Who Is Still in Amsterdam

We meet on the third Monday of every month. Six of us, all from the same UvA history cohort, all still — or mostly still — in Amsterdam. This month we were at Lies’ flat in De Baarsjes, which is a neighbourhood that has changed so completely in the past decade that it barely remembers what it used to be.

The book was about post-war Amsterdam urban planning. The reconstruction, the expansion, the decisions made in the 1950s and 60s that shaped the city we live in now. It’s a good book. Dense, specific, the kind of history that makes you look at a street differently when you walk down it.

But the conversation kept sliding off the book and onto something else.

Two of the six people in that room have left Amsterdam in the past year. Maarten moved to Haarlem in September — he and his partner couldn’t make the numbers work anymore, not with a baby coming. Sofie left for Utrecht in January. Better job, lower rent, she said. She didn’t say it like it was a defeat but it was.

The rest of us are still here. For now.

There’s a particular feeling that comes with watching people you thought were fixtures start to go. Not grief exactly — they haven’t died, they’ve moved to Haarlem — but something adjacent to it. A slow subtraction. The city stays the same shape but the people who made it yours start to thin out.

We talked about this for a while, using the book as a frame. The post-war planners rebuilt Amsterdam for a city they imagined — more space, more light, more room for families. What they built was eventually colonised by people with money who wanted to live in the centre of a beautiful European city. The planners’ intentions and the city’s outcomes were entirely different things.

Lies said: the city was never really ours anyway. We just got to use it for a while.

I’m not sure I agree with that. My parents were here. My mother still is. The Javastraat where my father’s family ran a café for twenty-five years before the rent tripled — that was ours in some real sense. The fact that it isn’t anymore doesn’t retroactively make it not ours.

But I understand what she means. The city is not sentimental. It doesn’t remember who loved it.

We finished the wine. We made plans for next month. Maarten will come in from Haarlem. Sofie might join on video.

The book club continues. The city continues. Both are slightly different from what they were.