Planning and sustaining an inclusive urban infrastructure of cultural amenities Lessons from Amsterdam

In this chapter, we contribute to current debates on cultural planning and governance by proposing a novel way of looking at urban cultural amenities which combines two conceptual approaches. First, we depart from a typology of cultural amenities that distinguishes goods into four types based on the audience it attracts (niche or mainstream) and the scale of provision (large or small). This typology goes beyond large-scale flagship projects and explicitly comprises ecos small-scale cultural amenities that significantly contribute to a rich cultural infrastructure. Second, our governance perspective highlights the distinction between collective action modes that directly provide cultural amenities and goods and those that aim to create favourable conditions for these. After introducing these two perspectives, we present cases of how concrete collective action processes have impacted Amsterdam's cultural amenities. These cases should serve as real-life illustrations of our proposal for a more comprehensive way of cultural planning.