The State of the City Amsterdam Monitor: Measuring Quality of Life in Amsterdam

Abstract

From 1998 onwards, local social policy in Amsterdam -the capital city of the Netherlands — has been carried out in a more structured and integrated way. By means of a ‘Social Structure Plan’, the local government tries to attune the implementation-and policymaking process in the social field. One of the goals of the Social Structure Plan was to follow developments in the social field and to indicate problems, both within social groups and over city-areas. For this purpose, an integrated monitoring system was designed. This monitor concentrates on the living conditions of people living in Amsterdam, more specifically on the various ways people are participating in the local community. Main topics are participation in education, work, income, societal participation, cultural participation, political participation, and livability of the neighborhood. The monitor consists of two parts. The first part is a survey held among a representative sample of the citizens of Amsterdam. The first results were published in 2001 in a bi-annual monitor called the ‘Amsterdam State of the City Monitor’. The main focus in the report lies on an integrative monitoring instrument: the living conditions index (LCI), which combines indicators of various domains into one single index. The second part of the monitor consists of a geographical information system, which follows various social developments within the city at a very precise level (six position postal code). From the survey data, it was found that living conditions in Amsterdam were worse than in the Netherlands as a whole. This is a hardly surprising outcome since more people living in the capital are economically and socially deprived. Both in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, the living conditions of the youth were better compared to the elderly, higher educated people had better living conditions than lower educated and people living together were better off than single people. However, there were some differences: the living conditions of elder people and of students living in Amsterdam were better compared to the same people living elsewhere in the Netherlands. One of the interesting outcomes of the geographical monitor was that the question of whether there is a ghetto formation of ethnic minorities in the city could be answered in the negative: the majority of the three largest ethnic minorities still lived widely spread over the city.