In the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch planners looked at the empty polder land southeast of Amsterdam and saw the future. They built a residential utopia on Le Corbusier principles: enormous honeycomb-shaped high-rise apartment blocks set in vast green parks, with separated levels for cars, cycling, and pedestrians. The original tenants the planners had in mind were Dutch middle-class families, who took one look at the wind-swept walkways and the half-hour elevator rides and decided to move to the suburbs instead. The vacancy was filled, beginning in 1975, by Surinamese families newly arrived as Suriname became independent and many of its citizens claimed Dutch citizenship while they still could. Ghanaians followed. Then Antilleans, then Dominicans, then refugees from the Horn of Africa. The honeycomb blocks, planned for a class of residents who never came, instead became one of the most international neighborhoods in Europe.

Walk through the Bijlmer today and you can read Suriname in the storefronts: Surinamese bakeries, hairdressers stocking products for Black hair, restaurants serving roti and pom and bara. The Black Archives, founded in nearby Oost but with deep ties to Zuidoost, preserves the literature and political history of Black Amsterdam. Anton de Komplein, the central square, is named for the Surinamese anti-colonial writer Anton de Kom, whose 1934 history of Dutch slavery was confiscated by colonial authorities and only fully rehabilitated in Dutch curricula in the twenty-first century. The market on the square rotates locations through the week; Monday and Thursday and Friday are at Anton de Komplein, Tuesday at Kraaiennest, Wednesday at Reigersbos, Saturday at Ganzenhoef. The stalls sell Caribbean and African produce, music, and clothing in proportions that no other Dutch market matches.

For decades, Bijlmer carried a reputation as the most dangerous neighborhood in the Netherlands. The reputation was rooted in real problems of the 1980s and 1990s, when neglected stairwells, vacant apartments, and a heroin epidemic combined to make some blocks genuinely unsafe. Things have changed considerably. The Bijlmer ArenA railway station, an architectural showpiece, now anchors a redeveloped commercial district with IKEA, MediaMarkt, and the Ziggo Dome concert hall just across the tracks from the Johan Cruyff Arena, the home stadium of Ajax. Crime has fallen substantially in the past two decades. Locals point out, only half-joking, that pickpocketing is the most common crime tourists actually suffer in Amsterdam, and pickpockets work where tourists are, which is not Zuidoost. The neighborhood may now be objectively safer for visitors than parts of the canal belt.

For decades, despite being home to the largest Rastafarian community in the country, Zuidoost did not have a single licensed coffee shop. Locals who wanted to buy cannabis legally had to travel into central Amsterdam, while everyone else dealt with the street trade and its problems. In 2017 the city council finally approved a coffee shop in Zuidoost; the absurdity of having forced the neighborhood to wait that long is part of how locals describe their relationship with the rest of the city. Bars are still relatively scarce and often close early, partly a holdover from the bad-reputation era and partly because Bijlmer nightlife historically happened in the basements of the high-rise blocks, in unlicensed social clubs with their own music and their own rules. Some of those basements have closed; others have become legal. The character of the neighborhood, though, is not in the bars. It is in the markets, the festivals at Anton de Komplein, the kids playing in the green spaces between the towers, and the stubborn fact that a failed Dutch utopia became, against all the planners' intentions, something most other Dutch neighborhoods can only envy.