The Right to the Red Light City: Inhabiting a Contested Landscape Negotiating A Space Between Tourism, Community, and Commerce, and Asking the Big Question: Who Owns the City?

Rather than seeing De Wallen as a fixed “tourist zone,” it is more accurately described as a living landscape where past and present continuously overlap and compete with one another. Emerging around the 13th-century, the Oude Kerk, the area historically housed sailors, traders, migrants, and sex workers operating within the economic landscapes of a developing maritime city.^[1]Sex work was tolerated rather than criminalised, reflecting a pragmatic approach to morality within the Dutch Republic. By the late twentieth century, this tolerance became commercialised and branded as part of Amsterdam’s cultural identity, transforming De Wallen into what Ashworth and Tunbridge call a “tourist-historic city”,a place where heritage is consumed as spectacle.^[2] Yet heritage here is not only architectural. The intangible culture of sex work, nightlife, and social tolerance is embedded in the daily rhythms of streets and windows. Policy documents often recognise the built environment, but rarely acknowledge this embodied labour as a form of living heritage.^[3] This tension reflects broader debates about what (and who) constitutes heritage.

Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 idea of the “Right to the City”, urban space should be shaped primarily by those who inhabit it.^[4] In De Wallen, at least four groups have conflicting stakes/claims to the landscape. Residents argue for more liveability, affordable housing, safety and quiet, whilst reporting rising tourist pressure and displacement. Sex workers assert a right to visibility and workspace; the window system is not simply commercial but provides surveillance, safety, and autonomy.^[5] Tourists, by contrast, exercise what John Urry terms the “tourist gaze”, the expectation of open access to “authentic” urban experiences.^[6] Finally, municipal authorities and investors use planning tools, heritage branding, and commercial regulation to steer the district’s identity and profitability.^[7] These tensions are encapsulated in the controversial proposal to relocate sex work activities to a newly built Erotic Center at the city’s edge. Municipal arguments claim this will reduce overtourism, protect residents, and restore “dignity” to the historic core.^[8] However, sex worker organisations, including the Prostitution Information Centre (PIC), when asked for their statements (in the same community information document as before), the majority felt that this move threatens their livelihood, safety, and historical presence in the city centre. Academic critics describe this as a form of heritage sanitisation, a top-down attempt to erase morally uncomfortable histories from view while preserving architecture for tourism. ^[9] Tunbridge and Ashworth’s concept of “dissonant heritage” is useful here: heritage is not neutral but often contested between groups with unequal power dynamics.^[10]

Tourism intensifies these conflicts massively. Amsterdam receives around 18-20 million visitors annually, far exceeding its resident population. ^[11] De Wallen has been described as undergoing “Disneyfication”, a shift from lived neighbourhood to themed environment designed for consumption.^[12] Ironically, the very qualities that draw tourists: historic canals, sex work, nightlife, are those same qualities now threatened by overtourism, rising rents, and municipal restrictions. Heritage scholars and UNESCO recommend approaches such as the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) method, which emphasises community participation, safeguarding of livelihoods, and dynamic adaptation of heritage rather than freezing it in time.^[13] Similarly, Laurajane Smith critiques the “Authorized Heritage Discourse”, which privileges monuments and expert narratives over lived, community-based practices.^[14] Applying these frameworks to De Wallen encourages us not to ask whether sex work belongs in heritage discourse, but whose voices define heritage at all?

Instead of choosing between either a theme-park tourism district or a sanitised residential zone, De Wallen could be understood as a negotiated heritage landscape that is complex, uncomfortable, and plural in nature. Potential steps forward include participatory planning involving residents, sex workers, and local businesses; heritage interpretation that includes working-class, migrant, and sex work histories; and alternative tourism strategies such as locally guided tours, night-time regulation, or visitor limitations similar to those used in Venice or Bruges to mitigate the strain it is putting on the area.^[15] Examples from Antwerp’s Schipperskwartier and Hamburg’s St. Pauli show that empowering workers, regulating tourism, and acknowledging urban issues/grey areas as part of heritage can coexist with safety and policy oversight. ^[16]

De Wallen is therefore not simply a moral or economic problem. It is a question of memory, power, and belonging. Recognising it as a heritage landscape in conflict means accepting that heritage is not only what is preserved, but also what is lived, negotiated, and sometimes resisted.