Den Haag’s Creative and Startup Scene: Small, Serious, Nothing Like Amsterdam
I moved to Den Haag from Amsterdam five years ago. Everyone asked why. The rent was the reason I came. The city is the reason I stayed.
Laakhaven: Where It Actually Lives
My studio is in a converted warehouse building on the Laakhaven. When I arrived in 2021, the building had seven other studios in it. Now it has twenty-two. The rent has almost doubled. This is the pattern across the whole neighbourhood.
Laakhaven was an industrial harbour area. The warehouses sat empty for years after the port activity moved. Then: artists, because it was cheap. Then: designers and makers, because artists had proved it was viable. Now: digital agencies, architecture firms, a couple of small tech companies, and the building managers who understand the game.
What still makes it worth being here: the concentration. If you walk from the Laakhaven bridge to the Binckhorst — the next industrial area over, even earlier in the process — you pass more interesting small businesses per hundred metres than anywhere else in the city. Ceramics studios, a letterpress printer, a furniture maker working in reclaimed wood, three graphic design agencies, a sustainable packaging startup. None of them are famous. All of them are serious.
The Startup Scene: Impact Over Hype
Den Haag’s startup scene is shaped by what the city is. You don’t come here to build a consumer app. You come here because the international organisations are here, because the government ministries are here, because the legal and security infrastructure is here.
The result: a disproportionate amount of the startup activity is in govtech, legaltech, security tech, and sustainability. Companies building tools for courts, for compliance, for climate monitoring. It’s not glamorous in the way that Amsterdam fintech or Dutch agritech can be. It’s often more quietly important.
The Hague Tech on Waldorpstraat is the hub. Co-working space, events, the place where the scene is most visible. They run regular meetups, some good, some networking theatre — you’ll learn to tell which is which quickly. The Humanity Hub on Fluwelen Burgwal covers the NGO and international development adjacent world, which overlaps more with startups than you’d expect.
The Delft Proximity
TU Delft is fifteen minutes away. This matters more than most people from outside the region realise. The technical university produces engineers and researchers who often don’t want to go to Amsterdam or Rotterdam — and the combination of Den Haag’s institutional base with Delft’s technical output creates a specific kind of company that you don’t find elsewhere in NL.
The Delft connection also means there’s a genuine deep-tech thread running through the Den Haag ecosystem. Not just apps. Hardware, materials, engineering. It surfaces in unexpected places.
The Creative Community: How to Actually Get In
The creative scene in Den Haag is not closed. But it’s not promotional either. Nobody is organising it for your benefit. You find it by showing up in the same places repeatedly until you are recognised, and then by being interesting enough for people to want to continue the conversation.
Practically: the open studio events in Laakhaven and Binckhorst happen a few times a year and are the best single entry point. The design market at Grote Markt is more curated and a good way to see the product designers. Creative Mornings Den Haag is explicitly welcoming. The rest is coffee and time.
What I’ve noticed: the people who do well here are the ones who are genuinely doing something, not the ones who are very good at talking about what they’re going to do. Den Haag is too small for the second category to last long.
