Oosterpark dates from 1891, the first large park the municipality of Amsterdam actually paid for itself. The older, larger Vondelpark on the west side had begun as a private project for the wealthy; Oosterpark was different by design, a green space built by the city for the workers who lived around it. The park's edges still tell that story. To the south stretch the working-class neighborhoods that grew up in the late nineteenth century, terraced brick streets that filled up with dockworkers and tradesmen and, much later, with the families who came from Suriname, Morocco, Turkey, and the Dutch Antilles. The Tropenmuseum, now rebranded as the Wereldmuseum, sits at the park's southeastern corner. Its galleries hold the artifacts of empire, displayed with steadily greater honesty about how they got there.

If you want to understand who lives in Oost, look at what is for sale. The Dappermarkt has been a designated market street since 1910 and it has tracked Amsterdam's demographic shifts more accurately than any official report. Today the stalls stock products aimed at Surinamese, Moroccan, Turkish, and Dutch Antillean customers, with everything from goat meat to dried fish to halal sweets to bolts of West African wax-print cloth. A few blocks east, the Indische Buurt has its own street market along the Javastraat. The names of the streets here, the Javastraat, the Sumatrastraat, the Borneostraat, were chosen in the colonial era to evoke the Dutch East Indies. The people who actually moved here a century later came from Suriname and the Caribbean and North Africa rather than Indonesia. The street names stayed; the neighborhood became something else.

The Eastern Docklands, Oostelijk Havengebied in Dutch, used to load and unload the trade with the Dutch East Indies. Warehouses went up in the first half of the twentieth century, then came the Depression, the war, decolonization, and the slow death of a working port. By the 1980s the area was decaying brick and weed-cracked quays. The transformation in the 1990s was modeled, openly, on London's Docklands redevelopment, but the result feels distinctively Dutch. Architects were given island-sized canvases and produced an extraordinary concentration of contemporary residential architecture: cantilevered facades over water, narrow rowhouses in saturated colors, footbridges that arch impossibly over canals. IJburg, the newer chain of artificial islands further east, picked up the same idea in the 2000s. The first house at IJburg was built in 2002. The population is now around twenty thousand and more islands keep being reclaimed.

Further south, where the Watergraafsmeer used to be a polder for affluent Amsterdammers to escape the city, sits the Amsterdam Science Park. The complex hosts the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMS-IX, one of the largest internet exchange points in the world. A surprising share of the data that crosses Europe passes through racks of equipment here, in a quiet green corner of Amsterdam-Oost that most tourists will never visit. Nearby rises the Rembrandt Tower, finished in 1994 at 135 meters and for a time the tallest building in the city, joined later by the Breitner and Mondriaan towers, all named for Dutch painters. The juxtaposition is very Oost: a market selling cassava three tram stops from a fiber-optic backbone, immigrant neighborhoods next to billion-euro infrastructure, all of it east of the canals that the tourists never leave.