Amsterdam takes advantage of the Coronavirus to reset to try to change its socio-economic model at the root, and they are not the only ones

Being able to change a country's production model is extremely complex, especially when its politicians are not in it for the work beyond the seductive headlines directed at the electorate. And that is not to mention in more general terms the change of its socio-economic model in all its extension, since it has many more implications, even of a political-social nature. There, the declared and never implemented will even translate into a strong underlying resistance that prevents the reforms from revitalizing the socio-economic system.

But on a more local scale, this type of change of model is equally very complicated and requires a strong determination on the part of the local authorities, but it also requires not only proposing an alternative model but also choosing the most appropriate moment to do so. In Amsterdam, they are very clear about this, and in the socio-economic reset brought about by the Coronavirus, they have seen a golden opportunity to try to transform the economy of this great European capital.

Amsterdam had already been behind for many years in changing its socio-economic model, and they believe that the Coronavirus has opened a window (or door) of opportunity for them

For various reasons, since the 1980s, three were the great European capitals that were on the route of the most alternative culture, but also of another "type" of understanding of nightlife, which in cities such as Amsterdam was also daytime leisure, dispatched without any hindrance in broad daylight and under red lanterns. In that Amsterdam, since then, the sale of certain types of substances was not only allowed in certain cases, but it was extremely easy to acquire in broad daylight also as many narcotic substances already illegal even there. That Amsterdam in the 1990s was joined by a Zurich where the residents were dispensed narcotics free of charge and under controlled conditions, under public methadone programs. By chance, a servant was able to witness what it was like in those years, and I can assure you that at the time of the "delivery", hundreds of users of the drug in question (and others of pure and -very hard- heroin) were concentrated in one of the city's most central parks (nicknamed "The Needle Park"), and then they would take out their rubber and needle kit in the middle of it and inject their dose. This Dantesque scene really made an impact, especially because, behind the rush and anxiety to inject, there was the desolate scene left behind by the "chute", with the floor literally full of syringes, and with a silent crowd of people absent in artificial paradises and thrown in the middle of the public street, scattered everywhere.

The third usual capital on those routes of lax regulations and "fat sights" was the alternative Berlin. In those years, Berlin was not only a nightlife center with a certain parallel life, but it was also a capital that conserved an alternative character of the real ones, with a culture that was often reflected in initiatives such as that famous Tacheles de Oranienburgerstraße, which was spontaneously defended by a good part of its inhabitants as a symbol of the city's most alternative culture. In spite of that and everything it represented, Tacheles has ended up succumbing to a form of tourism (and interests) that has taken away almost everything it held dear as an alternative and has ended up being transformed into something almost exclusively and artificially touristic and commercial. But there were more poles of life and "alternative" outlets in Berlin's nightlife, such as the usual ones in the multifaceted Kreuzberg district, and there were also many nightlife venues in the city (many with hard electronic music), where psychotropic substances ran much more easily in those years than the authorities were willing to publicly admit.

Of that triad of European cities with more than lax rules regarding certain substances, today only Amsterdam remains as the maximum European exponent of governmental and municipal laxity on certain issues, and not only because many people there think that this is an "alternative" way of life to be respected, but also because a whole socio-economic model has been made out of it, which provides the city with enormous amounts of money and tourists, which is now very difficult to reconvert. Amsterdam is a top-level nightlife destination in Europe, but it's also a top-level nightlife destination because tourists look for that very type of 'leisure' there, which in Zurich and Berlin (or elsewhere) is no longer so easy to find, and which in Amsterdam has become too important (among other reasons) for its leaders to have been able to dismantle it so far.

And it's not because Amsterdam hasn't been seeking to transform its socio-economy for some time, but the fact is that having allowed laxity to transform an entire socioeconomic sector is something that can't now be tackled overnight, at least not without seriously damaging a city whose socioeconomy has long been structured around a certain 'tourist' profile. The reality is that the debate has been open in the capital of the Netherlands for years, but they couldn't find the time or the situation to jump into the pool. And now it's time for the pause produced by the pandemic, a full-blown economic reset that the Dutch local and national authorities want to take advantage of as a unique opportunity to try to transform (now yes) the socioeconomy of Amsterdam, but minimizing the impact and potential economic damage.

Amsterdam is clear on this and is launching a "now or never" campaign with courageous and timely determination

Amsterdam's long history of cohabitation and laxity with these 'substances', which are directly illegal outside the city limits, is not a love-at-first-sight idyll. In fact, as I was saying, Amsterdam has been trying for years (if not decades) to rid itself of its reputation as a destination for unlimited partying, and of the underground drug trade that often surrounds the night business, which is also done there in broad daylight and in the city center. Hand in hand with the narcotic substances, another leg of the socio-economic model that they want to change in Amsterdam is an old neighbor that all too often shares space with the drugs: prostitution. And in the city council of the city north of the canals, they have been trying for some time to change this other socio-economic model with its epicenter in the Red Light District. In fact, it may even be surprising how in the tourist information pages on the city of Amsterdam they talk very explicitly about prostitution in the city, with a very neutral and equidistant approach, but also introducing the public debate that the Amsterdamers are having about the suitability of making it a tourist attraction and a large-scale business model.

Significantly, however, the economic page of the Dutch capital's city council does not mention at all certain "unorthodox" "retail business" and tourist activities: what's more, tourism is not even mentioned at first sight as the city's economic engine, when on average the city receives more than 1 million tourists a month, a figure that exceeds that of its permanent inhabitants, having turned the whole center into an inhospitable and extremely uncomfortable place for the residents themselves. The fact is that tourism is one of the main driving forces behind the city, especially the "Coffee Shops" and prostitution, which is precisely why they are having such a hard time converting their economy to other models. As Bloomberg reported in the previous link, the city as a whole welcomes 19 million tourists a year, who leave 6 billion Euros in the city, and on which 10% of jobs depend.

A whole manna that is now difficult to tackle without leaving collateral victims. The city council's urban renewal efforts have one of their main bets in attracting national and international companies to the city, reversing the trend of companies fleeing the capital in the last decades, and offering as an attraction for their employees the life of a city that they also do not want to stop being vibrant going from 100 to 0. Nor can we deny the coherence of the argument of those who advocate giving continuity to this business model, which is based on the fact that this type of tourism provides income and jobs for the city, something that is especially essential at an economic time when dark clouds are gathering. The meeting point between the two ways of life is in the equidistant middle of the most balanced Amsterdamers between the two extremes, who say that the alternative way of life is not really the problem, nor has it been years ago, and who maintain that in reality, the real issue to be tackled is the extreme massification of tourism so typical of our times.

But the city of Amsterdam does not intend to let the window of opportunity opened by the Coronavirus pass by, and they have rushed to change a model that they have not liked for some time, at a time when prostitution has almost paralyzed their activity when the market for those street windows displayed by the prostitutes in the Red Light District has collapsed, and when many sex workers have left the city to return to their countries of origin (usually Eastern Europe). But in addition to these spontaneous movements of the sector forced by the persistent stoppage, the city council has begun to implement new policies to try to take advantage of the moment to benefit their city and its citizens. Aware that mass tourism is inseparable from the parallel boom in tourist housing services with Airbnb and similar as a distribution channel, local politicians have implemented an ambitious plan for the socio-economic reconversion of the city, the first measure of which is to ban tourist housing in three central neighborhoods. The first measure is to ban tourist housing in three central districts. As in other European capitals, these tourist homes have become the main example of the expulsion of permanent residents, and in many central districts, there are practically no more than a weekend or daytime residents.

Other measures that the council wants to implement are to channel and promote the purchase of real estate assets within the city centre, giving special priority to real estate companies committed to making the city socially sustainable. And it will be the city council that will end up deciding which businesses will be awarded the licenses and premises that the local authorities will be responsible for managing. At the same time, they intend to change the legislation so that 24-hour shops will no longer be a real, permanent, almost wholesale alcohol business. The aim is to restore the social and economic fabric with the permanent inhabitants as the epicenter, and to prevent tourism from continuing to invade everything; at least the current beer&cannabis tourism&"something else", because one of the policies to be implemented is to attract more quality tourism, and to promote Amsterdam as a national hub where tourists arrive, spend a few days there, and then devote themselves to visiting the rest of the country. The situation looks so dramatic and hallucinogenic from the inside, that the city's mayor, Femke Halsema, has asked for "emergency powers" from the Dutch executive to be able to take action against the risk of imported COVID-19 infections, but obviously with the tourist saturation of the city in the background: surely some of the measures they want to put in place will have arrived so that they never leave again.
A change in the socio-economic model is never easy to achieve, often for lack of political will and vested interests, but Amsterdam has not been the only one to launch

Amsterdam has also been no exception. Other cities have seen the Coronavirus as one of those windows of opportunity that occur (at most) once in a generation. Thus, the beautiful but "hyper-turitized" Venice, that floating jewel in which there is hardly any living space left for the Venetians themselves, that city of water in which tourists are an invasive species on a large scale, that historic capital that oozes art on every corner, but which is covered by hordes of people, That Venice, the standard-bearer of the historic Lombard-Venezuelan kingdom, had been dragging along this socio-economic problem, which we expose to you as being very difficult to solve once it has permeated the productive fabric, and which had as its cause tourism that was no longer even minimally sustainable for the visitors and even less so for the locals who had suffered a long process of expulsion. As a demonstration of how inhospitable Venice has become to its residents, its population has been reduced by 70% since 1951, from 174,800 to just 53. 000, and where the few remaining native Venetians live mostly cornered in distant neighborhoods such as Campo Santa Margherita, a last stronghold of Venetian authenticity which is now also being destroyed by Airbnb&Rest.

And let it be known that the Venetian case is directly applicable to certain Spanish cities such as Barcelona, which, on a different scale but with the same progression, are being invaded to excessive limits by tourism, while their inhabitants wonder whether they live in a welcoming city or in a simple theme park where even its famous Gaudí facades, unfortunately, begin to seem like an urban setting to them. And there have already been serious cases of the breakdown of cohabitation, with regrettable and multiple attacks on tourists. Tourism must not only be environmentally sustainable, but also socially sustainable, and technologies such as the Intelligent Cities, of which Europe is a world leader, find a golden opportunity with the Coronavirus to be implanted even more intensely in our most touristy cities, for the benefit of both inhabitants and visitors, who will cohabit with them in a much more respectful way in both directions.

The economy of a city (not to mention that of a country) is something very complex to transform from its most theoretical phases. If this type of change of model is planned well and with concepts of the future, it can give great competitive advantages in the long term and strengthen the leadership position of a city or country in the world. The problem is that in practice they are very, very complex to achieve with a success that makes them worthwhile, not to mention the usual unwillingness of the leaders themselves for this type of change, as they are often too "in collusion" with the prevailing models and their consequent vested interests.

In fact, we can say that, after the bursting of the Spanish real estate bubble, during which the entire national productive fabric had already been adapted to the new socio-economic configuration, there has been talking in Spain of the need to change the national productive model, in a debate that has not transcended much in real implemented policies, and in which finally, as it could not be otherwise, it has been the situation that has forced the productive fabric to seek "the beans" by itself, without the slightest planning or design of productive strategies at the highest level. A black swan-like the bursting of the real estate bubble, which could have been used to transform and modernize the Spanish socioeconomic fabric just as Amsterdam is doing now with the resetting of the Coronavirus, in our case made Spain lose a golden opportunity that, if we had known how to take advantage of it, would now have allowed us to reach new heights of progress, and possibly be in a much better position to face very complex socioeconomic environments like the present one.

But... And why is one of these changes in the socio-economic model so complex to tackle?

Well, the truth is that, both politically and socially, when money starts to come in from certain activities, you don't always have the guts to put a stop to the succulent incoming flows right from the start. Thus, little by little, money that is often necessary to revitalize the economic activity of a city in the face of certain circumstances ends up being perpetuated in a model and a socio-economic sector, which over the years it is very difficult to do without. The fact is that when money comes to a city under certain spending patterns, the city's socio-economy is structured around it, and companies end up having a high degree of dependency, and with them the jobs of not a few of its inhabitants.

It ends up being a real socioeconomic snowball effect, which in a certain situation is allowed to roll for whatever reason, and once it has started to go down the slope it becomes, with the years, fatter and gains socioeconomic weight, which is then very difficult to stop... at least if it is not in an extraordinary situation of shock and socioeconomic standstill due to exogenous factors such as those brought by the COVID-19.

And it may be that there are times when even this is almost mission impossible, but what is clear is that if there is an ideal moment to tackle these radical changes with a little more probability of success, it is in exceptional moments of socio-economic resettlement such as that which arose in the heat of the pandemic. Amsterdam has seen it all too clearly, and let us hope that others will follow suit if a change of model is truly a priority for them. Because now the moment of truth is coming, and we may be able to observe who was talking about a change of model with a sincere intention, and who was naming it simply because it looks great at election rallies. In Amsterdam, significant work has been done, and with great determination, who else is signing up for the Heat of the moment'? Cri cri, cri cri, cri cri... here you can only hear the echoes of our own particular cricket cage: Healthy envy is what the Amsterdamers give me most: at least they know what they don't want and are trying to really change it