The word on the street : discursive investing and distinction in an Amsterdam shopping street

The word on the street

Discursive investing and distinction in an

Amsterdam shopping street

Master Thesis

Irene Bronsvoort

10198385

Research Master Social Sciences

Table of content

3.1. Discursive investing and urban change 6

3.2. The city as a symbolic project 7

3.3. Consumption, distinction and the politics of taste 9

4. Questions and methods 12

4.1. Research goals and research questions 12

4.2. Data collection and data analysis 13

5. Research Context: the Javastraat 15

6. Discursive investing in a local shopping street 20

6.1.‘Here it’s happening’. The discourse on the Javastraat 25

6.2. From Instagram posts to Eastside clothing: Forms of discursive investing in the 31 Javastraat

7. ‘Be local, buy local’. The social mechanisms behind discursive investing 38

7.1. Elective belonging in the Javastraat 38

7.2. Identity for sale. Elements of distinction in the Javastraat 43

8. Conclusion 46

9. Bibliography 48

1.

Abstract

The development of local shopping streets in cities today increasingly depends on the way they are represented and conceived. When publicly communicating representations of a certain urban locality, people influence its reputation through which they engage in a discursive form of place making. This research explores the workings of these acts of discursive investing in a case study on the Javastraat, a local shopping street in Amsterdam. More specifically, I analyse how and why various actors engage in discursive investing in the Javastraat, by which I particularly focus on the role of distinction and urban identity formation in making discursive investments in this street. Drawing on a combination of data from discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, my analysis shows that while the interests and arguments between social groups at the Javastraat differ, a common discourse exists on the street as being unfinished and in need of more middle class businesses and visitors. As its manifestation differs between settings, four modes of discursive investing appear in the context of the Javastraat: the entrepreneurial mode, the artistic mode, the digital mode and the merchandising mode. These discursive investments are made by mostly new, middle class entrepreneurs and residents with the intention of expressing their pride of (belonging to) the Javastraat and for whom the street’s reputation as urban, diverse and upcoming serves as a way of social distinction. While discursive investors do not always deliberately contribute to neighbourhood change, they are often aware of their ability to draw attention to the street and influence its urban experience.

2.

Introduction

‘Surely one of the nicest streets in Amsterdam East is the Javastraat. It is filled with shopkeepers and products from all corners of the world as well as super cool hotspots. At the local shops you buy the best vegetables, bread, spices and herbs. After which you visit a nice coffee bar, lunchroom or restaurant. I will tell you about the places to go in the Javastraat in Amsterdam’ (De Buck 2015).

In Amsterdam’s Indische buurt, residents have seen their shopping street change over the last few years. Between the Turkish greengrocers and Moroccan bakers on the Javastraat, new cafes and boutiques have emerged and what used to be parking lots are now terraces where people can enjoy lunch or have a late night drink. Meanwhile, the Javastraat has increasingly become the subject of discussion in newspaper articles, on social media and in local review blogs, as the above quote illustrates. There are maps available in the neighbourhood that show where to find new stores and cafes on the street, numerous bloggers list their favourite Javastraat hang-outs and many Instagram users consider it a place worth to picture and share with others. Similar to the images and articles on shopping streets in other cities, these representations reach both a local and a global audience.

Seen as subjective interpretations of the urban (Pacione 2005), these representations can be considered to play an important role in the way we conceptualize and experience these places (Zukin 2010). For example, when used by city marketers and politicians, they serve as a way to frame or brand places, mostly with the goal of attracting visitors and residents. However, as the above description of the Javastraat illustrates, a wide variety of actors are nowadays involved in creating and distributing representations of urban spaces, such as via social media. In a recent study on online restaurant reviews and neighbourhood change, Zukin et al. (2015b) found that restaurant reviewers do not only represent certain restaurants in their texts, but also influence the image of their neighborhood and thereby attract investors to the area. For this reason, they denote restaurant reviewers as ‘discursive investors’, referring to how they ‘participate publicly and discursively, with no financial reward, in the process of making ‘place’ (Zukin et al. 2015b: 4).

While Zukin et al. (2015b) only write about restaurant reviewers as ‘discursive investors’, their study raises questions about the extent to which their concept is applicable to other settings where people represent and conceptualize urban space and why people would participate in these activities of ‘voluntary promotion’ (Uitermark and Boy 2015). In this paper, I explore the workings of these acts of discursive investing in a case study on the

Javastraat in Amsterdam. The question leading this research is: How and why do various actors engage in discursive investing in the Javastraat?

Reformulated as discursive investing, I define this concept as the activity of publicly communicating a visual, textual or physical representation of an urban locality which leads to a participation in its ‘place making’ and may thereby, intentionally or unintentionally, contribute to neighbourhood change (Zukin et al. 2015b). Drawing on a discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse how the street is represented and conceptualized by different actors in a variety of settings. Furthermore, the data is used to distinguish and describe different modes of discursive investing in the context of the Javastraat. To explain why actors engage in discursive investing and how their motivation relates to strategies of distinction and identity formation, I use insights from interviews and participant observations.

By approaching the development of the Javastraat in the light of discursive investing, this paper aims to illuminate an understanding of local shopping streets as being shaped by its daily consumers and producers via social representations and cultural tastes. Furthermore, being one of the first to operationalize and apply the concept of discursive investing by Zukin et al. (2015b) in an empirical study, I aim to inform about the possible theoretical value added by the concept of discursive investing and show how its usage may lead to new questions and insights regarding urban and social change.

This paper starts with a theoretical discussion in which I develop the notion of discursive investing in relation to theories on urban change, consumption and distinction. Then, I discuss the questions guiding this research and the methods used to answer them, followed by an overview of my research context: the Javastraat. In the empirical part, I elaborate on the different forms of discursive investing in the Javastraat and describe how and why various individuals engage in these activities on the Javastraat, by which I particularly focus on the social function of discursive investing in terms of elective belonging and distinction. This paper concludes by describing the workings of discursive investing in the Javastraat and explaining its broader implications for studies on urban change.

3.

Theoretical framework

3.1

Discursive investing and the urban experience

The concept of discursive investing is crucial to my attempt to understand the role of social representations in commercial change. The concept derives from a paper by Zukin et al. (2015) about the relationship between online restaurant reviews, race and gentrification. In this study, Zukin et al. (2015: 3) introduce the concept ‘discursive investors’ to explain ‘the complex role of online restaurant reviewers in the contemporary capitalist city’. Following the authors, social media users do not only represent certain restaurants by posting online reviews, they also change the image of its neighbourhood. As the investment of their labour in writing positive texts about a restaurant is likely to draw people with similar tastes, they act as discursive investors in in the process of producing space for more affluent users (Hackworth 2002), as gentrification is often defined. Hence, these reviewers ‘participate publicly and discursively, with no financial reward, in the process of making ‘place’ (Zukin et al. 2015: 4).

Although Zukin et al. (2015b) only write about discursive investors with regard to online restaurant reviewers, their concept has a wider scope and meaning. In particular, when formulated as a discursive practise or strategy rather than a signification of a bounded group, discursive investing could also be identified in other settings where people conceptualize and represent urban space. In this research, discursive investing is defined as an activity of publicly communicating a visual, textual or physical representation of an urban locality which leads to a participation in its ‘place making’ and may thereby, intentionally or unintentionally, contribute to neighbourhood change (Zukin et al. 2015b).

In order to understand the concept of discursive investing and its relevance regarding local shopping streets, it is important to know about its origin and the theoretical context in which Zukin et al. (2015b) use the concept. The first part of this section is therefore concerned with describing Zukin’s theory on urban culture and the politics of representation. Related to this, I introduce Hajer’s (2006) theory on discourse coalitions as a way to study the role of representations in the urban landscape. In the second part, I use Bourdieu’s theory on consumption and related studies to further develop the notion of discursive investing in relation to consumer tastes and distinction.

3.2. The city as a symbolic project

The introduction of the concept of discursive investing by Zukin et al. (2015b) is grounded in a perspective on cities as both material constructions and ‘symbolic projects, developed by social representations’ (1995: 46). Rather than seeing neighbourhoods, parks or shopping streets as geographically bounded places that are separate from our imagination, Zukin (2010) considers them as social constructions, shaped by capital flows and government policies as well as by individuals that use and conceptualize these spaces on a daily basis. In her view, the look and feel of cities depend to a great extent on the way in which they are represented and by whom. Zukin is not only interested in who occupies ‘real’ space, but also stresses the use of ‘symbolic’ space:

‘To ask ‘whose city’ suggests more than a politics of occupation; it also asks who has the right to inhabit the dominant image of the city. This often relates to real geographical strategies as different social groups battle over access to the center of the city and over symbolic representations in the center’ (Zukin 1996:43).

Following Zukin, the creation and distribution of symbolic representations should be seen in close relation to the ‘battle over access to the center of the city’. Whereas other urban scholars with a focus on representations conceptualize cities as the chaotic and diversified outcome of urban social life (e.g. Raban 1997), Zukin emphasises the power relations behind the representations of cities. Who occupies and controls the city’s public spaces is determined by what she calls the ‘politics of representation’ (Zukin 1995: 290). In this view, representations reflect subjective attitudes towards the city and are used to serve particular interests. Those that have the cultural power to determine social representations of space are able to control cities by symbolizing who belongs and who does not belong in certain spaces (Zukin 1995). The production of space is not restricted to government officials and real estate developers, but depends to a great extent on those that have the cultural power to claim a ‘sense of belonging’ (Antonsich 2010) to a neighbourhood and thereby symbolize ‘who belongs there’ (Zukin 1995: 1). This way, urban spaces such as shopping streets are the outcome of continuous struggles between social groups with different interests and attitudes towards the city. It is in this context that discursive investing becomes meaningful.

Seeing local shopping streets as both the stage and the object of the politics of representation in cities, the act of promoting it through discursive practices is a way of participating in these politics of ‘place making’.

Although these politics of representation have always played a role in the production of urban space, Zukin (1995) stresses their significance by pointing to two major changes in the last few decades that have tremendously impacted both cities and social life. The first change is concerned with the increasing importance of culture in the contemporary city. Influenced by Harvey’s theory on urban entrepreneurialism (1989), Zukin (1995) describes that as cities have changed from spaces of production to spaces of culture and consumption, their reputation became a central point of attention to those involved in its place making. The economic success of post-industrial cities increasingly depends on their ability to attract tourists, residents and companies, which in turn depends on how people conceptualize and experience the city. This new urban economy can be thought of as a symbolic economy, referring to the role of culture and symbols in capitalist activities (Zukin 1995). In the symbolic economy, urban places are produced as both sites and symbols of culture. Hence, the emergence of new consumption spaces in the city, the organization of cultural events and the refurbishing of inner-city neighbourhoods should be seen as the material outcomes of cultural strategies by ‘place entrepreneurs’ such as real estate developers and government officials, fuelled by consumer tastes and media images.

The second development that, in Zukin’s (2010) perspective has impacted the politics of representation, is the rise of media technologies. Following Zukin (2010), the internet has created new means for people to represent urban localities and share them with others, through which our urban imaginary now increasingly depends on what we see and read about cities online. In their article on online restaurant reviewers, Zukin et al. (2015b) focus on the role of social media platforms in particular. In the contemporary capitalist society, platforms such as Yelp and Instagram are becoming increasingly important means to promote consumer goods and services and to represent urban localities. While the rise of social media is often heralded as a way to make social life more democratic, Zukin et al. (2015a) point to its selective representations and the digital divide between people with and without access to these new ways of representation, which is instead rather expected to increase the unequal power relations in the politics of representation.

Within social sciences, there is a rumble of interest on how to study such politics of representation. One approach draws on Hajer’s (1993, 2006) work on discourse analysis. Following Hajer (1993), discourses should be seen as a set of storylines that actors use when discussing a certain (political) issue or problem. They are ways to give meaning to the social world by structuring experiences and metaphorical language. From his perspective, social practices such as political decision making are largely dependent on the discourse around that topic and so politics become a struggle for discursive dominance and competing definitions (1993). In this context, Hajer uses the concept of discourse coalition to identify and understand the way in which different actors form specific coalitions around specific storylines. These discourse coalitions can be defined as ‘a group of actors that, in a context of an identifiable set of practices, share the usage of a particular set of storylines over a particular period of time’ (Hajer, 2006: 70). A discourse coalition is often not a formal group; their actors can even have different arguments or interests but they are a group in the sense that they conceptualize reality in a similar way. To unveil discourse coalitions, Hajer (2006) stresses the study of metaphors used by actors to symbolise the key ideas of the discourse and see where storylines overlap and reinforce each other.

To summarize, the concept of discursive investing should be understood in relation to a view on cities as symbolic projects, shaped by a politics of representations between social groups with different amounts of cultural power. Due to the emergence of a symbolic economy, social representations of individuals result in discursive investments, as their appreciation of certain urban places becomes a reason for economic investment. The rise of media technologies has enabled people to create and share those representations without much effort and with great potential (economic) impact. With his discourse coalition approach, Hajer (2006) offers a useful way to study the social representations and its resulting discourse.

While this explains to a large extent how social representations become discursive investments, it does not explain why people engage in this discursive way of place promotion. Moreover, it does not clarify who these discursive investors are and why they choose to live and consume in one urban locality instead of another. Hence, to fully understand the workings of discursive investing, we should not only consider its economic profits but also the social profits gained by its producers.

3.3 Consumption, distinction and the politics of taste

An important advantage of approaching social representations and cultural expressions through the concept of discursive investing, is that it draws attention to the role of individual actors and their consumer behaviour in the production of space without neglecting the social structures that inform their practices. Whereas other critical theories on consumer culture and representations result in a view on people as merely ‘the vehicles for expressing the differences between objects’ (Miller 1987: 165), the notion of discursive investing as described by Zukin et al. (2015) sees people as active agents that are able to influence and reproduce social structures and relations. As with several other theoretical assumptions underlying the meaning of discursive investing, this view on the consumer as an active agent is informed by Bourdieu’s work on class and cultural consumption. With his sociology of consumption, Bourdieu’s work gives some useful insights into how and why individuals participate in discursive investing in their local shopping street and why they do so in that particular matter. Bourdieu’s (1984) work on consumption is first of all grounded in a perspective on society as consisting of fields, a setting in which actors have certain social positions based on their class position, which determines their interaction and social relations. In the field of cultural practice for example, social groups interact and form power relations on the basis of their class position, related to their access to cultural and economic capital. Crucial to Bourdieu’s understanding of this field is the social significance of consumption. That is, he sees consumption not only as a way to express differences between social groups, but also has having the function of establishing those differences (Bourdieu 1984, Jayne 2006). In

Distinction (1984), Bourdieu explains how tastes, enacted and expressed through

consumption, work to reproduce and legitimate class differences. People with high amounts of cultural capital are able to elevate and sustain their social status by expressing certain tastes and lifestyles. They determine the ways of seeing, define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tastes and express their cultural capital through the formulation of signs, values and symbols, creating a social distance from other classes. In this respect, tastes become part of a cultural politics in which different social groups compete over what and who defines aesthetic superiority (Lin 2005). Cultural representations and consumer tastes should thus not be seen as a mere reflection of differences between groups but rather as a way of both expressing and re-establishing class positions through the means of cultural capital and economic capital.

In the context of my research, Bourdieu’s theory contributes to the understanding of discursive investing in three ways. Firstly, it draws attention to the social significance of consumption to individuals. That is, it helps explain the importance of consuming for people’s identity formation and feelings of belonging to a certain group, through which they are able to reproduce their class position. Building on Bourdieu, Zukin (1995) writes that taste is a social product, expressed by a group with a comparable background, class and profession. She states that ‘by consuming, we purchase a certain identity, composed of products from all over the world’ (Zukin 1995: 25). As we have seen, this social significance of consuming is closely related to the need of distinction, the second contribution of Bourdieu’s theory.

Distinction is a useful and important concept in this research as it offers a way to explain why people publicly connect themselves to the shopping street and why they choose the Javastraat in particular. Several studies on urban change (Ley 2003, Lloyd 2005) have suggested that, for an increasing group of people, the search for distinctiveness has led to an appreciation of urban neighbourhoods where they can develop ‘alternative consumption practices’ (Zukin 2008: 724). The urban lifestyle consists of different values and practices, including an aversion to suburban life, a celebration of diversity and cosmopolitanism. Thus, urban living and consuming has become associated with sophistication and style (Jayne 2005). In this sense, discursive investors, by posting an aesthetic picture of an urban place or wearing a certain clothing brand, are able to bring an ‘aesthetic disposition’ (Bourdieu 1984) to their consuming practices at the shopping street. Their discursive investments are then ways - or cultural strategies - for the urban middle class to mark themselves from others that cannot afford to go to these places or do not have enough cultural capital to feel comfortable there. With their discursive investments, these producers signal a sense of belonging to the places they represent, by which they boost their status (Uitermark and Boy 2015).

The third contribution of Bourdieu’s theory to the understanding of discursive investing concerns the relationship between economic and cultural capital. The act of discursive investing is a form of expressing or practicing cultural capital, as it involves the creation and sharing of pictures and texts that resemble and boost the social status of the investor. In fact, following Zukin et al. (2015b), discursive investors are typically characterized as having more cultural than economic capital. However, their cultural investments can result in economic investments as it contributes to its sense of place, drawing positive attention to the neighbourhood and signalling the neighbourhood as a ‘safe’ place for investors (Zukin et

al. 2015b). This leads back to Zukin’s (1995) focus on the impact of the symbolic economy and media technologies on the politics of representation, ‘making reviewers’ cultural capital an integral part of capitalist innovation’ (Terranova 2000, in Zukin et al. 2015b: 17).

To summarize, this section has first described the origin and theoretical context that is necessary to understand the meaning of the concept of discursive investing, employed in this paper. Seeing cities as symbolic projects, shaped by social representations, economic forces and media images, helps explain the significance and workings of discursive investing in today’s consumption spaces. Furthermore, I introduced Hajer’s (2006) discourse coalition approach as a helpful way to study the discourse and its discourse coalition on the Javastraat. By drawing on Bourdieu’s theory, I added elements to my understanding of discursive investing that give more insight in both the sociological significance of discursive investing and its social function for individuals, namely to form an urban identity by which they can distinguish themselves from others. Together, these theoretical insights provide the framework that is used to investigate my research questions.

4. Methods

4.1 Research design and questions

This research starts from a view on cities as ‘symbolic projects’, developed through social representations and cultural symbols. Hereby, the focus is on the way people describe, depict and represent urban space rather than investigating its physical geography (King 1996). This approach has been put to work in a case study of the Javastraat, a local shopping street in the Indische buurt in Amsterdam. Seen as a qualitative research strategy, I understand a case study as ‘an in-depth exploration from multiple perspectives of the complexity and uniqueness of a particular project, policy, institution, program or system in a ‘real life’” (Simons 2009: 21). From this view, my research is an exploration of the complexity and uniqueness of particular social practices and behaviour that I define as ‘discursive investing’ in the empirical context of a local shopping street in Amsterdam. The choice for this strategy in short hinges upon both the complex and contextual nature of the issues at matter and my aim

to gain a comprehensive understanding of the relations between social representations, cultural distinction and urban space.

In order to answer the main research question of how and why various actors engage in discursive investing in the Javastraat, I have formulated three more specific sub questions. The first question to ask is how discursive investing appears in the specific context of my case. More specifically: what forms of discursive investing can be found in the Javastraat and by whom? Defined as a visual, textual or physical representation of an urban locality, discursive investing can be expected to have different manifestations depending on the setting in which it occurs. In order to distinguish different forms of discursive investing, I draw on Gold and Gold’s (2005) analytical framework about place promotion, involving four interrelated elements, namely producers, content, media and audience. Although their concept differs from mine, their framework is a useful starting point to understand its different manifestations

The second question I seek to answer is: why do actors engage in discursive investing in the Javastraat? Hereby, I intend to uncover the social mechanisms behind the acts of discursive investing that appear in the Javastraat, including people’s motivations to create and share promotional messages about the shopping street. This question is closely related to the third question, namely: how can discursive investing be explained in relation to identity formation and distinction in the Javastraat? This question is concerned with understanding the act of discursive investing in relation to cultural identities and lifestyles on the Javastraat. More generally, it guides the analysis of why people make discursive investments by hypothesizing the role of daily identity formation and cultural distinction in the social production of the Javastraat, as described in the theoretical section. Hence, while the first question focuses on what forms of discursive investing can be found and by whom, the second and third question is used to investigate why they occur and how they can be explained in relation to identity formation and distinction. Together, these questions offer a framework to empirically study how and why actors engage in discursive investing in the Javastraat.

4.2 Data collection and analysis

Since the questions leading this research are of different kinds, they require different methods to answer them. Hence, this case study involves a combination of qualitative research methods, consisting of a discourse analysis, interviews and participant observations. The

combination of these methods enabled me to both describe the appearances of discursive investments in the Javastraat from a rather distant perspective and investigate how they are experienced and motivated from a microscopic perspective (Collins 2004), i.e. in the context of discursive investors’ personal lifeworld. More generally, the triangulation of multiple methods and sources of data is aimed at adding rigor and depth to my research and contribute to its internal validity, as the different types of data complement each other (Denzin 2012).

To identify different forms of discursive investing, I first conducted a discourse analysis of media articles about the Javastraat, as outlined in my theoretical framework. The media articles used for this discourse analysis are from local and national newspapers since 2012, collected from the Lexis Nexis database, by using the combination of keywords ‘Javastraat AND Amsterdam’. To also cover those articles of the local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool that do not mention Amsterdam explicitly when writing about the Javastraat, I included all articles since 2012 with the keyword ‘Javastraat’ from Het Parool. The resulting dataset consisted of 236 articles.

Although newspaper articles are a useful source to study the discourse around the Javastraat, the way people perceive and experience the city today increasingly depends on conversations in social media and online blogs (Zukin 2010). For this reason, I complimented my research by examining a corpus of online posts from the social media platform Instagram. As one of the most popular platforms to create and distribute visual representations of urban places, Instagram offers a way to study how urban spaces such as the Javastraat are represented, used and discussed by social media users (Uitermark and Boy 2015). To get an insight in the Javastraat’s representation on Instagram, I browsed through the bulk of posts with hashtags and geotags that referred to the Javastraat in the Indische buurt and examined a sample of 50 posts more closely. In addition to what was posted, the Instagram posts also contained information about who (what kind of people) posts the most pictures about the Javastraat and how. This way, I could also identify ‘discursive investors’ and contact potential respondents for interviews.

To answer the second and third research question aimed at investigating the reasons behind discursive investing and its relation to identity formation and distinction, I conducted 12 in-depth interviews with actors in the Javastraat and Indische buurt1_{. Respondents} included new entrepreneurs at the Javastraat, artists, local bloggers and Instagram users who

show a prominent connection to the shopping street and contribute to its discourse. In the interviews, I translated my analytical concepts of ‘discursive investing’, ‘distinction’ and ‘neighbourhood change’ into concrete questions about the reasons behind respondent’s particular way of discursive investing (e.g. online promotion or organizing an event) in the Javastraat, their motivation to move to the neighbourhood and their opinion of and associations with the shopping street. Furthermore, I asked respondents to explain changes in the neighbourhood in order to understand their position in the collective ‘place making’ of the Javastraat. Most of the interviews took place in one of the cafes or stores in the Javastraat, which added value to the research as it offered points of reference for the conversation and created an opportunity to concomitantly observe my respondents in the social setting of the places they talked about.

In addition to interviews, I conducted several participant observations on the Javastraat and in the neighbourhood. These activities included informal conversations with entrepreneurs and costumers at the Javastraat, working as a voluntary assistant in a pop-up store and participating in a photography excursion in the neighbourhood. By observing the street and its costumers at different times of day and visiting their stores and cafes, I experienced at firsthand how the Javastraat is used, imagined and discussed by different social groups. This way, the participant observations served to check whether the verbal accounts of my interview respondents corresponded with people’s actual behaviour on the street and they enabled me to better relate to the topics we discussed during interviews.

In short, this method section has laid out the methodological approach taken in this research. To empirically study the workings of discursive investing, the main research question is divided into three sub questions and applied to a case study of the Javastraat in Amsterdam. By collecting data through a combination of discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork on the Javastraat, I was able to study both how – or, in what different ways - people engage in discursive investing and why they do so. Before elaborating on the results of this case study, I will first provide some background on the Javastraat and explain why it is a suitable case for a research on discursive investing.

5. Research Context: The Javastraat

The Javastraat is the main shopping street in the Indische Buurt, a neighbourhood in the east of Amsterdam. The street was built in the beginning of the 20th _{century, named after the island} Java, that used to be a Dutch colony. While the neighbourhood was for long inhabited by mostly Dutch working class and middle class residents, the decline of Amsterdam’s manufacturing industry from the 1960s onward and the poor quality of housing in the Indische buurt caused many of them to leave the neighbourhood. The new group of residents consisted largely of immigrant families from Morocco and Turkey, who were attracted to the large share of new social housing apartments that the local government had built in the meantime (Heijdra 2000). This way, the neighbourhood became characterized as a multicultural neighbourhood, with more than half of the population coming from an immigrant background (O+S 2012). This population composition was also reflected in the retail supply of the Javastraat, which increasingly consisted of immigrant stores.

In 2007, the minister for Living, Neighbourhoods and Integration declared the Indische buurt as one of the 40 ‘problem areas’ (probleemwijken) of the Netherlands, due to its high concentration of criminality, social housing and low income households (Heijdra 2000). In order to improve the reputation and ‘liveability’ (ANP 2007) of the neighbourhood, a process of state-led gentrification was set in motion, consisting of the renovation of houses and the conversion of social housing in owner-occupied or student housing (Rath ). Another important aspect of the social policies aimed at neighbourhood upgrading focused on improving the ‘attractiveness’ of the Javastraat. Therefore, in 2008, the local government commissioned the refurbishment of the streets and sidewalks, the renovation of storefronts and the reduction of parking spaces for cars. Furthermore, the local government developed a zoning plan which was used to determine which kind of businesses would be established on the street (Hagemans et al. 2015).

Figure 1: Map of Amsterdam, showing the Javastraat (Google Maps 2016)

In addition to an influx of middle class residents, the gentrification of the Indische buurt is closely related to the transformation of the retail landscape of the neighbourhood, specifically in the Javastraat. Whereas the street used to be characterized by Moroccan greengrocers, kebab shops and Turkish bakeries, an increasing number of coffee cafes, restaurants and designer clothing stores have emerged. This has changed the look and feel of the local shopping street and has not only resulted in the influx of more affluent residents, but also attracted visitors such as tourists or residents from outside the neighbourhood to the shopping area of the Indische buurt (Hagemans et al. 2015).

The transformation of the Javastraat in Amsterdam shows some striking similarities to the changes of local shopping streets in cities in other countries. Just as in New York, London and Berlin, the changes of the Javastraat reflect processes of globalization and gentrification, which have changed the way urban (public) space is used and by whom it is used. For example, in all of these local shopping streets, stores with a supply of – often ethnic- daily products catering to working class needs are increasingly replaced by ABC’s: art galleries, boutiques and cafes (Zukin et al. 2015a). However, the way the Javastraat has (been) developed is rather different from that in many countries. That is, whereas in cities such as London and New York, the transformations of local shopping streets are mostly the result of real estate developers and urban entrepreneurs who operate from their capitalist interests, the rapid transformation of the Javastraat needs to be seen in the context of its social democratic welfare regime (Carpenter & Lees, 2009) through which the local government plays a larger role in the development of the Javastraat In this sense, the case of the Javastraat deviates from local shopping streets in other countries. However, since the policies and the gentrification in the Indische buurt have had similar outcomes in the Javastraat in comparison to other local shopping streets, there are still comparisons to make. Moreover, considering that the changes of the Javastraat have only started from around 2008, the Javastraat is still saliently in a phase of transition (Hagemans et al. 2015). Furthermore, the population of the Indische buurt now consists of a mixture of long term residents, most of which can be characterized as ethnic working class, and a relatively new group of residents, of which a great deal consists of white middle class couples and families (Hochstenbach and Van Gent 2012).

6. ‘Here it’s happening’. The discourse on the

Javastraat

The development of the Javastraat has not gone unnoticed by the media. In the past four years, numerous newspapers, magazines as well as food blogs and local websites have devoted attention to this local shopping street. Regarding the printed media, this attention has also significantly increased between 2012 and 2016. Amsterdam’s local newspaper, Het Parool, even shows a tripling of the amount of articles containing references to the Javastraat in Amsterdam during this period. In addition to articles that mention the street as the location of the article’s main subject such as an event or the opening of a new store, a considerable amount of articles is about the Javastraat itself.

As a first step of analysis, I have searched for claims about the Javastraat in the media articles. This ‘claim analysis’ illuminates some interesting aspects of the way in which different newspapers and magazines have been writing about the Javastraat. Apart from the analysis of individual statements, the process of coding is already indicative of the discourse on the Javastraat. As can be derived from the graph, I found almost three times as much positive claims than negative claims about the Javastraat. Taking the different amounts of articles per year into account, the amount of negative claims fluctuates and decreases over the years rather than increases. In contrast, the analysis shows a strong increase of positive claims about the Javastraat, even though the number of articles decreased between 2014 and 2015. This implies that there is a change in the discourse on the Javastraat with regard to newspaper articles, as the street has increasingly been referred to in positive terms over the past four years.

In fact, when comparing the claims about the Javastraat in 2012 with those of four years later, it seems as if they refer to different streets. The headlines of the articles with a main focus on the shopping street already tell much about the change of the discourse on the street. While in 2012 and 2013, the articles had titles such as ‘Simply unhappy in the Javastraat’ (Kok 2013) and ‘The decay went faster than the reconstruction now’ (Damen 2013), several headlines from the articles between 2014 and 2016 are comparable to ‘Operation makes the Javastraat nice again’ (Vugts 2016) and ‘Altogether to the Javastraat’ (Smit 2016a).

The sudden rise in positive claims and decline of negative claims implies that there is a common agreement on the development of the Javastraat between 2012 and 2016, namely that it is a positive development.

Yet, in order to know more about the discourse on the street, it is necessary to take a closer look at these claims and identify their producers and the context in which they appear. Such an investigation of claims on the Javastraat is the main focus of the following sections.

Figure 3: Positive and negative claims about the Javastraat in Dutch newspaper articles from 2012- 2016

6.1 The Javastraat and its Discourse Coalition

One goal of analyzing claims about the Javastraat from newspaper articles and Instagram posts is to gain insight into who is talking about the Javastraat, in what way and how that relates to other notions about the street. The claims about the Javastraat are made in different contexts and by different kind of actors on the shopping street. In the articles, the majority of claims are made by journalists and editors, either in reviews about a new consumption place in the Javastraat or in articles focusing on the Javastraat or its neighbourhood. They are supported by quotes from residents or entrepreneurs who express their opinion about the

Javastraat or by numbers such as housing values and crime rates. In the Instagram posts, claims are made by Instagram users in their description of posted pictures on the Javastraat or a related subject. Although the way of writing on the Javastraat differs between actors and media platforms, there are some important points of agreement to be found. As a way of interpreting the seemingly collective feelings of enthusiasm about the Javastraat, I use the discourse coalition approach developed by Maarten Hajer (1993).

The application of Hajer’s (2006) discourse coalition approach to the Javastraat illuminates some interesting aspects of the discourse on the Javastraat. When analyzing the claims from the articles and Instagram posts, three sub discourses can be identified. As described in figure 4, one sub discourse is organized around the metaphor of the Javastraat as a street emerging from the downturn. This expression refers to a group of arguments mostly employed by long-term residents and entrepreneurs in talking about the Javastraat and its developments. These long-term residents and entrepreneurs often relate their opinion on the street to its history, based on their own experiences. While it could be expected that these actors are sceptical about the changes and might be in favour of retaining the neighbourhood’s character or be worried about commercial competition, the media presents a different view.

That is, most of them appear to be welcoming the emergence of new middle class residents and entrepreneurs on the Javastraat. An example of such a long-term resident and entrepreneur is the owner of the oldest ‘brown’ cafe on the Javastraat:

‘We were going to perdition with all these illegal gambling houses. Now nice shops are emerging again. The Javastraat used to be a real shopping street. There was a men’s shop, a shoe store and we had a fishmonger. That needs to return. You see it happening now: we suddenly have totally different visitors.’ (Smit 2016: 28).

Similar to this café owner, other long-term residents explain their approval of the changes by pointing to the decrease of criminality in the Javastraat and the increasing success of businesses at the Javastraat. This way, one of the long-term entrepreneurs at the Javastraat emphasises that these new entrepreneurs are ‘sole proprietors who really make the most’ (Smits 2015: 13) of their shop or cafe. The long-term residents who express this sub discourse are typically Dutch working class residents. Their reasoning is based on a discontent with the current character of the Javastraat or that of the recent past and expresses a kind of nostalgic desire to return to its ‘original’ character. Since, from their perspective, the street’s main

problem is often considered to derive from its ‘multicultural’ character, the opening of new bars and stores by white middle class entrepreneurs is seen as signs of progress.

While the sub discourse of the Javastraat as emerging from its downturn largely discredits the multicultural character of the street, other claims show a profound appreciation of this feature of the Javastraat. This appreciation for the ethnic diversity in the Javastraat, often formulated as ‘exotic’ and ‘Mediterranean’, forms a part of the second sub discourse on the street which represents the Javastraat as ‘a diamond in the rough’ (Smit 2016b). The group of actors enacting this sub discourse are mostly new residents and entrepreneurs, but also visitors from outside the neighbourhood. Different from the first sub discourse, these people express an appreciation of the ‘edgy and less developed’ (Smit 2016b) character of the Javastraat and the Eastside as a whole. They aim to live, work and shop in an ‘authentic’ neighbourhood that matches their urban lifestyle (Zukin 2010). Their discourse consists of arguments that ‘in theory, the Javastraat is an attractive street’ (Kok 2013) and that ‘when soon also that [new bar] opens, the Javastraat might actually become a street where there is something to do at night’ (Van der Beek 2015). To some new entrepreneurs, this alleged potential seems to be an important reason for starting a business at the Javastraat:

“Something is happening in the Javastraat’, says Veugelink, who lives in the Indische buurt since 2007. ‘The Nine Streets? Those are outdated. Here in Oost is Amsterdam’s extraction area. That’s also why I wanted a shop here’’ (Smit 2016b:28).

Similar to other new entrepreneurs and residents, this shopkeeper describes the Javastraat as a place in development and the opening of his shop as a way of investing in this location. An important difference with the sub discourse of the long-term residents is that this new discourse on the street is not specifically concerned with ‘restoring’ the safety and Dutch character of the street, but instead is aimed at creating a place that is attractive and interesting to the new middle class residents. Together, these arguments result in a sub discourse that define the current Javastraat as an unfinished street with the potential to become an ideal destination for shopping and dining.

Figure 4: Discourse coalition in the Javastraat

Sub discourse

a b c

Metaphors Javastraat as emerging from the downturn

Javastraat as a diamond in the rough

Javastraat as a potential catalyst for neighbourhood upgrading

Actors Long-term residents and entrepreneurs

New residents and entrepreneurs

Housing corporations, politicians and local government officials

Arguments The JS’s original character as an elegant middle class street should be restored. The JS needs ‘good’ entrepreneurs. It is now becoming a more lively street again.

The JS is an exciting, edgy and cosmopolitan street on the rise towards becoming the ideal hang-out. New entrepreneurs know what the

neighbourhood still needs.

The Javastraat needs more (aesthetic) ‘diversity’ and ‘quality businesses’ to be attractive to new residents who fuel the

neighbourhood’s upgrading and economic growth.

Shared storyline

The Javastraat of the recent past is undesirable or ‘unfinished’ and the arrival of new middle class businesses and people are necessary to improve the street.

This sub discourse of the Javastraat as a diamond in the rough also returns in the Instagram posts. The group of actors that express this second sub discourse in the newspaper articles, namely new (young) residents and entrepreneurs, overlaps to a great extent with that of the Instagram users who post pictures about the Javastraat. Although most Instagram posts do not involve any explicit claims about the Javastraat, but rather use the Javastraat as the background of their shown activity, they do give a selective representation of the street. In the corpus of posts with Javastraat hashtags and place tags, the street is mostly pictured as the stage of an activity such as enjoying a nice cup of coffee or having drinks with friends. Most of these posted activities in the Javastraat take place in one of the new cafes on the street, some accompanied by an enthusiastic message about this new ‘asset’ of the street.

When the street itself is pictured, this is done in a positive and aesthetic way, emphasizing the beauty or distinctiveness of the Javastraat.

The third sub discourse is one that represents the Javastraat as a potential catalyst for neighbourhood upgrading and economic growth. This is the discourse brought forward by housing corporations, local politicians and policy makers. Instead of focusing on returning to the ‘original’ state of the Javastraat or on its ‘authentic’ and exotic character, their arguments are formed around the mission to attract more middle class residents to the Javastraat and Indische buurt and thereby improve the neighbourhood. Their narrative gives an impression of the Javastraat as a socially engineerable project that needs a more aesthetically diverse and professionalized outlook. The appointment of a street manager, who helps to establish ‘good’ entrepreneurship at the Javastraat, is an example of an institutionalisation of this discourse. Not only is this street manager, as a powerful representor of the Javastraat, able to influence the discourse, her actions are also informed by the dominant discourse on the street.

Together, these three sub discourses form a discourse coalition. As described in table 1, they share a story line that represents the social reality of the Javastraat in a similar way. Although their interests and arguments differ, these three types of narratives together imagine the Javastraat as a street that recently was or still is undesirable or ‘unfinished’ and in which the arrival of new middle class businesses and people is seen as a necessary improvement. While the long-term residents are positive about the emergence of new consumption spaces because it brings ‘good’ entrepreneurs and visitors to the street, the new residents are mostly pleased of having new places to express and develop their cultural identity in. Thirdly, for economic stakeholders and policy makers, the new businesses and increasing attention for the street offers a way to control and improve the neighbourhood by representing it as their responsibility to ensure diversity on the street. While it can be expected that some people in the neighbourhood are more critical of the changes in the Javastraat, these voices are significantly underrepresented in the media articles. Instead, the above shared storylines form the dominant discourse on the Javastraat and are translated into specific social practices in the street. They result in local policies such as the appointment of the street manager and the implementation of the Horecanota 2012 (Gemeente Amsterdam 2012): a set of policy practices aimed at stimulating and facilitating the emergence of new middle class cafes and restaurants at the Javastraat.

However, local policy practices are not the only way in which a discourse is translated into social and material outcomes. When broadening our understanding of contributions to neighbourhood change, alternative ways can be identified in which different actors both influence the discourse on the Javastraat as well as engage in practices that conform to this discourse, namely discursive investments. In the second part of this section, I elaborate on different forms of discursive investing in the context of the Javastraat.

6.2. From Instagram posts to ‘Eastside’ clothing: Forms of

discursive investing in the Javastraat

What forms of discursive investing can be found in the Javastraat? Although the newspaper articles and Instagram posts are useful to find signs of discursive investing, their data is not rich enough to fully understand its context and meaning. Therefore, the data from interviews and participant observations, but also some secondary sources such as information on websites, are also used to answer the research question. Drawing on the theoretical categorization of place promotions by Gold and Gold (2005), I was able to distinguish different forms of discursive investing in terms of producers, content, media and audience. This way, I found that both the owners of the new shops and cafes at the Javastraat are involved in discursive investing as well as the entrepreneurs they work together with and their customers.

On the basis of the newspaper articles and Instagram posts complemented with secondary data and fieldwork data , I have developed four ‘modes’ of discursive investing. These modes or types have in common that they are all activities of publicly communicating a selective visual, textual or physical representation of the Javastraat and thereby contribute to its social placemaking. However, they differ in terms of their producers, content, media and audience. Before elaborating on these different modes, it is important to emphasize that they are categorizations of practices. This means that one person can engage in different modes of discursive investing and hence, that some modes of investing have a similar kind of producer, content, media or audience. In the following sections, I will elaborate on the different modes and illustrate them with cases from the data.

Figure 5: Forms of discursive investing in the Javastraat Entrepreneurial mode of discursive investing Artistic mode of discursive investing Digital mode of discursive investing Merchandising mode of discursive investing

Producers Shop owners and neighbourhood- oriented entrepreneurs Artists and creatives in the Indische buurt Instagram users and (professional) bloggers and reviewers Certain clothing brands and residents in the Indische buurt

Content/activity Opening a new store at the street, changing the retail offer and cultural character of the street, privatizing public space by creating terraces Creating visual representations of the JS by organizing art events, painting shopfronts, selling posters or postcards about the street. Posting positive reviews, blogposts and pictures of the JS on social media and blogs

Producing, wearing and picturing

clothing and caps with neighbourhood references Media Physical appearance, websites, social media Physical appearance, websites, social media Instagram, Newspapers, blogs, review websites Physical appearance, websites, social media Audience Potential customers (residents and visitors) Potential customers (residents and visitors) Potential customers (residents and visitors) Potential customers of merchandise and (potential) residents

The Entrepreneurial Mode of Discursive Investing

The first mode of discursive investing is through entrepreneurship. One of the most salient actors involved in this mode of investing are the entrepreneurs that own a business at the Javastraat. Firstly, their retail offer and the looks of their business play a great role in determining the character of the shopping street. By creating terraces on the pavements or hanging signboards outside their shops, they appropriate the public space around their business and provide their shop with a distinctive cultural identity. Figure 6 shows a telling example of such an expression of a distinctive cultural identity through an appropriation of public space. By decorating their shop front with rainbow flag during the annual Amsterdam Gay Pride, these entrepreneurs make a clear cultural statement and attract customers with similar views. Although temporarily, they represent the Javastraat as an LGBT-friendly street and also distribute this message online. In the words of Zukin (2010: 24), such entrepreneurs provide new urban terroirs: ‘localities with a specific cultural product that can be marketed around the world, drawing tourists and investors and making the city safe, not cheap, for the middle classes’. Another way in which shopkeepers and cafe owners make discursive investments in the Javastraat is by connecting the identity of their business to the identity of the street, such as by using the different cultures of people in the neighbourhood as a source of inspiration for their menu or naming their restaurant after the neighbourhood.

Apart from the entrepreneurs that own a business at the Javastraat, other locally oriented entrepreneurs also make discursive investments in the shopping street. Box 6.2.1 entails a case description of Jill’s Eastside, a locally oriented company that has a considerably large influence on the discourse of the Javastraat, without owning a business on the street. The activities of Jill’s Eastside are a telling example of discursive investing through entrepreneurism in the Javastraat, as these entrepreneurs earn money by selectively representing the neighbourhood and its consumption spaces. Their ‘personal’ approach of writing solely positive messages on behalf of their alter ego Jill, results in highlighting certain aspects of and places in the neighbourhood that appeal to people with a similar taste and lifestyle. With their network of mostly new, middle class entrepreneurs, they form an important spill in the discourse coalition on the Javastraat.

In short, the entrepreneurial mode of discursive investing shows the way in which certain shopkeepers and other local entrepreneurs have a crucial influence on the sense of place in the Javastraat. As in the case of Jill’s Eastside, controlling the image of the shopping

street is a day-to-day business to many entrepreneurs. But also when owning a business at the street in particular, they have numerous means -and a strong interest - to both indirectly and directly change its cultural character.

Box 6.2.1. Jill’s Eastside

Jill’s Eastside is a small company in the Indische buurt that functions as a PR-agency for neighbourhood entrepreneurs. Its name refers to the fictious character Jill who lives in the east of Amsterdam and reports about things to do and places to go in her neighbourhood. A large share of recently arrived entrepreneurs in the Indische buurt and the Javastraat are subscribed to the services of Jill’s Eastside, meaning that they annually pay an amount of money to get publicity on Jill’s Eastside’s platforms. The initiators are two women who both live in the Indische buurt and aim to make the neighbourhood ‘nicer and stronger’ by ‘connecting so many entrepreneurs, companies and people with each other’. In a video on their website, one of the initiators explains her motivation to start Jill’s Eastside:

‘I once started [Jill’s Eastside] because people reacted very negatively when I told them where I lived. And I didn’t understand that. But then a new restaurant opened in the neighbourhood, one with such an international sensation! For this, you will come to my neighbourhood, I thought. And then I made a website where you could find all these cool places together, so that everyone can enjoy their neighbourhood even more’ (Website Jill’s Eastside 2016).

This reasoning emphasises the initiator’s desire to change the image of the neighbourhood by promoting its (new) consumption spaces to people living elsewhere. Hence, Jill’s Eastside does not not only function as a PR-company for entrepreneurs in Amsterdam East but also for the neighbourhood as a whole. In addition to spreading updates about the businesses in their network, they share local ‘news’ such as the opening of new stores or vacancies in the neighbourhood. Their website contains an agenda with ‘things to do in the Eastside’ and lists such as ‘The nicest festivals in the East’ and ‘How to become a great (Air)bnb host’. Apart from their online activities, they also distribute maps around the city with lists of shops and cafes in the East, they set up workshops and pop-up stores for their entrepreneurs and organize speed dating events for neighbourhood residents.

Fig. 7. The entrepreneurial mode in practice: Pop-up store Jill’s Eastside at the Javastraat selling ‘local products’ (photo by author)

Fig. 6. Example of appropriating public space: street decorations during Amsterdam Gay pride (photo by Zwartbol 2015)

The Artistic Mode of Discursive Investing

The second mode of discursive investing is through art. As a form of communication, art is able to imagine and represent urban localities. The presence of art and artist can change a neighbourhood’s cultural character and contribute to neighbourhood change. In fact, artists and creatives are often considered to be important incubators of gentrification, as their example of pursuing an urban lifestyle is frequently followed by other social groups (Zukin 1982, Ley 2003). In the newspaper articles, several instances can be found in which the Javastraat is the stage or subject of an art project. One of them is the ‘Museumstraat’, an event organized by art students in 2014, whereby neighbourhood residents exhibited collection items from Amsterdam museums in their own house. With this, the students aimed to ‘make art more accessible to a wider public and bring neighbourhood residents closer together’ (De Telegraaf 2014). People with an interest in art were invited to the Javastraat to look at art in a ‘living room setting’. Both the initiative of the Museumstraat as well as the participation of Javastraat residents are modes of discursive investing. By representing the Javastraat as a museum, the event publicly gives the street an artistic character or transforms it into a place of what Zukin (2012: 51) calls ‘destination culture’.

Another example of an artistic mode of discursive investing is ‘Qunst’, a pop-up store that was located at the Javastraat for two months in 2015. This was an initiative by De Gentrifiers, two artists who call themselves a ‘meta-marketing bureau’ and used the shop to sell posters with so-called ‘Streetmonuments’, that is: ‘indexes of transitory symbols in the Javastraat’ (NRC.Next 2015). With these posters, the artists meant to show the beauty of symbols that are subject to change (NRC.Next 2015). On their website, the artists explain their project as an effort to make people think about the meaning of gentrification (De Gentrifiers 2015). What is interesting about this project, is that although the pop-up store is presented as a kind of mocking imitation of other new stores at the Javastraat, it seems to have many similarities to them. That is, the store and its products are targeted at the same kind of middle class group and it similarly enhances the status of the Javastraat as an interesting place to be.

Both the Museumstraat and the Qunst project make the Javastraat a cultural destination. While the Museumstraat has brought art to the Javastraat, De Gentrifiers have changed the features of the Javastraat itself into art subjects. With this form of artistic place

making, they did not only temporarily influence the physical character of the shopping street, but also structurally change the perception of the street.

The Digital Mode of Discursive Investing

‘I used to enjoy to really discover something. Then when I passed by something on my bike, I would just go in. And I would tell a friend that I eat there and that it was fun. While, nowadays, I would already have read something online way before like ‘it’s not a nice place’ and I would never even enter the place’ (Eline, entrepreneur and resident).

A third way in which discursive investments are made, is through digital media. As a form of ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells 2009), digital platforms such as local blogs and social media applications create new ways for people to represent and thereby influence urban spaces. As is exemplified by the above quote, it may even change the way people conceive and usage urban spaces. The way in which the concept discursive investing is used in this research closely relates to how Zukin et al. (2015) have first used the concept in their study on online restaurant reviews in Brooklyn, New York. In recent years, the Javastraat has also become well-represented on social media platforms and online blogs.

Fig. 8: ‘De Gentrifiers’ standing at the Javastraat (photo by Van der Vlist 2015)

While many shopkeepers and cafe owners at the Javastraat use social media to promote their own business, the majority of posts that represent the Javastraat in my Instagram sample are from individual residents and visitors of the Javastraat. In particular, they are posted and shared by mostly young (16 - 35 year-olds), white residents and visitors of the Javastraat.

On Instagram, many posts with a reference to the Javastraat are from residents and visitors in the street that use the platform to show others where they are or what they are doing. The posts often depict a scene in one of the new cafes and stores at the Javastraat, such as having a drink with friends or getting a new haircut. When a place in the street or the street itself is pictured, this is mostly done in the most aesthetic or artistic way, with the aim to highlight the beauty or originality of the place. These Instagram posts can be considered discursive investments as they create positive publicity for the street and attract people with similar tastes to the street, which may be followed by economic investments (Zukin et al. 2015b). Following Uitermark and Boy (2015: 29), Instagram users can in this context be considered as ‘voluntary promoters’ of particular consumption places, since their appealing pictures of places do not only boost their status but also the status of the places they picture.

While these Instagram posts by residents and visitors on the Javastraat are often relatively covert or indirect ways of place promotion, some bloggers and online reviewers are more explicit promoters of the Javastraat and/or its (new) consumption spaces. They write reviews about new places at the Javastraat or blogs about things to do in the neighbourhood. Once they have many followers, some also start writing for newspapers and magazines. This way, I found several positive claims about the Javastraat in the sample of newspaper articles that are made by such (review) bloggers. In box 6.2.2, I elaborate on the work of one of these bloggers to illustrate how these activities function as discursive investments in the Javastraat.