This is an English translation. The original Dutch article is authoritative.
Concerns regarding the quality of the living environment in Amsterdam's city centre have enjoyed a high degree of public and political interest for decades.
It is logical, as over the past 50/60 years, the public domain of that city centre has changed radically from a transition of poor housing, commercial activity, and industry (even featuring a number of characteristics of the old guild system in the city centre) to all kinds of new forms of hospitality and other entertainment. More recently, due to increasing tourism, there has been an explosion of new hotels, residential rentals, and a wide variety of retail offerings purely focused on the tourist.
Such radical changes in such a relatively short time lead to uncertainty among all stakeholders who experience the change up close. This subsequently feeds the perception of nuisance, accompanied by the call for the government to take action, i.e., to intervene!
However, it remains striking that in the public and political discussions on how to improve the quality of the city centre, it is consistently and predominantly prostitution (specifically the Red Light District) and coffeeshops that are identified as the primary causes of nuisance. This was already evident in previous projects regarding the Upgrading of the city centre, based on the premise that nuisance would decrease with a substantial reduction in the number of prostitution windows and the number of coffeeshops.
And now that the future of the city centre is once again high on the political agenda, the accusation repeats itself: that coffeeshops attract low-value tourism and cause nuisance. One of the options envisioned by the city hall is that this problem can be solved by introducing the "Wietpas" (a ban on tourist access to coffeeshops – i.e., non-residents, the I-Criterion). In response, the Adviesburo Drugs conducted a small-scale study among 11 prominent coffeeshops and processed the results into a report. This report is an account of the investigation into whether it is true that coffeeshops are responsible for attracting low-value tourism and whether this causes nuisance.
August de Loor, January 2020