrial warehouse district from the 1920s, just the sort of high-density urban neighborhood that grassy utopias like Slotervaart had been designed to replace.
Before, Slotervaart had been a place that looked good from a helicopter or from the vantage of a downtown planner. In a radical departure, Amsterdam decided to make it into a place that looked good to someone arriving from a village. People were moved much closer together, not just because they wanted it—and they very much did, for reasons of safety, convenience, and commerce—but also because of the belief that higher population density is better for social cohesion and prosperity. Zoning restrictions were all but eliminated, so that retail, light-industrial, and commercial services could be mixed up with housing. Business and licensing laws were relaxed, so people could open shops and companies without much paperwork and without full citizenship status.
And to the social-housing apartments that had dominated the neighborhood were added condominiums, unaffordable to most first-generation Moroccans and Turks but within reach of young Dutch couples and some children and grandchildren of immigrants. This was a deliberate effort to create an interface with the established city culture by attracting a middle class who wanted to “buy in,” in hopes that mixing and mutual influence would occur. To make this work, some of the housing blocks introduced very low-cost studio space for creative businesses on the ground floors, in hopes of attracting young downtown entrepreneurs and artists and thereby creating, from scratch, the sort of mix of immigrants and artists that has brought life to Spitalfields in London or the Lower East Side in Manhattan or to inner Amsterdam districts such as De Pijp or De Jordaan. This was, in short, a brute-force effort to accomplish what urban felicity had done in the former warehouse and industrial quarters of major cities: By making the failed arrival city of Slotervaart look and feel