Translator: Hong Ha Nguyen Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
Five years ago, I came to Amsterdam for a date.
When I arrived here, I discovered the city buzzing with life,
and I fell in love,
first with the city, and eventually with my boyfriend.
(Laughter)
I remember being amazed
by the amount of people riding their bicycles
and the way they seem to interweave so beautifully
as if everyone was connected to everyone else.
At the time, I was doing an internship
with an environmental think tank in Freiburg,
widely recognized as one of the most sustainable cities in the world.
There, people often talked about
the way they ride their bicycles to save the planet.
So when I arrived here and saw all these bicycles,
I thought I had come to a city of virtuous environmentalists,
relentlessly pursuing a low-carbon lifestyle.
But to my surprise, in my first conversations with locals,
I learned that the Dutch are not particularly green.
They ride their bikes
because by design it is simply the most convenient,
the fastest, the cheapest way to get around.
So I became fascinated with what I perceived to be
this uniquely people-friendly city and sustainable city.
And I wanted to learn more.
So a couple of years later,
I enrolled in the urban planning masters at the University of Amsterdam.
During my thesis, I learned that, not too long ago,
Amsterdam was a city disconnected by cars and bad planning,
much like most cities around the world today.
So tonight I want to tell you
how Amsterdam managed to reinvent itself as a city that connects people.
I'd like to thank Thomas Schipherd, who is in the audience today,
for visualizing the topics that I'd like to talk about.
You'll see some of his great photos tonight.
Now, these days, there is a lot of talk about connected cities
with governments and companies racing to build
the next hyperefficient smart city of the future.
The idea of a smart city is to leverage digital connectivity
to help address urban issues like congestion and pollution.
One of the most popular examples is that of autonomous vehicles
which, by communicating with each other via clever algorithms,
should be able to continue moving without having to stop at traffic lights,
thereby preventing congestion,
as you see in this MIT video.
This is one vision of a connected city.
It is expensive, it is complex,
and, quite frankly, no one really knows if it's going to work.
You also notice that in this vision
there is no space for people to walk, or bike, or be in public space.
But there is another way to create a connected city.
In my work with international delegations who come to Amsterdam to learn
how they can make their cities more sustainable and smart,
I often show them
how this interweaving flow is already a reality here in Amsterdam.
It isn't achieved through connected cars, but through connected people.
And here you see this rich connectivity
that experts expect will be extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to achieve with self-driving cars.
It turns out that it is actually through these interactions,
through eye contact, and through giving right of way,
that we build trust and community and social cohesion in cities.
That just doesn't happen if we were all going to be in metal boxes.
So, Amsterdam is actually emerging as a smart-city leader
precisely because its approach is to use new technologies
to enhance the existing urban connectivity,
not to replace it.
That might seem obvious,
but, not too long ago, Amsterdam took a very different approach
to thinking about the kind of city it wants to be in the future.
You see here this vision of modernity
that Amsterdam borrowed from the Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
While this particular vision
of the redesign of Surinameplein and Overtoom
was never implemented,
other streets and squares previously used for public interaction and for markets
were converted into freeways and parking lots
and disconnected communities.
As Amsterdam pursued this cars-centric approach,
the number in -
the increase in traffic accidents and fatalities also increased.
So Amsterdamers had a revolution
and demanded a return to a more livable city.
You see here one of the most influential groups,
the "Stop the Child Murder" campaign,
which demanded safe streets for children
to be able to walk and bike to school and to play in their neighborhoods.
It took over a decade of campaigning and demonstrations and guerrilla action,
but finally the work of Amsterdamers paid off,
because the government, by the 1980s, started shifting power
from people inside the car to people outside the car,
for example, by creating a vision for a bicycle network.
Here you see the result of four decades of incremental transformation
from a city that tries to serve technology to a city that serves people.
Today, almost 70% of trips within Amsterdam are on foot and on bike.
This is precisely what gives Amsterdam
this feeling of vibrancy and liveliness.
When I show these kinds of transformations to audiences in North America especially,
they are immediately labeled as new urbanism,
which is a movement that promotes development of cities and communities
around people instead of cars.
It's really funny to call this new
because there's nothing really new about it.
This is actually how cities functioned for hundreds of years.
And I often say
that many cities can be inspired and learn from their former selves.
They called themselves modernists
when they threw away
this people-centric approach to urban development
in favor of a modern city,
a city built primarily around cars
and around grandiose architecture
that served the egos of architects and planners and engineers
more than it served communities.
Here you see this vision by General Motors
that was popularized during the 1939 World Expo in New York
and which has influenced so much global urban development
over the past eight decades.
It is a vision of a city as a perfectly engineered machine.
Like the MIT simulation, you see that there is no space
for people to walk or cycle or spend time with each other
in public space.
These activities were just not part of this vision for the future.
Many cities around the world adopted this vision,
and now they regret it
because their cities are disconnected by roads that are clogged with traffic
instead of connecting and enhancing communities.
Now that urban leaders realize that this is a problem,
many are trying to fix it
using the same top-down, technocratic approach
that got us into this mess
instead of working with communities to find out how they want to connect.
For hundreds, in some cases thousands of years,
cities have functioned as platforms for human connectivity and interaction.
All great cities resemble ecosystems
which, by virtue of density, diversity and interconnectivity,
make it possible for people to exchange goods and ideas.
While modern technologies can and should enhance this social connectivity,
we should not pretend that we can replace it.
If you think of a technological city
which promises to get you from A to B faster,
a social city will give you a reason to enjoy the journey.
Ultimately, what I think people can learn from Amsterdam
is that if Amsterdam -
is that cities are malleable.
I hope that if people see that Amsterdam was not always Amsterdam,
they realize that their cities can transform too.
Like the 1939 World Expo inspired a vision
for technologically connected cities,
I hope that Amsterdam inspires a vision for more socially connected cities.
The best part about this vision, I think,
is that it's not some abstract model or simulation,
it is a tested and proven reality
of a city that is worth falling in love with over and over again.
But you AUC students want to change the world, right?
(Laughter)
Okay, so here's your homework!
Three steps, and friends and family can do it too, okay?
First, you have to look up a photo
of your home city, or another city you're interested in,
a hundred years ago.
Then you have to compare it to the current situation.
Then you have to think about
what kind of city you want to live in ten years from now,
and, perhaps most importantly,
what can you do to influence that vision, to create that future.
The reason this is important is because you have to remember
the reason you can ride your bike home safely tonight
is because of people
who got involved in shaping their streets and their community.
When you change the streets, you change the world.
That's why you have to do your homework.
Thank you.
(Applause)