Welcoming Amsterdam

Abstract

Due to growing touristic movements worldwide, cities and landscapes start to experience or are already experiencing negative socioeconomic impacts, resulting in for example a decreased liveability and overcrowding. The increase of tourism is related to global trends like globalisation, economic well-being and migration movements. Amsterdam is the largest and most popular city in the Netherlands, it attracts many tourists every year. With the predicted growth of possibly more than 45 million tourists in the year 2030, there is a need to get a better understanding of the positive and negative impacts of tourism on the host city and its inhabitants. The project will aim to develop a framework to deal with increasing numbers of tourists visiting the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, including both the quality of life of the citizens and the experience of the visitor by analysing layers present in the city of Amsterdam and find the problematic links and nodes of the varying networks between history, governance, technical,
economic and social layers. The results of the theory about the method and the analysis can be found in the separate booklet Welcoming Amsterdam | layer analysis. Together with theory about positive and negative tourism impacts and cultural clusters to distribute the economic benefits and number of visitors more evenly and minimize the negative impacts will this thesis propose a spatial strategy of networks of touristic nodes and connections. One possible touristic area will be developed to elaborate on the requirements of a cultural cluster.