ABSTRACT
European Cities are changing. Newspapers write extensively about the creative class working on their laptops in hipster cafés and about middle-class families returning from the suburbs and exchanging their cars for cargo bikes to transport their children around the city. This reassessment of the city – as the playground of a new urban middle class – is clearly visible than in Amsterdam, which perhaps more than any other Dutch city resembles the success story envisioned by the Dutch government in their newest urban agenda Celebrate the City (2015). Gentrification, active citizenship and do-it-yourself urbanism are celebrated as core values of this new, postmodern city. But not everyone is celebrating and some people feel left behind.
