The Gentrification of Amsterdam’s Gritty Nightlife

(Photo by John Walker via Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

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“It was in the nightlife scene that I found my kindred spirits — people who were also searching.” – Joost van Bellen, DJ resident at the RoXY

On the frayed edge of the city, surrounded by a dystopian vista of countless towering wind turbines on a deserted industrial estate, any form of entertainment seems far out of reach on a Saturday night. But those who know where to look will find the “refuge church” of OM314, a DJ and event organizer, who runs an underground club with his wife. 

Disguised as what appears to be an ordinary warehouse, a nightclub has been operating here for four years. After entering through a warehouse filled with construction vehicles, countless materials, and a communal fridge left open for whoever needs it, an iron staircase leads up to a dance floor dominated by a giant,  majestic disco ball. Many an audiophile could lose themselves in the depth of sound coming from the homemade sound system, while the DJs can be admired from the sawn-off front of an old Mercedes-Benz 508 bathed in the same dim red light that washes over the entire space. 

It is this distinct communal identity that is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve. Not only in Amsterdam, but also in Berlin, where 46% of the clubs consider closing within a year, rising rents and energy prices, gentrification, and the overcommercialization of the music industry push community-driven clubs further and further out of the city or force them to close. 

Although appreciation for nightlife culture is growing, its protection falls short, threatening the diversity of vital safe spaces for queer individuals, people of colour, and lower-income community members.

The Roots of House in Amsterdam

Since the eighties and the arrival of overseas house music, Amsterdam carved out a place for itself as a valhalla within the electronic music scene. The pioneering club the RoXY added a paradise-like refuge to Amsterdam’s nightlife. A sanctuary where queer communities and people of colour, who felt less heard during the day, found a place to call home. 

The RoXY distinguished itself as a club that began to combine “this new, often very soulful dance music; and also this incredibly vibrant and exuberant aesthetic, shaped by those black and queer communities who had first introduced the sounds in the early 80s.” The dance floor became a place of comfort when AIDS spread in the 1980s, a space where people danced away their trauma.

Ever since the RoXY, Amsterdam’s club scene has continued to reinvent itself. The nineties brought a wave of new, influential venues that identified themselves as more than just a dance floor. In the early 2000s, Club11 shared its space with the art world. Housed on the top floor of a postal sorting building awaiting demolition, half of Cuba11 was rented out by day to the Stedelijk Museum for lectures and presentations. A club and museum under one roof. 

In 2009, Trouw added its own “night museum”, a basement space reserved for late-night art exhibitions, and became the first club in the Netherlands to receive a 24-hour license in 2013. This was a milestone that former mayor Van der Laan himself marked from behind the decks. Nightclub De School, operated in a former technical school, took the concept to a full-fledged community hub. Alongside the dance floor was a concert venue, restaurant, café, exhibition space, and gym, with a courtyard that stayed open year-round to neighbourhood residents, not just clubgoers.

The Gentrification Engine: Clubs as a Tool for Revitalization

Amsterdam exemplifies what Richard Florida describes in his book Rise of the Creative Class as cities that attract artists and creatives as engines of renewal, only to sow their own gentrification. Amsterdam’s social housing stock fell from 60% in the 1990s to roughly 35% today. Amsterdam saw its neighbourhoods yuppify considerably. House prices have risen over 95% since 2004, even in relatively low-income areas. Specialist shops and local corner stores give way to trendy coffee bars and yoga gyms. The original residents, often people of colour and lower incomes, are not so much directly displaced as quietly excluded to where they can no longer return once they left.

Clubs play an ambiguous and underappreciated role. They have historically retreated to the fringes of the city in empty offices and abandoned industrial sites where rent was low, and nobody else wanted to be. There, they built identity, atmosphere, and appeal. Precisely the ingredients that make a neighbourhood “interesting” to the creative class that Florida described. 

But that appeal works like a magnet. Once a club puts a district on the map, creative workers follow, then hospitality, then property developers. The club shifts from one stage prop to another and is finally replaced by high-end apartments or flex offices. Nightclubs De Marktkantine, Skatecafe, and Garage Noord are textbook examples of this pattern.

Local government play an active, if rarely explicit, role. The city also benefits financially from land sales and redevelopment, which can place cultural spaces under pressure.  Cities have learned to manage nightlife rather than protect it. While local governments’ good attitude is visible in their planning, in practice clubs are often the first casualty of the gentrification they themselves created.

Recognized, But Not Protected

This asymmetry has legal roots too. Under Dutch law, nightclubs fall under horeca — the same category as cafés and snack bars – and are governed by hospitality rules, rather than cultural policy. Germany drew the line differently: clubs once shared a legal bracket with brothels and gambling halls, until a 2021 reclassification gave them the same planning protection as theatres, pop venues, and museums. Amsterdam has only moved that way informally, through a night vision recognizing “night culture as living cultural heritage” — without changing clubs’ actual legal status.

Amsterdam already has precedent for this logic. The bruine kroeg (brown café), hit by inflation and competition from trendier concepts, has been classified as intangible cultural heritage for the tradition it carries. But intangible heritage status offers limited protection. It recognizes tradition without giving venues the same legal or financial safeguards as cultural institutions. The drift continues as many brown cafés keep homogenizing, chasing a tourist-friendly look at the cost of their character.

This legal gap shows up in the numbers. Amsterdam subsidizes museums and theatres with over €125 million yearly. Nightclubs receive around €540,000 — a disparity that goes far in explaining why clubs struggle where institutions do not. A newer initiative funds youth-oriented nightlife events up to €15,000 each, signalling real recognition of night culture’s value. 

But a subsidy that small does not protect a club. Rather, it funds a single night while the building gets sold to a developer. The real gap is not financial; it is conceptual. The city does not treat clubs the way it treats theatres and museums — as cultural heritage worth structurally protecting.

Against the Grain: Staying Underground and Community-Based

For some, the answer to a system that will not protect them is to stay outside of it entirely. This is exactly what OM314 has done. Far past the ring road, OM314 has been running his underground club for four years out of a warehouse he uses professionally as a roofing contractor. It started as a one-off party, but the taste for more never left. 

OM314 has been hosting nights since long before that. His relationship with music and with the space goes back to his childhood. As I spoke with him, he described how he “was four years old when I claimed a record player from my recently deceased aunt’s house as my inheritance. By my teens I basically had a disco already in my bedroom.”

What he has built now is something more considered than a dance floor in a warehouse. The space is deliberately divided into smaller hubs – a balcony, a modest dance floor, a chill-out area beside the stage and a community bar zone, each with its own social gravity. “That way you create a lot of movement and intimacy without needing a huge crowd,” he explains. It is a philosophy of scale: the club works precisely because it does not try to be big.

The Price of Compliance

OM314’s feelings about the current scene are complicated. He has watched nightlife transform from a subculture into something that increasingly resembles a sector. “I don’t want to call the current scene an industry,” he says carefully. “That’s exactly what the scene was pushing back against when it started.” 

That tension surfaces especially around subsidies: “I do believe subsidies can help certain clubs. But the power of the night also lies in the freedoms you give up the moment you have to comply with subsidy regulations. A counterculture of escapism from the organised system will always be a timeless urge.”

The pandemic was paradoxically clarifying. “During the corona crisis, the idea took shape. It was a period that confirmed just how dependent we are on social contact, and how real the need for an outlet like a club is.” Out of that stillness, he committed fully to what had always been his passion, without pretence about what it could offer financially. “Maybe I’m just in my midlife crisis,” he laughs, “but I can’t do anything other than dedicate myself to this. Financially there’s no business model in it. The pleasure of the passion gives me enough energy.”

What Disappears When a Club Closes

When a club closes, there is no obituary for the dance floor where some people felt safe and truly at home. Especially for queer people, people of colour, and other marginalized people in general, the stakes are high. These places served as necessary infrastructure, a way to escape the world outside. 

As one writer puts it, the club serves as  “a meeting point, a release, a mirror, a shelter, where you went to lose your ego, not boost your profile.” That sanctuary function is precisely what cannot be replicated by whatever opens in its place. 

Nightlife is not peripheral to a city’s creative life; it is where that creativity is tested, shared and renewed. The dance floor has always been a place where new sounds, fashion, and social possibilities emerged before they surfaced anywhere else. As architect David Mulder van der Vegt describes: “Nightlife is the canary in the coalmine: once your nightlife starts to slow down, it says something about cultural production as a whole and creativity in the city.”

The Blueprint for a Better Nightlife

The prototype for a better approach already exists. In 2021, Berlin officially classified clubs as cultural institutions, granting them the same planning protections as theatres and concert halls. The effects have been significant. Clubs gained stronger grounds to defend themselves against property developers, noise complaints could be weighed differently, and the city has more tools to protect nightlife infrastructure.

Amsterdam can do the same. A stronger legal status for clubs as cultural heritage would protect them from the gentrification engine they themselves set in motion. Beyond that, the city can play a more active role in soundproofing, not by restricting clubs, but by investing in the insulation of buildings and their surroundings, so that the urban densification and nightlife no longer have to exclude each other. The local government in Berlin has spent €1 million on soundproofing clubs to prevent more from closing, after 170 nightclubs have been forced to close since 2011.

The change does not have to come from governments alone. Clubs can focus on booking more local DJs over expensive international headliners, reducing overhead,  and keeping a root in the community. 

But ultimately, the power of the night is not something that can be fully institutionalized. It lives in a hedonistic escapism, an ageless drive to step outside the organized system, to dissolve into sound and movement, and to find something that remains out of reach during the day. That drive does not disappear. It finds a new route, a new building, a new edge of the city. Amsterdam’s task is not to manage that energy, but to give it the space it deserves.

Edited by Atena Abbaspourbenis