Gouden kansen? Vastgoedstrategieën van bouwondernemers in de stadsuitleg van Amsterdam in de Gouden Eeuw

During the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam grew from a modest little town on the river Amstel into a powerful trading metropolis. Thanks to several very large-scale expansion schemes (in particular the third and fourth expansions), it became one of the biggest cities in Europe. This article does not focus on the design or implementation of the urban expansions. Instead, it concentrates on a subsequent phase in the development: the moment when the large public project broke up into thousands of private projects, which occurred when the government sold off building plots. The key questions posed in this article are whether the large scale of these expansions stimulated entrepreneurship in the building sector, and how that affected the urban landscape. Was there any increase in scale in the building sector, how did the sector deal with the opportunities offered by urban expansion and what strategies did it employ?It is the first time that such a very large quantitative study has been carried out for an early modern city. Amsterdam possesses exceptional series of sources that we were able to combine for this purpose. During the urban expansions, thousands of plots of land were sold at a succession of auctions, which resulted in maps and auction ledgers. These provide information about the plots and their buyers and allow us to calculate the proportion of building sector craftsmen investors and to work out which market segments they focused on (based on the location, size and price of the plots). Because we are primarily interested in the impact of major building booms, we concentrate on the periods 1614–1617. (when the land in the third expansion was sold and built on) and 1660–1699 (ditto for the fourth expansion).It transpires that building sector craftsmen were heavily over-represented in the real estate market compared with their colleagues from other production sectors. Nevertheless, only five to ten per cent of building sector cra'smen invested in land, which they usually bought in a dispersed fashion. In this way they gained access to the market, where they invested mainly in land intended for the social middle classes. (This was in contrast to the large-scale investors, who tended to concentrate on the market for workers’ housing.) In a few instances they built a house for themselves with a workshop from where they could offer their services to clients in the neighbourhood. In other cases, in particular among bricklayers, it seems that in buying land they