No more hotels in Amsterdam

Carilyn Pointer – Amsterdam is the capital of Netherlands and has quickly become a popular tourist destination, but is also the place where thousands of people live and conduct their day to day lives. As tourism continues to increase, new initiatives seek to limit the number of visitors and to keep Amsterdam livable for its residents.

Understanding the location, locale, and the identity of Amsterdam provides deeper understanding into the issue and the motivations behind the initiatives. The location is the role a place in the world and often involves major industries or sources of employment in the area. In Amsterdam this can be identified as their tourism and technology industries. As tourism continues to grow, concern over the imbalance has risen, influencing stricter laws around building hotels, barring cruise ships, stricter marijuana laws, and banning tourist shops. The imbalance in major injustices is concerning because “Without such a stop, Amsterdam’s center would become one big hotel.” Next, are the institutions such as clubs, societies, or religious groups that organize people and form the basis for cooperation or conflict. These are referred to as locale. The locale in Amsterdam is heavily influenced by the red-light district, and easy access to marijuana where lately “rowdy groups of tourists often cause disruptions to local residents.” The high quality of life present in Amsterdam is at risk as more conflicts arise within the locale of Amsterdam. Furthermore, as locale changes to cater more to tourists instead for the locals, more conflict is likely to arise.

The last aspect of place is identity, otherwise known as how people view the place they live and their sense of attachment to it. It seems that many of these new laws are aimed at keeping Amsterdam a city that is enjoyable for its residents, clean, and not too crowded. These goals speak highly of how many people already perceive their city and would like it to remain, which provides further understanding and complexity to the issue.

_{Photo Credit:Agnes Monkelbaan, distributed via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.}