Turning off the red lights: Entrepreneurial urban strategies in ‘De Wallen’ Amsterdam

• We describe the emergence of urban entrepreneurial strategies.
• We distinguish between soft and hard design approaches and the use of fictions.
• We discuss strategies and effects in Amsterdam's red-light district.
• Ongoing strategies have not proven to elevate the conditions of sex-workers.
• In the longer run, homogenization of the area could also affect tourist potential.

Entrepreneurial strategies to urban development involve a combination of risk-taking, inventiveness, promotion, and profit motivation, mostly associated with the field of economics. This market rational, guided by public-private investments and city branding, could however result in (a) a collection of sanitized city spaces specifically designed for the upper classes with unfavourable activities pushed outward, and (b) a homogenization of different destinations, without sufficient attention for the space-specific characteristics. Specific entrepreneurial strategies and their consequences for socially marginalized groups and destination competitiveness are discussed in the case of the red-light district of Amsterdam.