I’m not good at going on holidays. Ideally I’d rather live somewhere I like living enough, and work somewhere I enjoy working enough, that planning and dreaming of living and doing something else for one month a year isn’t what sustains me through the other eleven.
This hopefully goes some way to explain why I’m now back from a short holiday to Amsterdam first planned for Winter 2019.
To the extent I like breaks, I like city breaks, because I like cities. Cities are to people as hives are to bees, dams are to beavers, and palatial mounds are to termites. They’re the ultimate extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens sapiens, a way of terraforming a piece of the planet into something that more efficiently meets human wants and needs than any other part of the Earth (and by extension the known universe). I don’t see cities as something that contrasts with nature, but something that beautifully expresses human nature. And I think Amsterdam is perhaps an especially beautiful and complete expression of this nature, or at least some of the potential that exists within this nature.
My suspicion is that, for various complex reasons, the British just don’t tend to do cities as well as most of our Continential European neighbours. Perhaps the key to the mystery why is locked up in that self description of England and its “green and pleasant lands”, which in Blake’s poem is contrasted with the “dark satanic mills” of industry, and in that oddly disease-like term, bucolic. England has placed its dreams in an idealised past - fields, village greens, rugged white cliffs; sketches and icons which found full expression in the 2010 UK passport design, as it happens - and the big, livable city has had no place in this iconography. The other UK nations, in this very unequal nation of nations, has then been taken along for the ride, to dreaming of ‘escaping to the country’ rather than seeking out the city.
So, as we don’t like living in cities, and our dreams aren’t in and of cities, we don’t dream big when it comes to designing our cities to be more livable. So, we don’t make wholesale efforts to encourage cycling and mass transit, as Amsterdam did in the 1970s. We have less active travel, more disease related to sedentary living, more suburbanisation, more traffic jams, more time spent going from, through and into places rather than being in places.
The British aversion to cities may help to explain why an apparently universal empirical ‘law’ of cities, known as Zipf’s Law, doesn’t seem to apply as strongly in the UK as in most other affluent nations. Zipf’s Law states that, if the log of the rank of a city (ordered from most to least populous) is plotted against the log of the size of the city, the points plotted should form a straight line. For most continental European nations, this ‘law’ seems to hold. But for the UK, it doesn’t: either the first city (London) is too large, or the other cities (Manchester, Birmingham, and so on) are too small.
In a very crude sense, a city reaches its population limit when the positive effects of population density get to be fully cancelled out by the negative effects of population density. Negative density effects are generally known as congestion effects (which includes but is not limited to traffic congestion) and positive density effects are referred to as agglomeration effects. Both congestion effects and agglomeration effects only go up with density, but at different rates, leading to a net density effect schedule that’s likely to be somewhat upside-down-U-shaped. The challenge of making a successful livable city - somewhere people want to go to rather than escape from - is to make the marginal agglomeration effect schedule steeper than the corresponding marginal congestion effect schedule. In practice it’s probably more important for city planners to focus on flattening out the congestion effects than on trying to capitalise further on the agglomeration effects.
And how does this relate to Amsterdam? Well, a bicycle takes up less of a city and its streets than a car, and a person takes up less of a city than a bicycle. So, if more people could be encouraged to walk, or cycle, or use other forms of mass transit, then the congestion effect schedules become flatter. It seemed that, in the Netherlands, there was a recognition by the 1970s that the car-is-king philosophy that took off in the post-war decades were making Amsterdam a less pleasant experience for those living in and visiting the city. By making a large number of large scale infrastructure changes all at once, the congestion effect schedule got flattened, and so the optimal density peak got pushed back further to the right (possibly to a limit more dependent on how high buildings could be built, rather than how fast people could move within the city), and the city became livable once again.
Of course, another thing the Netherlands, and especially Amsterdam, has become internationally renowned for is its permissive attitudes to illicit drug use and sex. Though this may at first seem unrelated to the above, perhaps it’s not. Perhaps these came about, in part, as solutions to other, less directly tangible, kinds of agglomoration/congestion effect challenge? For someone who’s crudely libertarian in outlook, of course, a city is a musterpoint for markets, and markets exist for all kind of good and service, so surely permitting rather than inhibiting markets in the wide range of goods and services denizens wish to offer and consume is just another way of increasing the steepness of the agglomeration schedule of cities and allowing people who live and work together to serve each other’s needs more effectively. From this crude libertarian perspective, the criminalisation of some goods and services then just adversely distorts and degrades these markets, making it harder for people to service each other’s wants and needs.
The impression I had of Amsterdam, however, was that the drug-and-sex permissiveness comes less from purely free-market libertarian ideology, focused on maximising agglomeration effects, and more from a sense of urban pragmatism, focused on minimising social and cultural congestion effects. When lots of people, from many different backgrounds, come to share the same finite physical space, there will be lots of different things they will want, not all of which we may want for them to want. 1 By simply permitting people to indulge and avail themselves of goods and services that might be risky or harmful, we at least reduce the potentially greater risks and harms that may come from attempting to prohibit or inhibit their use. Amsterdam, it appears to me, tolerates the trade in some drugs and sex, rather than celebrates it.
The closest UK analogy is probably vape shops: Of course, it would from first principles, from a health perspective, be better if no one sought out nicotine products, nor became nicotine dependent. But if we were to live in the real world, where tens of millions of people are nicotine addicts, it is surely less harmful they meet this need through vaping than smoking? So, beyond some level, the prohibition or restriction of vape shops is likely to be net harmful, because it is likely to reduce the level of switching from (more harmful) cigarette smoking to (less harmful) vaping. This argument does not mean vaping is great, nor that vape shops are harmless (especially when and if they encourage switching from not smoking to vaping, for example in school-aged populations), but it does mean that trying to stop this growing market risks doing more harm than good.
The analogy seems to work in another way too: though the growth of vape shops in the UK over the last decade or so has been substantial, only a relatively small proportion of shops are vape shops, and the rate of growth in this kind of establishment seems to be slowing. Similarly, in Amsterdam, shops selling cannabis and psilocybin products 2 are not uncommon, but at the same time are far from the only shop in Amsterdam: cafes greatly outnumber ‘coffeeshops’. Supply found equilibrium with demand, and did not overshoot. ‘Sin goods’ exist, and in Amsterdam appear to peacefully coexist with the many other markets that a large city can support. If we were to stretch the concept of ‘congestion effects’ to any kind of adverse harm that groups of people meeting can cause to each other, and include drug-related deaths in this concept, then - according to Our World In Data at least - this particular form of social congestion effect appears to be around five times worse in the UK than in the Netherlands. So it seems it’s not just our roads that are needlessly congested from failing to think pragmatically about the challenges of urban living; our morgues are too.
Footnotes
Another aspect of this is that cities tend to disproportionately draw younger adults, and single people, rather than older adults and familities; both factors likely associated with greater risk appetites/lower risk aversion.↩︎
Sales of ‘harder drugs’ appear more strongly prohibited. If pushing the vehicle congestion analogy perhaps this is like permitting the sale of unleaded petrol but prohibiting the sale of leaded petrol?↩︎