For the January edition of Time Out (magazine) Amsterdam our office for cultural innovation Non-fiction was asked to give a vision of the city in the year 2020, together with KesselsKramer, LAgroup, Concrete and Benthem Crouwel. Since we discard the idea of a blueprint for the city of the future and strongly believe in the power of co-creation and collaboration, we invited a few dozen of people we know and/or admire to to speculate on the future of the city (of Amsterdam). By juxtaposing perspectives from both in- and outsiders and by combining utopian visions, critical reflections, personal fantasies and (more) mundane thoughts, we wanted to provide a kaleidoscopic view of the future of the Dutch capital.

We had been given a two-page spread (basically two A4 pages) to present our vision of the future and in order to maximise the number of ideas we invited our friends and colleagues across the globe to answer a simple question: “What will you be doing in Amsterdam in 2020?”, in 140 characters. A Twitter-message from the future. As we are moving into the next decade, Twitter is at the very front of communications innovations, and gathering all these tweets into a tweetdeck gives a recognizable and playful collaborative vision of the city (of Amsterdam) in 10 years.

The final result (thanks to our buddies at Vandejong) is a densely packed information-grid, giving an overview of 36 seemingly unrelated opinions and doom scenarios. But upon closer inspection fascinating patterns appear: our participants think that Amsterdam eventually will merge into a bigger metropolitan area, that it will suffer severe flooding, that the historic city centre will become an abandoned open-air museum and that the outskirts will become the new hubs of urban vitality and (re-)development.

In contrast, there are also people who hold a unique believe that by 2020 the city will be either connected to Utrecht by a high speed electro-magnet train, will still lack a new art museum or subway line, or simply will be and stay the ‘same old, same old’.

The magazine just hit the stores, so check it out or contact us if you wish to receive a copy! And please join us for the ‘2020 vision’ event at De Verdieping on Thursday 28 January at 8 pm in collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam, bringing together the contributors and other visionaries to discuss the propability of our predictions…

We wish to thank all the contributors and the people who are still sending us their submissions. We are very happy with the outcome of this collaborative effort. In the new year we will continu this ‘crowdsourced’ investigation into the future potentials and failures of a complex city.

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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.

'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.