Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy:

Socio-economic and Spatial Re-organisation

of Albert Cuypmarkt

Albert Cuyp Market, Amsterdam’s most visited and famous street market, is an important wealth generating structure in the city. Its socio-economic structure, spatial organization and temporal dynamics present certain weaknesses as well as important potentials. It is located in the zone designated to be developed as Amsterdam’s Red Carpet. Along with the other areas included in this zone, the market and its surroundings are undergoing a process of urban regeneration. While formulating an urban development strategy for the market, city authorities focus mostly on the role that it can play in urban branding and in regional image making. As a part of the debate on marketplaces in relation to urban development strategies, the paper aims to investigate a new spatial design for Albert Cuyp Market, which suggests an inclusive urban regeneration scenario for the market and its surroundings. This investigation brings together questions of spatial quality, rental rates, working hours, flexibility, building materials, construction costs and income levels.

The design proposal is based on the differentiation of the commercial units in their spatial quality, rental rates, working hours and temporal flexibility. This allows to differentiate the target income group suggested for each commercial unit and to create spatial possibilities for the low-income vendors to be integrated into the market. The configuration of the commercial units at urban scale is based on the principle of spatial transformation of the market at different hours of the day in order to obtain socio-economic and programmatic opportunities from the temporal dynamics of the market space. The new design also aims to improve the public space quality, the operational mechanism and the economic vitality of the market. It is expected that as a result of this intervention, different income groups will co-exist in the same urban space generating urban wealth from one single economic structure, opportunities will be created for the low-income groups to climb up the income ladder in the society, and the economic investment made for the urban regeneration of an area will equally benefit all income groups in the society.

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The article is originally published in Janssens, Freek and Sezer, Ceren, eds. Built Environment: Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy.Volume 39.2 (2013)

The article is based on the author’s Masters thesis ‘Socio-Economic and Spatial Re-Organization of Albert Cuypmarkt: Integration of Low-Income Groups into Wealth-Generating Urban Structures’, completed in Technische Universiteit Delft.