At midnight on a freezing Friday, Amsterdam’s Rembrandtplein is rammed. Excited clubbers flock towards the cavernous, hi-tech pulse of Escape and the glitzy Club Rain. All around, a slew of bars, coffee shops and lesser music venues throb with energised youth.
The after-hours heart of a city famed around the world for night-time excess, this 17th-century square was, until recently, often overrun. Noise, violence, vomit and worse; nocturnal nuisance ugly enough for an angry, sleep-deprived neighbourhood to speak bitterly of a “4am war zone”.
Tonight, though, is calm. Ten pairs of young, red-jacketed Rembrandtplein Hosts tour the square, chatting amiably to clubbers and drinkers, directing tourists and out-of-towners, gently reminding all of the Rembrandtplein rules, prominently displayed everywhere: “Stay classy, think neighbours, drink inside, use a loo.”
Talking to these hosts is Mirik Milan, the first nachtburgemeester – or night mayor – of Amsterdam. His job is a tricky one: nurturing the Dutch city’s ever-expanding night economy, while satisfying residents and public officials who would sometimes rather it didn’t exist.
This pragmatic and classically Dutch notion is now being copied across Europe: Toulouse, Zurich, Paris as well as several other Dutch cities have night mayors too.
This week the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced plans for a “Night-Time Commission”, a six-month assessment of how to protect and manage the city’s £66bn night-time economy which is likely to recommend the creation of a “night-time champion” role. Berlin is considering it too, and in April, Amsterdam will host the first global Night Mayors’ Summit.
Milan, 35, a former club promoter, was elected in 2014 by festival-goers, club and bar owners and (in an online vote) the public. Formally, the post – which emerged from projects dating back to 2003 – is as head of a small but influential non-profit foundation funded jointly by city hall and the business community.
The instinct of city authorities everywhere when residents complain, Milan says, is to “bring in a curfew, tighten regulations, shut places down, ban stuff. It’s understandable: how can you make good laws if you’re in city hall, with no real clue of what’s happening out there in the night-time? The only way is for the night economy, city hall and residents to figure out, together, how to make it work”.
As cities become increasingly 24-hour and night-time economies grow in scale – the Dutch dance industry alone, focused on Amsterdam, is worth €600m (£470m) a year (pdf) and employs 13,000 people full- and part-time – it is a job that needs doing. “Late-night culture is a massive motor for cities’ economic wellbeing,” says Milan, who has been invited as far afield as Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro to talk about the Amsterdam approach.
“Late-night people are typically young, educated, creative, entrepreneurial – people you want in your city, and who work in the creative industries and startups you also want. If places like Berlin have flourished, it’s not just because of low rents. It’s because they’re nightlife capitals.”
Not all cities have the same priorities. In London, gentrification and rising property prices – followed swiftly by new and deeply unhappy neighbours – have seen nearly 40% of the city’s grassroots music venues close in less than a decade.
In Australia, the New South Wales government’s decision to ban clubbers in Sydney’s Kings Cross from entering venues after 1.30am may have cut street incidents by 40% – but it also shut down 40 clubs, and saw footfall in the whole district plummet by 82% last year.
Ideas for easing city tensions between day and night in Amsterdam – whose nightlife is one of the major attractions for the 5.2 million tourists who visited in 2014, more than double the number in 2000 – go further than soothing residents around the city’s main nightlife hotspots of Rembrandtplein and nearby Leidseplein.
Out in Amsterdam-West by the A10 motorway is De School, one of the 10 trial 24-hour venues just outside the city centre that since last year have been free to decide for themselves when they open and close.
A sprawling former technical college that opened in January, De School now houses an airy daytime cafe, a gourmet restaurant, a gym, a concert space, an art gallery that is currently negotiating exhibitions with Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – and, in the basement, a cavernous and (at 2.30 in the morning) heaving nightclub.
“The idea,” Milan says, “was to take some of the night-time pressure off the inner city, and to bring something new to the near suburbs.” That part has worked: De School has sold out every weekend since it opened, while its weekday and night activities are also filling fast.
Twenty-four-hour licences are also an experiment to see whether city-wide closing times, which ensure thousands of unhappy people are kicked out on to narrow, city centre streets at 4 or 6am while “minutes before they were dancing, off in another world”, may not always be a good idea.
“If you don’t turn the lights on and force everyone to leave a club at 5am, some will leave at 3, and some at 8,” says Milan. “The night can end more naturally. It’s better for the area, nuisance-wise, and for the club, business-wise.”
The early success of De School and several of its fellow 24-hour venues has revealed another truth, says Kyara van Loenen, its creative director. “People now are very happy to cycle 20, even 30 minutes, out of the city centre for a bigger, different, more complete experience,” she says.
“It’s a lifestyle thing. The people coming here work hard – really hard – in the day and run or work out in the gym several times a week. At the weekend, they want to party. Being able to open 24 hours a day means we can offer them something that really matches their needs, that they really want.”
Amsterdam’s 24-hour venues may eventually usher in whole 24-hour districts “like a Chinatown for night culture, where businesses can open and close when they like,” Milan says. After 9pm in Amsterdam there is nowhere to have a proper, sit-down meal.
“We need a 24-hour library, 24-hour workspaces for students and creatives and people whose work means they’re dealing with the other side of the world. Shops where you can buy tomorrow’s breakfast, or that cable you need now for that presentation you’re giving at 9am. It’s possible.”
A little further outside the city centre, Radion Amsterdam, a vast former dentistry school and another 24-hour licence holder, was hosting a 36-hour dance party that started on Friday evening and would end at 11am on Sunday.
“At which point,” says Staas, one of the organisers, “the cafe opens for the Sunday activities we run for local kids. It works fine – 24-hours is how people want to live now. You know, the tickets that sold out first for this weekend were for Saturday – but for entry between 7am and midday. People want to party on Saturday morning.”
For the problematic Rembrandtplein, where up to 300 violent incidents were being reported every year, the night mayor and Amsterdam city hall came up with a three-year pilot project inspired by the altogether more relaxed atmosphere of a music festival.
“There you’ll have, like, 20,000 people,” says Milan. “Maybe two get pick-pocketed, and there’s one fight. It’s because you have easy-on, easy-off access, clear routes around the site, a programme and rules that everyone knows and understands, soft security … Basically, a pleasant environment.”
So the Dutch electronic multinational Philips, was persuaded to invest in some significantly more subdued, even refined lighting for the elegant townhouses that line the square, replacing garish neon.
The whole area was closed to all traffic – even bicycles – after 11pm. And the Rembrandtplein hosts, who patrol the square from 9pm to 5am on Fridays and Saturdays, their salaries funded equally by local businesses and city hall, were hired and started work last summer.
“We’re a friendly presence, I think; a similar age to the clubbers, a mix of boys and girls, less heavy-handed than the police, who are still here but parked out of sight now, in the side streets,” says Randall Thorpe, 26, a social worker by day. “We de-escalate situations. There’s much less anti-social behaviour on the square now – not the same fights, the same noise.”
Opening an exhibition including twin portraits of himself and Milan in a canalside art gallery earlier in the day, Amsterdam’s altogether more august day mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, was equally enthusiastic. The nachtburgemeester, he says, was about smoothing problems, finding solutions, and helping an increasingly important part of the city’s economy grow.
“Cities increasingly want to be 24-hour,” van der Laan says. “In some respects many already are, though few really cater for it. But cities also have to stay nice places for the people who work, live and sleep in them. It’s not always an easy balance to strike. The night mayor helps us understand the issues better, from all sides, and come up with innovative solutions – like 24-hour licences. Everyone benefits. It makes a real difference in Amsterdam.”
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