Time Out Future City Special: A collaborative vision of Amsterdam in 2020

Peter Cook, Plug-in City Study – Overhead view, 1964 (Archigram)

Peter Cook, 'Plug-in City' Study – Overhead view, 1964 (Archigram)

In little more than a month we will be millennial teenagers. The nameless decade of the ‘noughties’ will have passed, and the ‘tens’ will give us renewed inspiration and wonder for yet another future. The Amsterdam branch of the international city periodical Time Out has invited architects, designers and thinkers to envision Amsterdam at the end of the next decade in their Future City special in January. A group of five agencies have been invited, amongst them renowned architects Benthem Crouwel and superstar advertisement agency KesselsKramer. We are very honored and exicited that Non-fiction is one of these five.

If you are a follower of our activities (if you are, thank you!; if you are not, welcome!) you will know by now that we like to do things collaboratively. This is what we have been doing at De Verdieping and Castrum Peregrini in the past year, and this is what we will do at Kasteel Duivenvoorde a.o. in the coming year. For the article on Amsterdam in 2020, we would like to continue on this path and invite you to contribute. Non-fiction’s entry to the Future City special should be how cities themselves will be in the future: networked and participatory.

bigcloud.png

'The Cloud', proposal by Carlo Ratti et al. for the London 2012 Olympic Games

How does it work?
Well, thinking about Amsterdam in 2020 in 2009, we would like to keep it 2009. We would like to ask you to put your vision of the future of Amsterdam into 140 characters. One tweet. That is all. You can post it on Twitter (we are looking for keywords ‘future’ ‘Amsterdam’ ’2020′), or just place a comment in the thread below. The deadline will be 27 November, since we have to hand in the final design by 1 December.

It is our ambition to use all of the contributions for the magazine, but the last time Michiel put something on Twitter it got picked up by Richard Florida, so we are taking precautions this time. Maybe someone can come up with some kind of engine to visualise all entries that we can show in the exhibition (yes, there will be an exhibition too, we forget to tell you). In the end, it depends on the amount of entries and the final design how many fit in the printed article.

That is it. Simple as that. We hope you will join us in this effort to think about the future of Amsterdam. We look forward to your contributions, and we thank you in advance for your support.