The Asian tourists visiting Amsterdam are obediently trailing after their tour guide, who is holding up the sign for the group. They stop at the Oudezijdskolk canal at the top of the Zeedijk and crowd around the tour guide, who begins to describe the wild history of the area to them. Somewhat further away, a hipster on a bicycle is attempting to weave his way through the many tourists and day trippers who have ventured off the beaten track hoping to see something different from Dam Square or the Rijksmuseum.

And the Zeedijk is definitely still different. For example, there is a shop specialising in latex fetish wear that you are not likely to find on the Damrak or Kalverstraat. But the days when this street was the domain of the homeless, drug addicts and other representatives of the fringes of urban society are long past. The prostitutes strutting their stuff, the Surinamese addicts shivering in the cold Dutch winter, the drug users leaning against shop windows to smoke crack, the glass from smashed car windows underfoot and the noisy altercations and arguments that may or may not lead to physical violence – those were the types of scenes that typified the Zeedijk's image a quarter of a century ago, so much so that ‘the top of the Zeedijk’ was known virtually nationwide as being a gateway to the fringes of the big city.

Sanitised city

With just a hint of exaggeration, you could say that the cleaning up of the Zeedijk is representative of the transformation of the city of Amsterdam as a whole. In the 80s, the city suffered from high unemployment rates – officially, nearly a quarter of the working population was unemployed around 1985 – squatters’ riots and a relatively large population of drug addicts. To quote Simon Kuper (2014), columnist for the Financial Times: ‘When I was growing up in the Netherlands in the 1980s, Amsterdam was for hippies, drug addicts, prostitutes, penniless bohemians, students, a native white working class and gays fleeing intolerant Dutch small towns.’ The latter category still has a strong presence in the capital city, but there seems to be little left of those other subcultures that were such visible features of the urban landscape back in the 1980s.