In fact, these districts appear to be based on something historic. They are vaguely similar to but not the same as the city boroughs.
The present boroughs are: Amsterdam-Centrum, Amsterdam-West, Amsterdam-Nieuw-West, Amsterdam-Westpoort, Amsterdam-Zuid, Amsterdam-Oost, Amsterdam-Zuidoost and Amsterdam-Noord. I think these were created by merging earlier boroughs and, maybe, they were in turn created by merging whatever the districts on the street signs represent.
Keeping up?!
Long ago I created my own divisions of inner centrum, west centrum, south centrum, east centrum, western suburbs, southern suburbs, eastern suburbs and northern suburbs. Sub-dividing those into districts was an attempt to group shops at a more local level.
I'm now attempting a further sub-division into neighbourhoods. My hope is that this will group shops both geographically and culturally, as neighbourhoods tend to have distinct architecture and feel about them.
Some neighbourhoods still contain a lot of shops and could be divided into even smaller areas but there are no obvious divisions to use. For instance, in the centre I've already divided the 1012 postcode area into new side and old side but these still include lots of shops. The Red Light District is a definable area but only has the Bulldog left in it these days. The Spui area is quite distinct but otherwise these areas are tricky to sub-divide.
Similarly, the southern canal belt (Grachtengordel-Zuid) has distinct zones around the Leidseplein and Rembrandtplein, but these areas have no defined boundaries.
In the past I used postcodes to automatically group shops. This sometimes works to bring together natural clusters but not always. I'm still using this method outside Amsterdam but have now attempted an improved grouping within the neighbourhoods in this new index.
So, this is what I've got at the moment. It's still a bit rough and work in progress.
Amsterdam Neighbourhoods
