I tried to do the PUMA activity, but struggled a bit due to my inability to explore Amsterdam in my bike (because I was quarantined). The Ask a Local or Observations seemed impossible to do on Google Earth or by staring out my window. I did really like how it separated Amsterdam into the post vs pre war and brought that difference into focus since it was cool to see it aerially (I’ll do another blog post on this).
It was also interesting, since it gave so many points to those who went out to the suburbs of Amsterdam, many people appear to have done that and since there isn’t enough time to do everything, it feels to me that exploring the suburbs is really important to this activity that you could gain enough points by going out there to make up for missing a bunch from the other sections. I don’t know if I quite agree with how that is weighted, though of course if it was the same as everything else no one would go out that way…
My experience with the social factors of Amsterdam are not from the PUMA activity, but I can say that my experience in the city center was that that were more POC people in the inner city than I have seen the rest of this trip (almost everyone was white everywhere else we went). The central streets and area by central station also felt absolutely overrun with tourists. Locals felt like a real minority in the very center of Amsterdam. Even out past the first few canals it felt like almost everyone I saw was a tourist. I think if I had gone further out of the city that would have changed, but unfortunately I was unable to do so. I don’t have a city to compare it to in the US… New York or some cities in California might have that level of tourism and the racial differences between the inner city and outer areas might actually be similar to Oregon.
Amsterdam exceeds Portland’s population by almost 200,000, but the Portland metro area is practically three times bigger than Amsterdam. Spatially, Amsterdam has a dense city center, with small and narrow 4-5 story houses lined up one by one while Portland has a center of skyscrapers which quickly turn into sprawling, suburban, single family housing. Chicago, an older city, is quite similar but has a much greater mix of tall and short buildings. But Amsterdam is much older and yet only really sees significant land use variations between districts and not within them.