AMS Institute

Do you share our mission of 're-inventing cities' and want to join us to work on solutions for the city’s urban challenges? AMS Institute's communications team has 3 exciting job opportunities!

PR and Content Officer
Do PR, corporate storytelling, and content marketing, make you tick? Can you translate difficult topics into crisp and accessible content, do you have a creative approach, and would you like to work from an environment where innovation takes shape? Read more >>

Project Communications Officer
Are you the key communications expert within our projects and do you know how to create effective and appealing communication deliverables for our research & innovation projects? While organizing your work for multiple projects? Continue here >>

Internship
Are you looking for an internship in the field of communication, social media & community building, in an environment where you can immerse yourself in topics related to urban innovation? Click here >>

All job opportunities

Over a year ago, national COVID-19 measures and a lockdown was introduced in the Netherlands. This “new normal” impacted our lives in many ways. Our data visualization took a deep dive into some facts and figures how the lockdown affected city life.

The following topics were reviewed:

• Cardboard and glass waste
• Happiness levels and concentration problems
• Car traffic 
• Water usage
• CO2 emissions

Curious to see how the lockdown affected the above? Learn more >>

The City of Amsterdam aims to be a climate-neutral city by 2050 and to generate as much clean energy as possible on its territory. The Zuidoost district of Amsterdam wants to achieve this ambition as early as 2040.

The development of Amsterdam Zuidoost offers opportunities to combine sustainability with social improvement. For example by improving the living comfort of homes or by creating local employment. This ambition calls for innovative solutions to seize the opportunities for a social energy transition.

What does a smart and local energy system look like? How can we best shape this transition together? Who can play a role in this? In this program, we discuss the development of a scalable neighbourhood energy platform in the ArenAPoort area.

In collaboration with Pakhuis de Zwijger we hosted a livecast. We talked to various stakeholders involved in the Energy Lab Zuidoost:

• Henk van Raan | Amsterdam ArenA
• Ruben Voerman | Gemeente Amsterdam
• Huub Hendriks | Alliander
• Stella Boes | TU Delft
• Else Veldman | AMS Institute

The livecast was in Dutch, but you can watch the recording with subtitles.

In recent months, the Province of Noord-Holland, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK) in collaboration with Merel Stolker (Construction specialist, C-Creators) and Anne van Stijn (researcher, TU Delft) worked on a manual for housing corporations about circular renovation. With this manual, they want to embed circular impact in the renovation process - circularity is not the goal, but a means to achieve a sustainable built environment.

Handbook for circular renovation housing corporations
The handbook describes a process for circular renovation for housing corporations, explaining who should be involved in which step, which decisions are made and special points to pay attention to. This is illustrated by means of a number of inspiring examples.

The handbook also provides a clear definition of circular renovation: maintaining, renewing and reusing building (parts) without unnecessarily depleting natural resources, polluting the living environment and harming the ecosystem. This can be done on the basis of the well-known raw material principles - narrowing the loop, slowing the loop and closing the loop - which C-creators have translated into three building principles: minimize, utilize the available and use the reusable. Don't just look at the source of circular material, but also at the end of life.

The manual is intended as a starting document, an invitation for housing corporations and supply chain partners to get started themselves.

The handbook (in Dutch) can be downloaded free of charge here >>

Strandeiland is the newest artificial island in the IJburg archipelago in the IJmeer, on the east side of Amsterdam. The island is currently being constructed. With 8,000 homes, Strandeiland is one of the largest future urban districts in Amsterdam.

Involving citizens in urban development processes
How can citizens gain more control and ownership in the development of urban areas? To make the process of shaping the development plans of Strandeiland more democratic, the DemoS project was launched in October 2018.  DemoS – democratic Beach Island – is part of the Participation Plan for this area and has been running for two years.

The Strandeiland project leader, municipal innovation team (CTO), the local municipality (Stadsdeel), three IJburg residents, researchers, and students of MSc MADE participated in the living lab project DemoS from 2018 -2020.

The aim of the participation trajectory was threefold:

1. To set up a novel way of collaboration between civil servants and citizens around the participation processes of the design and development of Strandeiland.
2. To share the gained insights transparently to inspire other citizens and civil servants.
3. To grow a community of potential future Strandeilanders.

The participation team was loosely established on the principles of a living lab with the innovative focus on making city-making processes more inclusive and democratic. This is the first time in Amsterdam that civil servants and citizens work together in this formal agreement whereby citizens are engaged in creating the participatory processes. Continue reading about the results >>

City officials require sensor data to optimize operations, plan projects, or measure effects of interventions. Citizens often do not notice the sensors deployed by the City in public space. Also, the benefit for the public is not directly obvious to city residents or immediately shown by the sensing systems in place. Namely, in many cases only after data is processed, it informs an action that affects citizens.

Public concerns about sensors are often connected to concerns about potential action (to be taken by, for example, city officials), and that the action has negative implications. With ‘Simple Sensors’ we address these concerns.

The Simple Sensors project, which is part of the Responsible Sensing Lab, investigates these questions: What if sensors are designed to be seen? What if they communicate clearly what data they collect and how? And what if sensors invite you to interact with them?

Modules for responsible and ‘simple sensing’
Simple Sensors consists of a family of modules, designed by The Incredible Machine, that can be combined: some modules improve transparency over what data is being collected, other modules encourage interaction, and some modules just make it understandable how sensors work. The Simple Sensors family allows the City of Amsterdam to design sensors to fit any context or purpose.

A privacy friendly alternative for CCTV
The first Simple Sensor prototype called millimeter wave (mmWave) has been developed as a proposal for the City’s crowd management sensor at the Marineterrein Amsterdam Living Lab. It consists of four modules: 1) sensor module 2) transmission module, 3) data module, 4) threshold module... Continue reading about the project on our website >>