It’s a summer Thursday afternoon in Slotermeer and the children have flocked to the Sloterstrand in the Sloterpark. Parents and grandparents watch with satisfaction as they conjure creative structures out of the sand or spray each other with water. Some float in the puddle, others enjoy ice creams in all colors of the rainbow.
The 2-year-old granddaughter of Patrick van den Hanenberg (68) is busy with her scoops and molds when she notices that another toddler is watching her from a distance. He has olive skin, a brown head of curls and seems to be carrying nothing. The girl stands up to pass a shovel and a bucket to the boy. He hesitates for a moment, but then takes the stuff beaming. The two continue to play together.
‘The Sloterstrand and theater de Meervaart are possibly the only places where I come across a mixed audience here in Slotermeer’, says Van den Hanenberg. ‘The open way in which you see children interact with each other, regardless of color or class, confronts you with how adults can fall short.’
Van den Hanenberg is a theater journalist and former history teacher. He moved from the Brouwersgracht in the center to Nieuw-West six years ago. He bought the apartment in the Finisterre apartment building without thinking twice about it. The spacious apartment with the high windows on the sixth floor overlooks a beautiful, expansive Sloterplas and the walkers and runners that seem to be included in the pond. ‘At first I thought I had multicultural neighbours, because that’s what you expect in Nieuw-West. I soon noticed that this apartment building is almost entirely inhabited by white Dutch people.’
I am sitting in their apartment with Van den Hanenberg and his wife when he shares his experiences as a new resident of Nieuw-West. What does he think is causing this separation? ‘Besides class differences, I believe that people instinctively choose the ‘safe’ option: living among people who look like them.’ He puts sandwiches and a homemade mackerel salad on the table. ‘That doesn’t make it any less bad. And besides the fact that spatial segregation is caused by the arrival of people like us, house prices are skyrocketing. The price of this apartment has risen by more than one and a half hundred thousand in the past six years.’
Van den Hanenberg has lived in Amsterdam all his life and has traveled the world. When I ask him about his own social circle, he admits that he only has one non-white Dutch girlfriend. ‘A Surinamese I know from school.’
According to him, segregation largely starts with segregated schools. ‘Now more and more white Dutch families are living in Nieuw-West, but they generally place their children in schools outside of Nieuw-West. My daughter also lives in this district, but is thinking of sending her child to a school in South.’
I ask my host about the reasons behind this. “It is still thought that black schools underperform. While the figures have shown us that this is not always true. Yet that stereotype persists.’
Would he have sent his children to a mixed school if he had moved to New West earlier? He thinks for a moment. ‘The mixed school is a representation of our city, so yes.’ Then I think I sense a wave of doubt. “At least, I hope I would have.”
When I get home I will publish an opinion piece from 2016 The Parool against, with the headline ‘The diverse city that we are is segregated like the plague’. In this piece, Caesar Bast expresses his concerns about increasing economic inequality that promotes spatial segregation in Amsterdam. The article states: ‘The rich and the poor are living further and further apart and this can be disastrous for social cohesion.’
We are now six years later, rich and poor have moved closer together in space in Nieuw-West, but something is still going wrong with social cohesion. Residents of the same neighborhood and sometimes even the same street live completely side by side. Van den Hanenberg makes it salad bowleffect, the opposite of a melting pot. It describes population groups that live side by side and adopt cultural elements from each other, without creating a common culture.
When I think about the consequences of the current housing policy, as a result of which districts such as Nieuw-West are gentrifying, I realize that in the longer term there will no longer be any different population groups in the district and that Sloterstrand will also be full of children who live on each other. appear. They may not all be the same color, but they are from the same class.
The segregation that had to be counteracted is giving way to a new kind of segregation; a homogeneous group of residents that reaches to the edges of the suburbs. There goes your worldly metropolis. There goes Amsterdam.
