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This has also become a widespread phenomenon in Amsterdam, and has reached areas outside of the inner city such as Amsterdam-Noord and het westelijk havengebied. For example, an announced rent increase for the Tolhuistuin, an old Shell canteen turned creative hub for theatre, visual arts and music in Amsterdam Noord, means that more than half of the cultural institutions and companies located in the cultural complex are likely to move out during the coming months. The rent increase is initiated by the municipal real estate company, who took over the ownership of the Tolhuistuin from the local borough last year. By pushing out these creative enterprises, which often involve the surrounding neighbourhood in their cultural projects, the municipality is shooting itself in the foot. Commercial interest is given precedence over the development of a longer-term vision in which space for cultural initiatives is retained and local parties are involved.

Tolhuistuin by Tim Hillege

Meanwhile, in one of the capitals of gentrification so to speak, measures are being taken to counter the negative effects of gentrification. To prevent the departure of artists and creative firms, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has introduced a new planning measure: “Creative Enterprise Zones”. Six inner-city neighbourhoods have been designated as zones where “creative workers” – defined as people who work in art and fashion and have lower incomes – can take up residence in subsidised living and working spaces. The boroughs are given funding to provide affordable workspaces for artists, small creative businesses and local people. Recognising the economic and cultural significance of small creative businesses, this policy aims to ensure that creative businesses can stay in the inner city and are not pushed further and further to the periphery.

With this in mind, Amsterdam, taking on an increasingly market-driven approach to the city’s development, may soon lag behind in its urban governance regarding gentrification. Just as the ban on tourist shops in the city’s historic centre was put into effect in 2017, when actually the centre was already completely saturated with the fast-food chain stores which this policy aims to fight, the city needs to pay attention if it doesn’t want to lose its special character as laboratory for creative talent. A character that is fundamental both for its international reputation and attractiveness as well as its local liveability and diversity. The question should therefore be asked how Amsterdam can remain, next to a paradise for cultural consumption, a place where arts and culture are produced and there is space for experimentation?

If the city wants to remain a breeding ground for creativity, it should safeguard spaces for artistic production and experimentation to take place. This doesn’t necessarily mean following London’s “Creative Enterprise Zones” initiative, but it does mean looking into the value of creative enterprises. Beyond their economic significance for the city, it means recognising the social and cultural significance of arts organisations, and developing policies that can support creative enterprises, especially those that have developed links with their local community. And preferably before all of them have been pushed out and replaced by fast-food stores.

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As living space in Amsterdam is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, and gentrification is rampant, the call for a reassessment of the way in which the city is shaped is getting louder and louder. This was very noticeable in the run-up to the Amsterdam municipal elections of 21 March 2018; the first elections in decades in which housing was without a doubt the central theme that all parties, from the far left to the far right, felt they had to address.

What struck me the most amongst all the saber-rattling and show-wrestling that we call political campaigning, was the militant tone that the centre-left parties adopted on this subject. For example, the election manifesto of the Green Party, GroenLinks, stated in no uncertain terms: “We are going to curb the much praised free market”. The diagnosis is rightly made that if the market forces were to be unleashed, Amsterdam would soon transform into an enclave for an economic elite surrounded by the various peripheral misery belts for those who are lagging behind socially and economically. To avoid this, and to maintain the social mix that characterizes the city, the sale of corporation-owned housing must be curbed. The election manifesto of the Dutch Labour Party, PvdA, also explicitly places the problem in the context of a rampant housing market:

Amsterdam is a city for everyone. But our housing market is overheating. The city is in danger of becoming unaffordable. We do not want Amsterdam to become a city for the rich. We want to prevent houses from becoming even more expensive. We will protect Amsterdam from slum landlords, bad investors and commercial holiday rentals. (…) Amsterdam must remain Amsterdam. But Amsterdam’s social character is at stake. The city is increasingly in the grip of the pursuit of profit.[1]

Such campaign language reveals that, thank God, the political stale-mate of the third way-ish market-friendly socio-liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s is finally losing traction. Not too long ago center-left and center-right parties basically agreed that urban growth can best be achieved through public-private partnerships, deregulation, and state-led gentrification. It is a relief to see that parties such as PvdA and GroenLinks are now retracing their steps. It is also encouraging that a municipal administration is currently being drawn up with no fewer than three parties (GroenLinks, PvdA and the Socialist Party, SP) that, in the run-up to the elections, have called for more social and affordable housing and for restrictions on investors in the housing market. They will most likely form a coalition with D66, a liberal centre party that calls for social housing dwellings to be transferred to the free market in order to keep the city accessible to middle-income groups. According to local daily newspaper Het Parool, housing is therefore in all likelihood the most important stumbling block in the formation of a coalition.

Nevertheless, some reservations regarding the new political wind blowing in the Stopera, Amsterdam’s city hall, seem justified. To begin with, many policies effective today are still implicitly or explicitly market-oriented and pro-gentrification. This means that the tough campaign language of GroenLinks and the other left-wing parties will have to be followed up by a considerable administrative effort. In addition, the electorate has not forgotten that the same center-left itself has been at the heart of a whole series of measures and reforms that have deepened the housing crisis in Amsterdam. These include the privatization of housing corporations in the 1990s, the gentrification-friendly ‘Broedplaatsten’-policy (Creative Incubator policy) designed by GroenLinks alderman Maarten van Poelgeest in the 2000s, and more recently the introduction of new precarious, temporary tenancies by the Rutte II cabinet, in which the PvdA took part. This warrants doubts about the political ‘stewardship’ of the city administration, regardless of the political color of the parties participating in it, and it also raises questions about the endurance of ‘good’ housing and planning policies in face of ever changing political undercurrents and priorities. Can political parties in our representative democracy be entrusted with public housing, given their track record, including that of the Left, of squandering the public housing legacy in the recent past?

Laurens Ivens (Gemeente Amsterdam)

Jan Schaefer 1980 (Nationaal Archief – Anefo – Rob Bogaerts)

Even more important is the question of whether the current housing crisis in Amsterdam can be resolved politically at the municipal level. Can the housing market still be contained, or are we witnessing a tragic case of ‘too little, too late’? Can the local government regain control? This problem is nicely illustrated by the double legacy of the outgoing Housing alderman, Laurens Ivens of the SP, the most outspoken left-wing politician we have had in that position for decades. Following the example of the illustrious housing alderman Jan Schaefer in the 70s and 80s, Ivens has himself presented as an alderman who prefers the construction site to the conference table; a politician, moreover, who believes that the state should take the lead in urban development. And his figures are rather impressive. Under Ivens, more than 9,000 homes were completed in Amsterdam last year; which is approximately 15% of the total number of homes completed in the Netherlands. However, despite this astounding figure under his period in office, the number of social rental dwellings and middle-cost owner-occupied and rented homes under his control has actually fallen, while the segment of expensive homes rose from 21 to 29 percent. While under Ivens construction is progressing at record speed, the sale of social property continues at an even faster pace, especially in the centrally located districts. Ivens himself sighed that it feels as if he is “cleaning up a flooded room without turning off the taps” (dweilen met de kraan open).

Sadly, the truth is that a return to the vigorous Amsterdam housing policies of Schaefer is not very feasible. For many reasons: the financial stakes have become too high; political mandates are limited; the public planning apparatus has weakened considerably over the last few decades; and national legislation is still encouraging housing corporations to continue to sell off social housing. Moreover, private stakeholders today are much wealthier and more powerful than in the past: the market parties with which the city is now negotiating and competing are no longer yesteryears picturesque local slumlords, but internationally operating investment funds and venture capital firms, who have ample means to resist regulation. In addition, Amsterdam’s public housing policy has traditionally been linked to urban expansion, but space for large new housing developments is quite simply lacking.

Housing beyond state and market?

But if local government can’t and the market shouldn’t be in charge of the future of the city, to whom or what should we turn? In order to escape this conceptual impasse, more and more people are attracted to the idea of the ‘commons’, the popularity of which is underlined by endless stream of lectures and workshops, research groups, articles and books recently devoted to the subject; a young tradition that the Urban Commons of Culture platform is now seeking to join.

The term ‘the commons’ is, of course, notoriously unruly and elastic, but in its most minimal definition it describes a symbolic space that exists alongside the spheres of the market and the state, a space that is given substance through collective use and management. Examples of urban commons that recur frequently in the extensive popular literature on the subject include bottom-up social centres, squatted or improvised public hangouts, community gardens, but also to the temporary protest settlements of the so-called ‘movement of the squares’ of 2011. As a variant thereof, housing activists, architects and scholars are increasingly referring to the ‘housing commons’, although what is meant by this may differ per author. Some use the term simply to describe the rise of co-housing initiatives, others use it more ambitiously as a kind of conceptual horizon of what a public housing model for the 21st century could, or should, look like: namely, an network of radically democratic and citizen-controlled housing projects. There are also those who use the term to describe experimental forms of non-hierarchical, egalitarian and participatory communal life at the micro level – “living-in-common” –, with the underlying idea that such a form of commoning in the domestic sphere can “prefigure” larger societal changes. And there are those use the concept of the commons to reimagine the existing social housing system as a form of decentralized collective property beyond the market and the state.

What this indicates is that the definitions of the housing commons differ widely, but also that these definitions spring from very different positions. The discussion about housing commons is bringing another discussion back to the foreground: the discussion about scale and organization of housing systems. From a socialist or social-democratic logic, the solution to the housing crisis is often sought in large-scale state intervention, and it is no surprise that this point of view is often accompanied by a certain nostalgia for the vigorous “municipal socialism” of interwar Vienna (“Red Vienna”) or Amsterdam (“the Mecca of Housing”). Echoes of this are currently reverberating in the election manifestos of the left-wing parties in Amsterdam. But centralist housing policies, based on top-down planning and infinite space for urban expansion, have historically always received criticism from the Marxist side (“Mass-housing stems from social democratic reformism and pacification politics”) and from the anarchist side (“Mass-housing alienates and deprives residents of the possibility of self-determination and self-government”). On the other hand, advocates of a large-scale and centralist housing system point to the painful similarity between the rise of alternative, small-scale forms of housing and neo-liberal fantasies about the ‘Big Society’ or ‘Participatory Society’. It is a credit to the discussion on the housing commons, that it has led to a focus on such fundamental questions and oppositions within the housing struggle. What are we actually striving for: a democratic reboot of the existing centrally organised public housing system? Or an archipelago of radically egalitarian communities? In what follows, I would like to offer a few personal reflections on this discussion, against the background of the broader struggle for affordable housing in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

First of all, there is a practical issue. The idea that the creation of new housing commons is inversely proportional to the dismantling of the old public facilities seems to me to be a case of wishful thinking. In theory, the 2015 Dutch Housing Act, which is disastrous in most other respects, opened up new possibilities for citizens to initiate self-organized cohousing projects. But unfortunately, there’s a huge gap between theory and praxis. The rules are often unclear, the involved parties (municipalities, housing corporations, developers) not always willing to cooperate, and banks are hesitant to provide the necessary capital. And although some very important initiatives have been launched in recent years, it is also necessary to reflect on the fact that many have been nipped in the bud, or have only been implemented in a diluted form.

In theory, it is all too simple: housing corporations have large chunks of property that they need to sell in order to comply with national and European neoliberal legislation. On the other hand, it is increasingly the case that collectives of tenants present themselves as a interested party to acquire a property listed for sale—often the building they occupy—in order to safeguard it as social property and ensure its affordability. But time and again housing corporations show little willingness to take bids from residents’ collectives seriously, because they know that they can expect a much higher bid from an investment fund.[2] Indeed, investment funds are salivating over the prospect of transferring social housing to an explosive private rental market after purchase of a building. Such ‘worst cases’ need to be taken into consideration, because they reveal that a great deal needs to be done before cooperatives can offer a viable, affordable and accessible alternative to a housing market that is too expensive and a public housing sector does not function properly.

Secondly, I see little point in the current fetishisation of small-scale initiatives. Small-scale-ism is not a sacred principle. Yes, next generation co-housing initiatives can act as an incubator for new forms of collective life and political action. But the ultimate challenge is to invent larger, more robust structures to link and empower small-scale initiatives. This will require a form of upscaling that is not yet possible. What worries me is the coverage rate, so to speak, of the new cooperative-based, grassroots housing schemes. Housing cooperatives—and this is what they have in common with the numerous health insurance, co-working and energy cooperatives that have been established since the crisis—tend to reproduce existing networks, as their recruitment often takes place via informal channels. You know someone, and that person invites you to partake. Needless to say, these are often networks of highly educated, young people with considerable social capital.

Thirdly, we must do away with the idea that co-housing experiments by definition have a beneficial effect on the broader housing struggle.[3] In the best cases, that is true, but in the worst cases, these initiatives are only depoliticized enclaves of residents who have “bought themselves free” and now, above all, want to be left alone. Such projects have no added value for the broader ‘struggle for the city’, precisely because they are not reproductive. I agree with Stuart Hodkinson that we “should ensure that these new spaces of commons actively support existing housing commons and undermine enclosure and accumulation”.[4] Connection therefore seems to me to be a crucial next step, and there are various approaches at home and abroad that could serve as examples.[5]

The crucial question is of course: will cohousing remain the middle class facility that it is today, or can it develop into a valid alternative to state-controlled social housing? Not any time soon, I suspect. This does not mean that we should uncritically eulogize the social housing system as it developed in the post-war welfare state. From the social movements of the twentieth century we have learned that this system were by no means blind to differences in background, gender, class and education. Still, the public housing system that we presently have, however flawed, still has a far greater public reach and potential than an archipelago of loosely connected co-housing initiatives, and therefore is worth defending.

[1] Translations by the author unless stated otherwise.

[2] One recent and much publicized case is the Copekcabana cooperative housing initiative, which tried to acquire 30 social housing units from the Ymere housing corporation in the Van der Pek neighbourhood in Amsterdam-Noord. Copekcabana offered 5.5 million euros for the houses, no small feat for a citizens’ iniative, but this offer was refused because according to the owner it was 35 percent below the market value. The crux of the matter is, of course, that this market value has been artificially inflated in recent years by a steroidal gentrification policy, and that Ymere is anxious to fully capitalize on the colossal “rent gap” that has thus been created. After considerable pressure through the media, a compromise was reached: Ymere remains the owner of the houses, but the Copekabanians are allowed to pay rent collectively.

[3] More generally speaking, we must do away with the idea that ‘urban commons’ or innovative, experimental housing projects are by definition ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive’; the highly successful neo-fascist social center/housing project Casa Pound in Rome is a case in point. See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/22/casapound-italy-mussolini-fascism-mainstream.

[4] Stuart Hodkinson, ‘The return of the housing question’, ephemera 12 (2012) 4, pp. 423-444, 437.

[5] One very interesting example from Germany is the Mietshäuser Syndikat (apartment-house syndicate), which has been active for more than twenty years and comprises 128 housing projects and 17 social initiatives. The Syndikat functions both as a solidarity network and as collective “bank” to invest in projects in order to take them off the real estate market. Each new project thus also strengthens the solidarity infrastructure of which it is a part, making new projects possible, making the infrastructure stronger, and so on. The Amsterdam based organization Vrijcoop is attempting to translate the model of the Mietshäuser Syndikat into a Dutch context.

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Social protectionism

Many years ago, the British artist Beth Richardson moved to the so called ‘Valley’, near Benfeita, Portugal, where she and her husband Kin, a musician and carpenter, built their own house and are now raising their three young daughters. In this beautiful valley, various people, with alternative lifestyles outside of capitalist conventions, are setting up livelihoods away from the city dictated by fast moneymaking. Here, instead of buying a house on a grossly inflated housing market, they build their own houses from scratch. Rather than sending their children to the top-down and institutionalized school system, they attempt to organise their own schooling that conforms to their anthroposophical beliefs. And food is either grown close to home, or bought at the local organic food market. Neighbours, friends and family, all residing in, or near the valley, together have built a community to collectively undertake these social endeavours, while they are as well partaking in various forms of creative collectivity, whereby people transfer their cultural skills and share their cultural capital through for example drawing and painting lessons, pottery classes and concerts.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi has argued that before societies got embedded in a modern state system and market economy, they were characterised by reciprocal and redistributional ‘economic’ relations and the absence of a maximization mentality, based on the social principles of centrality, symmetry and self-sufficiency. According to Polanyi, the pressures of dominant market institutions have led to the emergence of social protectionism, whereby society safeguards itself from the isomorphic forces of the capitalist market. The people in the Valley live accordingly to Polanyi’s statement that the market society is unsustainable, given its destructive nature towards human mentalities and natural resources. Their way of life, marked by reciprocal social relations and the absence of capitalist market structures seems to relate to a ‘third way’ of allocation, outside of the market and the state.

Global linkages

These social and cultural collective arrangements are taking place between a relatively small group of like-minded people located in the Portuguese foothills and mountains, but they stretch much further than a single visit to the valley might suggest. If you would visit Beth’s website you can find, apart from her stunning paintings, the names and locations of the galleries which display and sell her work. Galleries in London and Milan(the Milan gallery shows her work in America and Asia as well) exhibit and offer Beth’s artwork, thereby generating (capitalist) income. While Beth and her family can live a latitudinarian and creative life between the Portuguese Mountains, gallery owners in first-tier/global cities commodify this creativity and sell it on the global art market.

Many people are attracted by the urban, with its presence of always proximate amenities and energetic ways of life. Others, however, feel chased by a constant focus on profit maximization and wasteful manners of consumerism. Some of these people burn out by the constant pressures of capitalism, while others seek an alternative lifestyle far away from the urban landscape. The people near Benfeita seem successful in having set up livelihoods based on local systems of reciprocal exchange that challenge the ‘conventional’ boundaries of capitalist structures of allocation. However, it still appears that to some extent, capitalism and a relation to the urban and global (art) market is inevitable.

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Book hunting at Vangsgaards Antikvariat, Copenhagen

Returning home to Amsterdam after a trip to Copenhagen, I ask myself: was I one of them? Was I one of those tourists my fellow denizens love to hate? My adoptive hometown has become growingly vociferous in its anti-tourism fervour. Attempts to curb some of the most insidious encroachments on its laid-back vibe have been successful: the beer cycles are out; cheese and waffle parlours are next in the line of fire. Over the years, I have redrawn the map of ‘places I avoid on a Saturday’, steering clear of bottlenecks and much frustration. In the meanwhile, weekend guests seem to be popping up more frequently in the sleepy residential neighbourhood where I live.

So as I sat sipping coffee in a small café, hidden away in a basement in Christianshavn in Copenhagen, watching a family get turned away for lack of space, it hit me. Where does the boundary between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ tourist lie? Where does my experience fall within this spectrum? Should I not travel at all? In contemplating these questions, I was reminded of the expression ‘You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic’. Cities that are choking under the weight of tourism have come up with new strategies to diffuse tourists – Venice for instance has called its sustainable tourism plans ‘detourism‘. A way of detoxing the problem areas and stimulating curiosity for more unusual itineraries in the city. I pride myself on being as a detourist-tourist. My tourism experiences feel unique to me and my to interests. I would claim to pursue the authentic, the low-key, the non-commercial. Until I look around and realise others have made the same choice.

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Les Rambles – Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yet, beyond this idyllic image, there is a conflict going on about who gets to use the space, enjoy the scenery, or woo those who pass by. Neighbours complain incessantly about a hospitality sector that has swallowed most of the public space and charge ridiculously high prices, of shops that cater to the tourist alone, and of tourist apartments which drive up rents. Quoting Brecht, Les Rambles is also a place where “beggars beg, thieves steal, and whores whore”. Indeed, as with all public spaces, the boulevard is a space of opportunities for those trying to earn a living outside the system.

Thus, we find a series of stakeholders who intend to use the space to fulfil their own interest. Uses of  Les Rambles can be separated into those which target economic profit (which can, at their turn be divided into formal, such as hospitality and commerce, and informal, begging, busking, criminality…) and those which do not (strolling, flaneuring, circulating, political activities…). The conflict arises when a group of stakeholders achieves a position of power so as to prevent others to use the commons to their interests. As well, and following the foundational texts on the commons (The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin or Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom), an overuse of a common pool resource leads to its destruction.

Conflict over a loaf of bread in Barcelona, Associated Press Berliner Büro, 1939 (Rijksmuseum Netherlands)

Both these aspects can be seen in the reflections by neighbours, who feel they cannot enjoy the atmosphere because of its overuse by tourism or commerce-related stakeholders. In this sense, Les Rambles is a commons as it contains a series of resources, (such as open space, human activity, and built environment) which can be used for many different purposes, from earning a living to socialising or organising a political movement. Hence, several regulations (zoning laws, regulations of acceptable activities in the public spaces…) are put in place so as to reduce such conflicts. What makes a regulation just is a matter of normative ideals. In this piece, I argue that a just distribution should maximise the opportunities of commoners to fulfil their needs without resorting to the market (for instance, by patronising a bar or renting commercial space). Here are four possible criteria to do that.

Managing a commons for social justice

Firstly, at a substantive level, I understand that access to a commons cannot be prevented to any stakeholder except when a certain use, by its intensity or its own nature, prevents others from using it (for instance, covering the entire walking space with terraces thus making non-commercial leisure impossible). This is because commons have a potential of generating material resources for citizens but also for activities of socialisation or political activism, which otherwise would be restricted to those who can own them or pay entry barriers to use them.

Linked to this, the second criteria would be the Rawlsian principle of difference, that is, that the least well-off are not harmed by changes in goods redistribution (in our case, in access to the commons). This presents a problem when the activities of this group are often the first to be prohibited in regulation processes, sometimes with reason (that is, when they entail criminal behaviours such as theft, illegal gambling…), sometimes less so (begging, rough sleeping…). Thus, if there is a public reason –more on that later– for denying uses to the least well-off, measures should be taken at other levels in order to render these uses unnecessary.

A space for political mobilisation – Source: Wikimedia Commons

Thirdly, those who take larger economic profits from the commons, via using them directly or via externalities, such as the “brand power” of the street, ought to have a larger responsibility in curating and conserving the resource. Finally, at a procedural level, in order to achieve the two previous criteria an inclusive and reasoned democratic process is needed. This means that, first, all relevant stakeholders should be included in the process (especially those less likely to do so, i.e. the least well-off), and that arguments should be posed so that other users can understand them and see them as valid, thus promoting a solution that can be considered acceptable by all involved.

This is, of course, but a brief sketch of the problem at hand and of the possible solution. As well, users and stakeholders are permanently changing and thus it is not possible to draw a between those who use the commons and those who do not (for instance, the role of tourists, those who profit on the positive externalities generated by the commons, and the right of all citizens of Barcelona to decide on the public form and planning procedures of their city). This will prevent full compliance with the fourth principle. However, as we have seen, a commons, even if it is not, per se, a cure for all inequalities in our cities, given proper regulation, can be a tool for equality and a generator of economic and social opportunities.

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Notwithstanding the rise of on-line bookselling, “real” bookshops still are important. Not just because of the actual selling of books, but also in creating concrete spaces where people can go to, wander around, look at the covers and the pages of books, get inspired and curious and stumble onto unexpected finds. They are increasingly also third spaces where people meet, drink coffee or have lunch. Culture is indeed capital – a resource on an individual level as Pierre Bourdieu has observed. It, however, also serves as a marker and a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion thus creating urban spaces where people with more or less shared interests can meet and get together. On a city level, we may see the emergence of a mosaic of such specialised third spaces contributing to the creation and reproduction of (sub)cultures.

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It’s high time for time travel! Time travel?! Isn’t that about other dimensions and wormholes? Not anymore! 120 something years after H.G. Wells popularized time travel in his science fiction book The Time Machine, the notion has fully and forcefully entered the realm of urban historians. In most scifi stories, people travel to the future, but traveling back in time may be just as exciting. Who wouldn’t want to find themselves smack in the middle of Golden Age Amsterdam, attending a bullfight at the San Marco in Venice, or visiting bustling fin-de-siècle Paris in the 1920s? In a few years from now, what seemed like science fiction will become (virtual) reality.

As we speak, humanities scholars and computer scientists, as well as professionals in creative industries  and cultural heritage are joining forces to build times machines for these and other European cities. What we call time machines looks less like the car in the 1960 film of The Time Machine, and more like a web of URI’s and algorithms that, for instance through machine learning techniques, allow for scanning, linking, searching, analyzing, and presenting historical information. Digitized information on sites, people, events, businesses, and objects will be linked and represented through maps and 3D models (even 4D once we add the dimension of time!). The local time machines will in the future be linked so that they can reveal in extraordinary detail how trade flows, migration, and knowledge exchange developed over time and across (and beyond) Europe. According to Frederic Kaplan, such a European Time Machine would serve as a Google and Facebook for generations long past (do check out his TED talk!). Kaplan is head of the first Time Machine (Venice), driving force behind the European Time Machine consortium, and director of the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).

Between all the data on Amsterdam that is digitally available and all the local historical expertise, it is certainly possible develop our own local time machine – or so a group of researchers and heritage data experts figured after learning about Kaplan’s project on Venice. This year, they will start for real, as various projects received funding from NWO, CLARIAH, and Stichting Pica. At Huygens ING and University of Amsterdam a project will start on local cultural industries in the Golden Age; a project at the University of Amsterdam will also enable search and linkage functionality on the minutes of the city council; a larger consortium will expand the HisGIS mapping infrastructure of historical maps; and AdamNet has already started to link datasets from its 33 local heritage partners.

One of the cool things about the Time Machine is that it brings all kinds of people and projects together. Collections of images, objects, texts, audio, and video of local archives and museums, as well as historical research data gathering dust on outdated servers, will be connected through linked open data. A major added value of the time machine lies in its potential to connect data from all these different (kinds of) sources and thereby facilitate multidisciplinary research. The Time Machine infrastructure makes it much easier for users to look at, for example, patterns in artistic production and consumption while systematically taking into changes in the broader urban environments. Computer scientists, moreover, are eager to use all our fuzzy historical data to test and train their algorithms to learn to take complexity and uncertainty into account. The linked data should be open and the techniques open source, so that  they can be taken up by creative industry businesses who develop apps and Virtual Reality technology to engage wider audiences in historical narratives and experiences. Tourists may to visit Rembrandt in his studio or witness the transformation of Dam Square. Locals may want to see what their houses looked like before or find out who lived there. And through crowd-sourcing they can even partake in such reconstructions of local histories.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not…) many historians are most skeptical about the digital turn and all this possible time traveling. I believe, however, that time machines should also be on the top of urban history’s wish list. Charles Tilly has described the city as the “privileged site for study of the interaction between large social processes and routines of local life” (Explaining Social Processes, 2015: 161). Times machines provide exactly the kind of infrastructure that can bring this interaction into focus. We can go back and forth from the micro to macro level, as the infrastructure allows us to identify individuals and their life courses, but also reconstruct social networks or mobility patterns. We will be able to zoom out on the level of the entire city or specific neighborhoods or zoom in on streets, houses, or even on the pictures that adorned the walls of a seventeenth-century merchant or a nineteenth-century industrialist.

The Amsterdam Time Machine is coordinated by the research program Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE). All parties have different pieces of the puzzle and something to gain. Not tied or governed by individuals or single institutions such universities, heritage institutions, the collaborations in the Amsterdam Time Machine form their own governance model. The group has been growing and meeting regularly since early 2017, laying the foundations and developing sub-projects. Our network is open-ended, so feel free to join us if you have data, tools or ideas to add to mix!

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