The City in Context

The healthy economic growth in recent years has not passed the major Dutch cities by. There has been a veritable wave of construction of new commercial and office premises in and around the four largest cities Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, and house prices in the most desirable neighbourhoods have risen to unprecedented levels. At the same time, unemployment at the bottom end of the labour market and social assistance benefit dependency remain very high, and the quality of life in some inner-city neighbourhoods is under pressure.
This publication looks at developments on a range of fronts in the four metropolitan areas in the Randstad conurbation in the west of the Netherlands. Among the topics covered are trends in the population, the housing market, the economy, the labour market and benefit dependency, segregation by income and ethnicity and crime. Special attention is also devoted to the unenviable position of the groups caught in the middle in the inner cities, the interaction between cities and the surrounding regions and the government's urban policy.