REVAMPING THE RED
LIGHT DISTRICT
With its winding cobblestone streets and historic 14th century
architecture, Amsterdam’s Red Light District, or the Rossebuurt,
holds plenty of visual interest. But the area is better known for its
illicit, rather than its architectural, offerings. What mainly catches
tourists’ attention in this area are the brothels where women pose
provocatively in windows and the coffee shops where it’s legal to
sell small amounts of cannabis.
Today, the city council would like to see a more subdued glow
from the Red Light District—one that makes the area more palatable to a broader swath of tourists and addresses concerns about
money laundering and other local crimes.
Enter Project 1012, named after the area’s postal code. The
city has allocated between € 40 million and € 50 million for
the effort aimed at sprucing up the Red Light District and
shutting down some of the less family-friendly businesses in
the centrally located area.
The proposed project would entail upgrading streets and public lighting, constructing a bicycle-storage facility and building an
underground parking garage for cars.
Project 1012 suggests closing half the coffee shops that sell
cannabis in the district, creating a 17 percent reduction in the
number of the shops city-wide. The project plan also recommends cutting the number of brothel windows in half, restricting
their presence to two streets.
The business community is ready to lend its support.
According to an Amsterdam government website, several large
corporations, including ING Real Estate and Fortis, “are all
involved in the [Project] 1012 strategy or have shown an interest
therein.”
The project is expected to take 10 years, but the city council vows
not to make changes to the district without more community input.
“Official public participation will follow in the first half of 2009,
when all interest groups and other interested parties will have the
opportunity to contribute their views,” according to a government
statement. Plans call for a definitive Project 1012 strategy paper
finished by the second half of 2009.
52PM NETWORK FEBRUARY 2009 WWW.PMI.ORG
developing the roadmap so that everyone has
a chance to buy into the new strategy and
become part of the solution team.”
TEAM OF ADVERSARIES
The gloomy economic forecast may force
businesses to explore new strategies—
possibly creating some strange bedfellows.
“The next great cost reduction will happen
when competing companies start to work
together,” Mr. Bonkenburg says. The fashion
industry, for example, tends to compete on
designs and price point in the marketplace,
but rivals could share warehousing and
transportation to reduce project costs.
“Ideas like these are beginning to gain
momentum, and the next generation of project
managers will very likely be working in
some form with their competitors,” Mr.
Bonkenburg says.
And Amsterdam is at the forefront of the
trend, he says, because of the proactive
efforts of the Netherlands government to
provide incentives aimed at encouraging
companies to collaborate.
The move toward alliances will certainly
alter the role of project managers who
“will now need to negotiate and manage
partnerships as well as projects,” says Mr.
Bonkenburg.
That means a greater emphasis on people
skills, as project managers work with an
increasingly diverse group of clients, colleagues and stakeholders. Mr. Bonkenburg
himself is a trained mechanical engineer, but
these days he often refers to himself as an
“engineering social worker.” Many of his
projects involve multiple cultures, geogra-phies and disciplines as well as many strong
individual personalities. “I spend less time
solving engineering challenges than I do on
communication challenges,” he says.
And in today’s global project environment,
that translates to a need for cross-cultural
savvy. But Mr. Bonkenburg sees a distinct
advantage for Amsterdam’s project managers
on that front.
“The city of Amsterdam has always been
a key center for multinational corporations,
causing these skills to be in high demand,” he
says. “Historically, the Dutch have excelled at
