Turning Amsterdam from a city for cars into a city for people

The Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) is one of the European Commission’s largest city support initiatives supporting European cities in their green and digital transitions. ICC delivers knowledge and support services to cities and their local economies to address two major challenges: making the transition to a net-zero economic model, while enabling social inclusion and sustainable development for every EU citizen.

Cities learn how to address these challenges through Local Green Deals: integrated, multi-disciplinary action plans to lead the green and digital transition across sectors from the built environment, urban mobility and renewable energy systems to tourism or small retailers. Cities become members of a vibrant network, gain access to advisory services, innovation and sustainability management techniques, cutting-edge technology and training and get inspiration and advice from peers and mentor cities.

Building on the success of the previous edition of the ICC programme (2020-22) and Digital Cities Challenge (2017-19), the ICC will now enter Phase 2!

Amsterdam as a Mentor City

Like previous years, Amsterdam has been selected to join the support programme as a mentor city. The city will play a leading support role by guiding the 64 core cities as they embark on their two year journey to create impactful strategies and develop innovative solutions that will place the cities at the forefront of the green and digital twin transition through Local Green Deals. A nice compliment, allowing the Amsterdam Region to share their experiences and learnings from setting up Local Green Deal initiatives over the past years.

The Intelligent Cities Challenge Strategy City Lab: Accelerating the Twin Transition (November 2023)

On 23 and 24 November 2023, over 200 people - a mix of Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) core and mentor cities, political leaders and representatives from European institutions gathered for the first time in-person to discuss the status quo of Twin Transition. Through examples and best practices, attendees had the honour to hear from over 30 speakers as they shared insights into collaboration methods, Local Green Deals, climate ambitions, digital transitions and more across the course of 20 sessions.

Amsterdam Smart CIty's Leonie van den Beuken travelled to this gathering in Brussels as one of the representatives of the Amsterdam Region. She summarized her trip as follows:

This EU program helps cities from north to south, east and west to connect, share and learn. A much needed interaction, as we all try to improve the quality of life of our citizens. We all struggle with the ever rising cost of living. And we all want to get our cities to become more sustainable.

None of this comes easy, but we all know that local collaboration plays a key role. Building local coalitions between government, businesses and citizens is one thing, but how do we make sure these so called coalitions of the willing actually become coalitions of the doing?

Some of the learnings we shared from the Amsterdam Region are; the need for political support and the importance of trust and respect.

• Local political leadership will inspire and guide society and entrepreneurs to invest and contribute. However, make sure pilotical support doesn’t evolve into political ownership. When that happens, societal parties and businesses tend to step out the coalition.

• Take the importance of trust and respect seriously. You need to show long term commitment, take time to create understanding between parties. Take competition between participating SME’s serious and define together how to handle this together. Create a workflow in which smaller parties are allowed to participate less intense but sill feel incorporated.

We'll keep you up to date on our participation in future gatherings and results from ICC Phase 2. Want to know more? Check https://www.intelligentcitieschallenge.eu/

When considering the future of (urban) mobility we often limit ourselves to urban mobility options we’re used to, like our road- water- and railway networks. But what if we think outside of the box. What if we extended our urban transportation system with sustainable aviation options?

Introducing Electric Vertical Take Off & Landing (eVTOL) options into our transportation system could be a promising move in achieving our urban and provincial goals. Examples of its benefits are; reduced greenhouse gas emissions by electrification, serving rural communities, more efficient emergency response, and decreased surface congestion and crash rates.

And what about some critical issues regarding this development? Think; dependence on battery technology and lithium scarcity, the immense pressure on the energy grid and complications when implementing in cities with old infrastructure cities like Amsterdam.

Case & Set-up of the Session

During our 20th Demoday we had an international guest; Kerry Rohrmeier. During her work as a researcher at San Jose State University, she was finalizing a paper on Urban Air Mobility (UAM). She was visiting The Netherlands to gather input on possible use-cases and considerations from Dutch experts and aviation related networks. As part of her visit, Chris de Veer invited her to join our Demoday and gather input from the Amsterdam Smart City network. It turned out to be a win-win situation. Kerry introduced this sci-fi-esque subject -and its progress in the US- to the network, and a diverse set of participants discussed her research questions in a focus-group setting.

The following paragraphs describe Kerry’s research topics and the answers we came up with as a group.

Insights:

Appropriate UAM use cases in broader sustainable systems
The group saw eVTOL modes of transport as;

• A promising alternative to our costly regional transport system, due to its small form, autonomous driving and on-demand possibilities.
• An alternative to ferry transportation to (nearby) national islands like Texel and Terschelling.
• A sustainable mode of transportation for sports teams traveling to- and from national opponents.
• A sustainable and efficient mode of transportation for emergency teams like the ambulance, police and firefighters. Its use would cut response- and travel times.
• A luxurious alternative to private jets and polluting travel behaviour by the rich.

Equity implications of new UAM and vertiports networks
When it comes to affordability of UAM services the question arises; who should take the lead in its implementation? Public authorities or the market? Subsidies and investments from the government would be needed but to what extent? Private parties could push down pricing create more value with air travel by collecting and selling data from the air (e.g. air-quality and weather predictions) but how desirable is this?

There are also questions regarding safety, because; how to preserve safety in and outside unmanned aircrafts? This led to discussions regarding the use of cabin ‘hosts’ and on ground safety persons monitoring in-cabin safety. Furthermore, someone pointed out how this was also one of the main concerns when elevators where introduced for the first time. This idea of using a closed space with strangers brought up the need for an elevator ‘operator/host’. Later on, this necessity slowly decreased. This could be an interesting case to study when addressing this ‘trust’ and safety topic.

Conclusions and nest steps

Kerry was very content with the discussions that were initiated and the insights she gathered from our perspectives on the case of Urban Air Mobility. It’s important to consider and play into this topic when designing our sustainable transportation system for the future. There are a lot of opportunities, mentioned in the paragraphs above. However, how this development could make a transportation system more ‘just’ and equal remains the question. While we see a rise in innovation and private parties willing to bring eVTOL to the next level, the discussions regarding affordability (for the masses), safety, and its reliance on batteries and a congested energy grid will require special attention.

For now, Kerry Rohrmeier will finish her research paper on this topic and we hope to update you soon with its publication and conclusions! Would you like to know more about this topic or get in contact with Kerry? Let me know via pelle@amsterdamsmartcity.com

When working together on transitions, it is important to be aware of and sensitive to the impact of power and systemic oppression in participatory processes. Within the Amsterdam Smart City network, the question of inclusion and civic participation, is often brought up in worksessions and discussions. However, we often lack the tools to find the bottlenecks and really include all important beneficiaries.

Therefore, we asked our valued partners Kennisland and DRIFT to lead a workshop about Power in Transitions at Demoday #20 on May 16. Dave van Loon and Faduma Mukhtar (Kennisland) together with Aron Teunissen (DRIFT) taught the participants more about power in transitions, based on the Power Literacy Framework and Field Guide from Kennisland. This guide describes five different forms of power and offers a set of tools for professionals to become more aware of power dynamics in their work.

The five forms of power

According to the Power Literacy Guide by Kennisland, there are five forms of power in design process. If you want to learn more about this, you can download the Power Literacy guide here. The five forms of power are:

Privilege: The type of power you get from a social relation whereby you benefit due to the social group you belong to, at the expense of another social group. It is an unearned advantage and often invisible to those who have it.

Access power: The ability to influence who is included in and excluded from the design project and process.

Goal power: The ability to initiate the design project to begin with, as well as the ability to influence decisions related to framing the problem, goals, and structure of the design process.

Role power: The ability to influence the roles that different stakeholders take on. This includes the ability to assign any roles or titles in the design process, as well as influencing the role each stakeholder plays in making decisions.

Rule power: The ability to influence the way that those in the design process will work together. It includes the ability to influence what is considered normal, what is allowed and what isn’t, how actors will communicate with each other, what language is used, and beliefs about what types of knowledge are valid.

Power check

After a theoretical introduction of the five forms of power, we split into smaller groups to perform a so-called power check for different Amsterdam Smart City projects, such as the Mobility Challenge and “Wat mensen beweegt”. Using this power check, the participants looked at access power and goal power. We identified all actors affected by the project and indicated which actors were not involved. The different actors were then assigned a role in different stages of the process: listener, co-creator, advisor, partner or director.

Most important take-aways

The goal of this exercise was to create more awareness about involving target groups in different stages of the project. The main take-aways were:

• The role for the for the ‘benefit group’, the people that are impacted by the project, is often too small. If beneficiaries are involved, this often happens in the last stages of the project. In this phase in the project, it is often more difficult or not possible at all to influence decision-making;

• To create equal power, some parties have to ‘give away’ (some of) their power;

• Truly inclusive work takes time, effort and money. It is not something takes place overnight;

• Awareness is half of the battle: make the topic of systemic oppression in participatory process a structural part of your (work)process).

Want to learn more about power in transitions? Read more.