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Intro -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1: Introduction -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 Explanations for Urban Transformation -- 1.3 The Socio-Political Cycle of Urban Transformation -- Class, Politics and the Production of Urban Space -- 1.4 Outline of this Book -- 2: Class, State and Urban Space -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Social Class in Context -- Social Class in the Netherlands -- Defining the Middle Class Today -- An Emergent Professional Middle Class -- 2.3 Spatializing Class, Classes in Space -- 2.4 Urban Transformation and Social Class -- Urban Space as Constitutive of Class -- 2.5 Class, State and Space -- 2.6 Two Mechanisms of Urban Transformation -- Institutional Politics: Policy Regimes and Elections -- Symbolic Politics -- 2.7 The Socio-Political Cycle of Amsterdam's Transformation -- 3: Social and Spatial Transformations -- 3.1 Amsterdam Diversifying and Gentrifying -- 3.2 Demographic Change -- 3.3 Ethnic Change -- 3.4 Economic Change -- 3.5 Social Class Change -- Disappearing Working Class -- Rise of the New Urban Middle Class -- Income Developments -- Regional Dynamics -- 3.6 Neighbourhood Transformations in Amsterdam -- Early Gentrification: The 1980s and Before -- Expanding Gentrification: 1990-2001 -- Ubiquitous Gentrification: 2001-2009 -- Post 2009: Transformations in the Wake of the Crisis -- 3.7 New Spatial Inequalities -- 3.8 Conclusions -- 4: The Electoral Geography of Amsterdam -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 The Dutch Political Landscape -- 4.3 Class-Based Voting and Spatial Polarisation -- 4.4 The New Middle-Class Vote(s) -- 4.5 General Electoral Patterns in the Netherlands and Amsterdam -- 4.6 Electoral Dynamics in the City Until 1989 -- 4.7 Electoral Dynamics in the City 1989-1998 -- 4.8 Electoral Dynamics in the 2000s.

This book seeks to understand the urban transformation of Amsterdam over a 40-year period. In addition to charting social and economic changes associated with gentrification, it analyses the electoral dynamics and middle-class politics that have underpinned Amsterdams change to a middle-class city. Willem Boterman & Wouter van Gent are Urban and Political Geographers at the department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. How can we explain urban transformations of the past decades? Boterman and Van Gent take on the challenge to explain how and why Social-democratic Amsterdam became a middle-class city. They conceptualize the socio-political cycle of urban transformation to meticulously analyse the growth and growing domination of middle classes that has transformed politics, the local state and urban policies, and has undermined Amsterdams quintessential social-redistributive characteristics. The book presents a terrific case study to bring to light the key processes that are reconfigurating European cities...and beyond. -Professor Patrick le Gales (SciencePo, Paris) Making the Middle-Class City is the result of a ten-year long ambitious project linking social-economic restructuring, electoral and political shifts to housing, neighbourhood and city-wide transformations. The key innovation of the book is that Boterman and Van Gent demonstrate how the different changes add up to nothing less than the gentrification of not only the city but also of City Hall. They dissect how policy makers and bureaucrats embody middle-class interests and act upon those interests. The paradoxical result is a city that is increasingly unaffordable to both working- and middle-class households. This book speaks to current tensions in many cities: between different class interests, between tourism-led growth and housing affordability, and ultimately between social justice and neoliberalism. It will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got there. -Professor Manuel Aalbers (University of Leuven) A superb book that tells us what is distinctive about processes of gentrification in Amsterdam. Outs the peddling of soft gentrification by a left-liberal Dutch state and evidences the hard edged impacts of this. The striking correlations between social and electoral change point to the possible futures of gentrifying and diversifying cities elsewhere in the world, beyond Amsterdam. An excellent addition to the gentrification studies literature. - Professor Loretta Lees (Director of the Initiative on Cities, Boston University, USA).

AbstractThis study investigates the consequences of female rural-urban migration with respect to their education, career, and relationship and family formation in the Netherlands. The study is based on four birth cohorts of Dutch women born in 1970-1973 in rural areas, comparing those who had migrated to urban areas before the age of 25 with those who had remained behind. Outcomes were measured at age 42. The data were derived from administrative registers available at Statistics Netherlands. The results show that female migration to cities served to increase women's resources: they were more often university educated and had better paid jobs, in line with the idea of cities as socioeconomic escalators. The city also functioned as a relationship market with a relative abundance of men with resources. Both lower and university educated city women were more likely to be in a relationship with a highly educated man compared to their rural peers. However, lower educated women had an increased probability of being single at age 42 when they lived in cities at age 25. This was not the case for university educated women. In conclusion, for lower educated women urban migration may entail risks as well as benefits, especially with respect to family formation. University educated women on the other hand benefited both in terms of their own socioeconomic outcomes and in terms of their partners' resources.