Experiencing Amsterdam’s Red Light District as a female resident:normalization, alliances and diversion

Every year, Amsterdam’s de Wallen neighbourhood attracts high numbers of tourists looking to experience a unique Red Light District (RLD). Yet de Wallen is a multi-use area, that combines sexualised consumption and leisure practices, with everyday residential urban functions and public spaces. This study investigated how female residents of this neighbourhood experience its sexualised nature, adjust their behaviour to it, as well as how they negotiate their feelings of belonging and being at home. Data was collected through in-depth interviews and focus groups. The results indicate that female residents navigate their ordinary lives in the neighbourhood with a sense of normality and familiarity, while acknowledging and maintaining a distance to the areas more extraordinary peculiarities, nuisances and darker, more unknown sides. They take ownership of their neighbourhood by creating a community, standing up for sex workers and reacting boldly towards sexual harassment. Becoming targets of objectification and sexualisation by male visitors to the area stimulates them to deconstruct power relations between genders. Generally speaking, this study shows how respondents residing in de Wallen manage to feel secure, spatially confident as well as attached and protective of an area that is both ordinary and extraordinary.</p

Transforming work:A critical literature review on degrowth, post-growth, postcapitalism and craft labor

Many scholars have called for a profound change in capitalist growth-oriented provisioning systems and business models to help address the unique socio-ecological challenges of the 21st century. Reenvisaging how work is organised, constructed, and valued is an essential part of this change. Scholars of degrowth, post-growth, postcapitalist, and craft research have long discussed alternatives to capitalist work from different perspectives and levels of analysis. We believe that cross-fertilisation of ideas between these strands of literature can advance our imaginaries of the future of work and transition pathways towards the vision of dealienated labour. For this purpose, we bring these strands of literature into conversation by performing a critical literature review on work in postcapitalist, degrowth, post-growth, and craft scholarship. Overall, 121 articles were included in the analysis. We identify autonomy, dealienation, and value creation as common themes with complementary insights from the strands of literature. We also observe that macroeconomic policies suggested by degrowth, post-growth and postcapitalist scholars provide an institutional framework that can be compatible with the micropolitics of work, as documented by craft scholars. Lastly, craft scholars provide an empirically grounded analysis of what it means to engage in useful doing, whereas degrowth and postcapitalist literature mainly contains critical theoretical reflections on the decommodification of labour, recognition of reproductive labour and value creation. Degrowth, post-growth and postcapitalist literature can benefit from more empirical research investigating these issues in relation to the everyday realities of workers.</p

Popular music as cultural heritage: scoping out the field of practice

This paper sets out to deepen our understanding of the relationship between popular music and cultural heritage and to delineate the practices of popular music as cultural heritage. The paper illustrates how the term has been mobilised by a variety of actors, from the public to the private sector, to highlight the value of particular popular music manifestations and justify or encourage their preservation and diffusion for posterity. We focus on Austria, England, France and the Netherlands – countries with diverse popular music histories and with varying national and international reach. Popular music heritage is present in national and local public sector heritage institutions and practices in a number of ways. These range from the preservation and exhibition of the material culture of heritage in museums and archives, to a variety of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives, delineating a rich landscape of emblematic places, valued for their attachment to particular musicians or music scenes. The paper points to an underlying tension between the adoption and replication of conventional heritage practices to the preservation and remembrance of the popular music and its celebration as an express

‘Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio?’ How audiences talk about music-related personal memories, preferences, and localities.

This chapter explores how people recall personal music memories from their youth and how they relate their past and present-day music preferences to particular local, regional and national identity signifiers. The findings are based on an online survey carried out in the Netherlands and the UK, as part of a European project on popular music, cultural memory and identity. The survey contained a mix of open questions – where respondents could elaborate on their music preferences and memories – and closed questions that were analysed to reveal how background characteristics (age, education, profession) and listening habits can help explain variations in attachment to regional and national music styles. Early music memories are often associated with family and friendship bonds, and they trigger nostalgic and emotionally charged reminiscing of family outings, holidays or first contacts with music or favourite acts. Language and locality are important markers of authenticity, while canonical acts are more often cited. We also note a strong bias towards positive reminiscing. The quantitative analysis reveals generational differences in listening practices and attachment to regional and national music, while also shedding light on how first experiences of music have become less convivial and more individualised in recent decades.</p

Inside and Outside the Market for Contemporary Art in Brazil, through the Experience of Artists and Gallerists.

In this paper, I seek to extend our understanding of global art markets by focusing on the relationships between different art world agents and their perceived responsibilities and roles in a market considered locally ‘incipient’ and emergent on the global scene. For this purpose, I draw on over 50 interviews with art gallerists, independent art spaces and visual artists represented by them, living in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two largest clusters of the contemporary art market in Brazil, at a time of market expansion and internationalisation. In an incipient market, two main functions are considered important: Developing the commercial circuit and opening up the market, and; enhancing the value of art in society. Such functions occur against the backdrop of a large and complex country, where the ‘eixo’ (axis) of the main cities offers greater opportunities for visibility and valorization. The findings help to elucidate the perceptions of responsibility and roles in a context of market development, as well as the emerging boundaries between culture and the market. Moreover, the paper explores the emerging dynamics and strategies of art world development as they are enacted, offering insights into how art market actors perceive their roles and responsibilities, as well as the strategies available to them to support market consolidation

Port-City Transition: Past and Emerging Socio-Spatial Imaginaries and Uses in Rotterdam's Makers District

This article explores old and emerging socio-spatial imaginaries and uses of Rotterdam's Makers District. The district comprises two urban harbors - Merwe Vierhavens and Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij - historically in use as bustling trade, storage, and ship yarding nodes of the city’s port activities. At the turn of the millennium, technological advancements made it possible to move many port-related activities out of the area and farther out of the city, gradually hollowing out these harbors’ port-related economic foundations and opening opportunities for new uses and imaginaries. This article traces the transition by detailing how the boundary between the city and the port has become more porous in this district. It does so by offering original empirical evidence on the flows of users in and out of the area in recent years, based on location quotients, while also applying a content analysis of the profiles of companies and institutions currently inhabiting and working in these transformed port-city spaces. On the one hand, the results show how the ongoing port-city transition in Rotterdam's Makers District combines carefully curated interventions and infrastructure plans seeking to progressively adapt the area to new purposes, while maintaining some of its former functions. On the other hand, they highlight the pioneering role of more bottom-up initiatives and innovative urban concepts, springing from the creative industries and maker movement. The article offers insights into the emerging uses and imaginaries attached to the district, while also showing the resilience and adaptation of port legacies

Places of popular music heritage: the local framing of a global cultural form in Dutch museums and archives

Through the prism of popular music, this article examines how the preservation and display of this global cultural form positions itself at the nexus of the local and the global, and in so doing mediates attachment to place. Springing from the increasing cultural legitimacy of popular music and the growing participation of fans and local communities in heritage practices, Dutch private and public heritage initiatives are analyzed to explore how the local histories and lived experiences of popular music reverberate in the framework of wider global cultural developments. The results of this study indicate that museums and archives give places meaning through three interrelated processes. They present local sociocultural histories, foster a sense of belonging and cultural pride, and seek to document the artistic legacy of places. Furthermore, it is found that despite the strong transnational dimension of popular music, the studied heritage practices strongly resonate with local and national cultural identities, as narratives of popular music and heritage are mediated by locally situated cultural gatekeepers. These findings are based on in-depth interviews conducted with archivists, collectors and curators from the Netherlands

Valuing popular music heritage

The institutional context for the preservation of popular music-related heritage in the Netherlands has in recent years changed dramatically. On the one hand, this is related to major cuts in government support for all kinds of culture-related initiatives (OCW, 2011) On the other hand, it reflects a shift in priorities and a redistribution of functions across the institutional landscape. In the field of music, this has resulted in the closure in early 2013 of dedicated institutions such as the Muziek Centrum Nederland (Music Centre Netherlands) and the Nederlands Muziek Instituut (Dutch Music Institute) and the fragmentation of their collections across a number of institutions, including the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) and the University of Amsterdam