Claiming the Streets. Using the Past to Challenge the Present and Imagine the Future of Urban Public Spaces (Conference)

Luca Bertolini (Urban Planning, CUS, UvA), Danielle van den Heuvel (History, ACUH, UvA) , Gamze Saygi (History, ACUH, UvA), and James Symonds (Archaeology, AHM, UvA)

This conference brings together scholars from different disciplines as well as policymakers, artists and other Amsterdam-based stakeholders to tackle questions of in- and exclusivity in the city, by looking at the street as quintessential site of contestation and emancipation, where the contrasting dynamics of ‘enclosing’ and ‘commoning’ most overtly collide. We aim for the conference to be an encounter between hitherto separate enquiries into the past, present and future of city streets as social spaces. The conference will focus on academic exchanges, and on exchanges between academia and society. We will mix more standard presentations of academic research with more free-flowing sessions in which academics and stakeholders discuss current and future challenges related to access to and control over the city street. Next to in-house sessions the aim is to include outside activities in urban public space.

Wellbeing in Amsterdam

Nicky Pouw (Governance and Inclusive Development, CUS, UvA) & Hebe Verrest (Governance and Inclusive Development, CUS, UvA), with research assistance by Jennifer van Beek (Research Master Urban Studies, UvA)

Contemporary cities are confronted with the challenge of creating inclusive and sustainable communities under conditions of mounting and compounding social, economic, cultural, environmental and spatial inequalities. In attempts to better understand and address this challenge, scholars and urban professionals are looking for new sets of wellbeing criteria- beyond a narrow set of economic growth indicators - to value city performance and reflect ambitions for a new urban paradigm (Gupta et al., 2015; Pouw, 2020). The City Doughnut (Raworth, 2020), and the Brede Welvaartsmonitor (OIS, 2020) are recent examples of indices aiming to capture a broader understanding of the quality of urban life. However, such alternative indices often find restricted or contested usage in urban policy and governance (e.g. Uitermark 2014). One reason for this is the mismatch between the wellbeing perspective expressed through the available data and the perspective that is lived and experienced at the level of communities, households and individual residents (Curtis et al., 2020).

This project aims to address this issue by bringing a household and community-level perspective on wellbeing in conversation with that expressed at municipal level. It aims at a. understanding wellbeing as lived and perceived by households and community groups in an ontwikkelbuurt (Venserpolder) in Amsterdam; and b. analysing the extent to which this perspective matches (or not) the data and instruments that are collected and used at city-level to present urban wellbeing. In this project we work together with Fearless City, Najah Aouaki (urban strategist) and community groups in Venserpolder.

Levelling the Playing-Field of Urban Planning: Co-producing and Commoning Property Market Knowledge

Andre Legarza (Research Master Urban Studies, UvA), Sara Özoğul (Urban Planning, CUS, UvA) and Tuna Taşan-Kok (Urban Planning, CUS, UvA)

Property market actors play important roles in shaping built urban environments. But in-depth, empirically-driven research that investigates how these actors make decisions within urban space remains missing within urban scholarship and municipal policy decisions. The diversity of sources and knowledge accumulated in property markets are often overlooked. This gap is explained by lacking transparency within the property sector, making it difficult to collect systematic and reliable data. Property market research and data is expensive and protected by strong privacy regulations – making it inaccessible to most urban scholars. Similarly, planning practitioners and scholars seldom attend property conferences or publish in academic finance and property-related journals. In this proposal, we argue that the gap between urban (planning) and property scholarship can be bridged by creating dialogue between property market actors, planning experts, and scholars. We want to initiate this dialogue through coordinating the following activities to bring different 'universes' together, co-producing property market knowledge for urban planners, and commoning the results:

1. Research platform: the platform will host the webinars and connect planning and property experts to work on the textbook, other publications, and long-term education projects.

2. Webinar Series: the webinars will inform future academic outputs and provide a space for scholars, policymakers, and property market experts to network and co-produce solutions to urban challenges. Planning master and graduate students will be invited to assess the lucidness of shared knowledge.

3. Textbook: the textbook will share actionable project findings with urban planners, informed by the research platform, webinars, and outside research activities.

Each activity aims to link contemporary planning questions with property scholarship and practises, providing a transparent and comprehensible property market knowledge basis for urban planners. This project builds on the ongoing research project WHIG.