Explore Amsterdam in Google Street View

Amsterdam is a set of rings, and once you see it the whole city becomes navigable. Four main canals were dug in the seventeenth century in concentric arcs around the medieval core: Singel, then Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht. Every street that crosses them is a radial. If you know which ring you are on and which direction the water runs, you cannot really get lost, which is not something you can say about many old European cities.

The houses are the thing to look at closely. They are narrow because plots were taxed on width, tall because the merchants needed storage above the shop, and they lean forward over the street because goods were hoisted up the front rather than carried up the stairs. Almost every gable still has the hoist beam sticking out at the top. Once you notice it you will see it on nearly every building along Herengracht, and you can watch the gable styles change decade by decade as you move along a single canal.

The Jordaan is where to wander without a plan. It was built as a working district outside the canal ring, on a tighter grid with smaller houses, and it kept its scale because it was too cheap to redevelop for a long time and then too fashionable to touch. The courtyards, called hofjes, are the surprise: small residential squares tucked behind street doors, several of which were captured on foot.

Bicycles are the defining feature of the imagery and it takes a moment to adjust. Every railing along every canal is stacked with them, the cycle lanes are wider than the car lanes in places, and the multi-storey bicycle parking near Centraal Station holds several thousand. This is the clearest example anywhere of a city that made a policy choice and then built everything around it.

For a specific contrast, compare the Nine Streets with Kalverstraat. The Nine Streets are a small grid of short cross-canal lanes full of independent shops, and they feel like the city working properly. Kalverstraat, a few hundred metres away, is a pedestrianised chain-store artery that could be in any European city. Both are equally central and they show what Amsterdam looks like when it is and is not being itself.

Finally, go out to the Eastern Docklands. The old port islands were rebuilt from the 1990s onwards with a strict rule that every building had to be different, and the result is a district of contemporary architecture at canal-house proportions. Java-eiland is the best of it: the same narrow plots and the same waterfront rhythm as the historic centre, executed entirely in the last thirty years.