Welcome to Soweto Amsterdam

Amsterdam has a problem. The city may be popular with tourists, but they all stay in central Amsterdam rather than sampling the delights of Amsterdam’s other neighbourhoods. This has been troubling the city council for years but now they think they’ve found the solution: marketing!

As Jeroen Mirck reports, the Amsterdam Tourist & Convention Board has decided that branding and marketing neighbourhoods should be the key to winning over tourists. Some of the names suggested: ‘Amsterdam Docklands’, ‘Green Plantation’, ‘Swinging Melting pot’, ‘Little Amsterdam’, ‘Kinetic North’. Yes, they sound better in Dutch, but not much.

Not all neighbourhoods have gotten their own brand suggestions yet — the ones above are for parts of the city already relatively popular and gentrified. The more troublesome areas of Amsterdam have been left out of this consultation exercise so far, though the marketeers had a “hilarious” suggestion for Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, traditionally the part of the city with the most Black people: Soweto.