From hippies to yuppies: marginal gentrification in Amsterdam’s Jordaan and De Pijp neighbourhoods 1960–1990

Challenging the prevailing assumption that gentrification is a recent development, this contribution explores the (re)discovery of central urban living in Amsterdam by using the concept of marginal gentrification. Two inner-city neighbourhoods that have experienced the influx of marginal and middle-class gentrifiers, the Jordaan and de Pijp, will serve as case studies. In historiography, the transformation of both areas is portrayed as an unexpected and sudden development kickstarted by neoliberal housing policies in the early 1990s. However, historical research on Anglophone case studies has demonstrated that gentrification should be understood as a long-term process of social, cultural and economic change, already beginning in the 1960s. Through the use of newspaper articles and policy documents from the period under research, this contribution will reveal how the changing living preferences and consumer cultures of ‘urban pioneers’ can be understood as a case of marginal gentrification. Thus, this contribution will offer a deeper understanding of the ways in which structural changes in Amsterdam’s urban society shaped the everyday life of its citizens, and identify some of the inequalities in which these changes resulted for specific social strata.