Why is Amsterdam Better than Brussels

It frequently happens when I meet new people, and sometimes even with existing friends who feel curious about it as well. “Arno, why did you choose to go live in Amsterdam?”. A mundane question, for which thousands of answers could be valid and to which, for the most part, you only come to disentangle the real from superficial arguments after some time.

Despite not intending to create any sort of hierarchy which would inevitably be unfair without a clear overview of a set of metrics upon which a comparison can be made, I cannot avoid that one will be created, because this is also how as humans we simplify things mentally. There is good and bad, or at least things slightly better and slightly worse, which we need to separate in clear dichotomous categories to simplify our decision making and increase efficiency (this is best exemplified by Daniel Kahneman).

Disenchanted with Belgian politics

I am, just like many young people inside my network of privileged white middle class friends group, disenchanted by a lot of aspects of Belgian politics. In this case, I use the term as a catch-all categorization of day-to-day management. Because if we currently rely on a de-centralized model where federal power keeps a hand on one piece of the cake, regional power on another and communal power on another (and fuck, it’s still not entirely clear to me who does what exactly).

It is one thing to be exposed to the painful attempts of forming a government after elections in which Flanders is calling for more nationalist initiatives to protect what is “theirs” and defend their culture from “out of control immigration” while Wallonia remains conservative in its own way by favoring the good old socialist party, who sure symbolizes some welfare state social values that have built some of the positive aspects of our communities, but also been in the middle of endless corruption scandals. These corruption scandals occur on a daily basis, and we’ve become so accustomed to them, that we now just look away while shaking our heads, not wanting to address the painful subject for which we know that there is no consensual, democratic plan that can be crafted across our language border.

Because of the complex division of powers in Belgium, you will also find some extremely inefficient handling of regional matters. Who will build the infrastructure of the new tram in Liege? Who will renovate the old university building and decide which project will be chosen with public money? Most of these things are corrupt too. Every big public initiative becomes a laughing stock abroad because of our utter inefficiency. It is so repetitive that I personally started to think that we, the citizens, were responsible for it too. Because at the end of the day, we could just rise up and start to ask for real change.

Inactive white males

I’ve recently come across a great article that outlines the perverse effect of university educated white people on American politics. The conclusions are valid inside Europe too in my opinion. We have become professional political commentators, just like me inside this blog post, but we gravely lack any kind of political activism per se.

1. We witness something unfair with negative consequences on our society
2. We are triggered and decide to communicate about it with friends through social networks or face to face
3. We realize that our private network of protest is utterly inefficient to change anything about the issue
4. We become submerged by apathy and loose internal and external political efficacy

Humor to the rescue

Belgian people are notorious for their “auto-derision”. At least they have been for a long time, you can just ask the French and Dutch people for jokes about us, and most of the time, we will laugh along. It’s a great quality to be able to laugh about yourself because it creates a distance between your ego and reality. Or at least that’s what I’ve always liked to believe. Recently, I’ve started to think about the opposite effect, meaning that it can become a vicious circle of inactivity. If you’re able to laugh about everything, then nothing is serious enough to act about it. If we constantly make jokes about Belgian roads (ask Dutch people) or Belgian public transport, we start to internalize that they are bad, but we’re not really doing anything to make sure they’re being fixed.

Why Amsterdam?

So where is this all going anyways? I’ve explained some of the things that bothered me about Belgium and the complex situation in which we find ourselves, but I didn’t openly disclose how I was going to try to change it. And in fact there is no plan, aside from this blog post to outline the full disclosure of my thought process.

In the end, having had the opportunity to travel during my studies, I also discovered some other countries and the way in which they dealt with their own problems. Spain, France, the US, the Netherlands. They each have their own relationship to societal challenges. Some of them want more or less state subsidies to solve things. And often, what is true of one city is not of the whole of the country. When I arrived in Amsterdam to study, I first noticed the beautiful efficiency of simple mobility solutions. Prioritizing cycling is a choice that was not particularly made because of ecological aspirations but rather because it has always been the most efficient means of transportation in a city like Amsterdam due to its urban composition. Therefore, you cannot really blame other cities from not having applied it themselves as it wouldn’t solve the same issues.

In Amsterdam, there are some very encouraging signs of public spending being invested in the right way. You can tell that construction work tends to be applied proactively before public infrastructure becomes deficient rather than once it is too late and needs fixing to work. Public transport works like a charm, despite having made some very inefficient calculations of public investment, in the North-South metro line for instance whose budget went from 700m. to 3.1B.

Yet other things like integrating immigrants and new cultures within the heart of Dutch culture also seems to flaw in more naturally. I am not capable to explain this with numbers and statistics as I would need to spend some time researching it, but the Amsterdam strategy of having some social housing in every neighborhood is a nice step towards keeping social mix within a capital that is also very much suffering from gentrification.

Ultimately, I’m not arguing that Amsterdam is better than Brussels but rather that it corresponds to my personal aspirations as a young person who recently entered the job market. Now that I earn an income and pay taxes, I want to make sure that this money is invested in a sustainable way and contributes on the long term positive development of the community in which I live. I do not have the impression that the taxes (higher) taxes that I paid in Belgium contributed to enough urban nor sociocultural improvements, with the inter-linguistic conflicts remaining the main drivers of the status quo.