Social and Spatial Transformations

Abstract

This chapter discusses the social and spatial changes in the city of Amsterdam from the early 1980s until 2015. It does so along three dimensions: social class, ethnicity and demography. The socio-spatial transformation of Amsterdam in those decades has been substantial and is characterised by an ever stronger concentration of highly educated and more recently also more affluent households. Furthermore, the city is increasingly ethnically diverse, but also socio-economically polarized. High-skilled migration from happens alongside lower-skilled labour migration. These processes have resulted in a gradual expansion of gentrification processes over in the pre-war city that are increasingly fuelled by international migration, leading to a spatial polarization with the peripheral post-war neighbourhoods.