Our experience of urban life in a city like Amsterdam consists of the interaction of many factors that work together to create a sense of place: the layout of streets and squares, the architectural facades, and the layers of carefully designed lettering and imagery that cling to the fabric of the city. This chapter deals with how graphic design in the urban environment of Amsterdam contributes to the creation and maintenance of this sense of place, or what cultural geographers term the genius loci of the city. More specifically, it considers the struggle within visual culture to assign a range of meanings to Amsterdam as a collection of individual neighbourhoods, with a particular emphasis on the commodification of the city's sense of place through urban branding strategies and city-marketing campaigns and, as well, on the local tactics that are employed to resist this commodification ‘on the ground’. As will be seen, the role of graphic design in this contested area is particularly interesting as it plays an important role in the top-down imposition of certain narratives of place, while it can also be a means of resisting imposed narratives ‘from the ground up’.

Anyone walking the streets of ‘global’ Amsterdam in the twenty-first century is likely to encounter a range of competing visual narratives which either attempt to impose dominant notions of place on the city or to disrupt and challenge imposed, hegemonic perspectives. Let us begin this exploration of Amsterdam's urban semiotics, then, by trying to define this somewhat vague notion of place. Geographers such as John Agnew regard place as a ‘meaningful location’ and sense of place as belonging to the realm of subjective, emotional connections or attachments to a particular locale (Cresswell 2004, 7). Likewise, for the Chinese- American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan place is most usefully contrasted with its foil, the physical, matter-of-fact notion of space, a geographical entity devoid of cultural meanings and emotional attachments (Cresswell 8). Space becomes place when given meanings, for example, when a particular spatial setting is given a name, such as Amsterdam, De Pijp, or Sloterdijk. In this process, visual culture makes a fundamental contribution, influencing how people connect with the city as place.