Joachim MeerkerkPakhuis de Zwijgerjoachim@dezwijger.nlS+RO 2016/03 21ThemaUrban AgendaThe (Im)Pact of AmsterdamThe complex challenges of our timedemand innovative solutions and aboveall, a new way of working. The city ofthe future does not originate from ablueprint on a designer's table or theexecutive's office. Urgent issues suchas climate change, increasing povertyand inequality, housing, or food supplydemand an approach characterised byexperimentation and integrated colla-boration, rooted in ownership and theparticipation of the city's users. The(Im)Pact of Amsterdam document is aCity Makers' call for co-creating thecity. But how can we achieve this?From 27 to 30 May 600 City Makersfrom 120 European cities assembled inAmsterdam for the New Europe CityMakers Summit. City Makers are thepioneers who are exploring a new wayof making the city. They are driven by a`do mentality' and often find their mo-tivation in existing systems that havebecome bogged down. City MakersThe (Im)Pact ofAmsterdamA City Makers' callfor co-creationand new governancestructureswant to do things differently becausethere is room for improvement. CityMakers can be found everywhere Theyare the active citizens working in theirown neighbourhoods improving thequality of life, or working with theirneighbours to form a community. Theyset up energy cooperatives, communitygardens or care initiatives. They arealso the architects and developers whobegin their design process by forming acommunity of end users. Together theydesign, construct and develop buildingsand areas using a cooperative approa-ch, tailored to people's needs. They arealso the civil servants and politicianswho base the policy that they deve-lop on participatory decision-making,transparency, open data and, aboveall, confidence in the strength of theirpartners in the city.The City Makers Summit is part of theCity Makers Agenda collaboration. CityMakers frequently work locally >>Acknowledge the vital role that City Makers playin stimulating social innovation. They are pursuing ini-tiatives that create innovative, resilient, inclusive, eco-nomically-flourishing and inspiring neighbourhoods.Co-create the city with a multiplicity of stakehol-ders: City Makers and social innovators, businesses,civil society organisations, knowledge institutions, andpublic authorities.Create a level playing field that allows for the sta-keholders in the Quintuple Helix to contribute accor-ding to competences and fitting roles - being carefulnot to confuse citizen participation with consultationor pseudo-politics.Experiment as a default for city-making. Allow forand support initiatives that emerge out of the effortsof City Makers, secure the translation into knowledgeand know-how and transmit this to new governancemodels and more participatory and co-creative pro-cesses.Shift focus from best practice to best process andrecognise the contextual differen ces from which initi-atives emerge. Be cautious with upscaling and repli-cation, but be curious to learn and implement lessonslearnt. Allow for diversity in many ways.Include everyone. Allow for a reinterpretation andredesign of regulatory frameworks for the protectionof the common good, such as the principle of equality,along lines of community, diversity and inclusion ra-ther than individual freedom and uniformity. Allowinginitiatives to make a difference, but calling upon theresponsibility of the initiators to be open and inclusive.Pool and provide access to underused resourcesin terms of physical buildings, natural resources andenergy, public space, and economic and social capital.Open up and give access to information and dataas prerequisites for changing processes of decision-making, budgeting and governance.22 2016/03 S+ROThemaUrban AgendaThe (Im)Pact of AmsterdamProvide access to finance, public procurementprocedures and support networks for alternative andcommunity financing.Facilitate local and inter-local learning networksand online and offline platforms where know-howand practices are exchanged and co-creation can beexperimented with.Assess impact in an integrated manner by takinginto account multiple value schemes where economic,social, environmental, societal and cultural values canbe carefully balanced.Learn in practice. Dare to question existing alloca-tion of roles and interests and allow for the flexibilityto change. Adapt the rules where sets of regulationsno longer fit current needs and challenges, rethinklegal forms and desirable scale.Connect to City Makers' initiatives and coope-rate in prioritising and developing policy and politicalagendas and use subsidiarity as a leading principle indecision making.Dare to prioritise and diverge on the basis of addedsocietal value.Redesign democracy to allow for more direct,inclusive and tailor-made decision-making and acommons-based public domain.The (Im)Pact of Amsterdam is a living document,we seek your input to help it grow. Please discuss,contribute, rethink and redefine its principles. Shareupdates, questions and comments with us on fb.com/necitiesintransition or via Twitter: @cityembassies.dezwijger.nlstedeninstransitie.nlcitiesintransition.euThe (Im)Pact of AmsterdamS+RO 2016/03 23ThemaUrban AgendaThe (Im)Pact of Amsterdamand autonomously. Their strengthlies in taking initiative and creativityas their basis and consequently theirwork is also context dependent. ButCity Makers are, by nature, inclined toseek each other out so as to affirm thatthey are not lone pioneers, or to gaininspiration. The City Makers Agendaenables us to connect City Makers onthree levels. Firstly, this entails orga-nising the meeting in order to form thenetwork that enables City Makers tomeet and interact and profile themsel-ves as a movement. Secondly, the CityMakers Agenda focuses on learningfrom each other. We organise specifictimes or online platforms for sharingknowledge and experience, but we alsoorganise practical support by involvingstudents and using their brainpowerand energy, for example. The third ob-jective of the City Makers Agenda is towork together to gain recognition andsupport for the work of City Makers.Gaining recognition as a collective con-solidates the position of City Makers inthe public domain.In order to realise this last objective,during the City Makers Summit, theCity Makers presented the (Im)Pact ofAmsterdam document. This documentwas formulated in response to thePact of Amsterdam that, as the UrbanAgenda for the EU, was ratified by thegovernments of all EU member statesin the same long weekend. The (Im)Pactof Amsterdam was presented duringthe official session of the Europeanministers responsible for Urban Policyas a guideline or call to co-create socialinnovation and liveable cities.The (Im)Pact of Amsterdam sends outan interesting signal. City Makers areparticularly aware of the urgency ofthe problems facing cities. They are`hands on' people who prefer devisingpractical solutions for complex pro-blems. But what is exceptional thesedays is that these practical solutionsrequire a systematic change. Climatechange, for example, cannot be solvedby simply focusing on a number oftechnological solutions. It requiresswitching to circular and coopera-tive thinking, but the way in whichwe build our cities is still subject to alinear decision-making chain in whichcompetition is more important thancollaboration. It requires different wor-king methods and City Makers put thisinto practice. They manifest themsel-ves as a shoot on the tree of this newapproach, but recognise at the sametime their dependence on institutionsthat are also changing. In the (Im)Pactof Amsterdam the City Makers statein fifteen points what we need to do toachieve this innovation. These, howe-ver, are not concrete policies that cansimply be implemented as they stand.They need to be developed in co-crea-tion and that is why the pact is mainlya call to experiment together and to dothis simultaneously on the differentlevels of realisation and governance.In Bologna we find an instructiveexample of how to shape that process.The Laboratory for the Governance ofthe Commons (LabGov) led by DirectorChristian Iaione has gained wide expe-rience with the Co-City protocol in re-cent years by applying this in associa-tion with the quintuple helix innovationmodel: social innovators, enterprises,civil society and civil society organisa-tions, authorities and knowledge insti-tutions. LabGov actively searches forplaces in the city where social initia-tives have arisen to give shape to publicneeds, for example by laying out parksand maintaining them, or transformingpublic squares into meeting places withmarkets. With these kinds of concretepractices the laboratory, set up bythe LUISS university in Rome, bringstogether various stakeholders fromthe quintuple helix in co-creation towork on (1) realising those practices, (2)converting that experience into know-ledge, (3) translating that knowledgeinto policy, laws and regulations and (4)testing it by prototyping. The processis cyclical. It is a continuous experimentin which the development of practicalsolutions for today's complex problemsgoes hand in hand with developing newgovernance structures that are essen-tial for the success and sustainabilityof those solutions.On the initiative of Pakhuis de Zwijger,a coalition - comprising educationalestablishments and the municipa-lity ? is being formed in Amsterdam incollaboration with Christian Iaione toestablish a LabGov Amsterdam that willexamine whether this innovative prac-tice can also be fruitful within a Dutchcontext. More generally we want to callfor the initiation of more of this kind ofexperimentation, for space to be provi-ded for it, and for active participation.The social challenges of our time areextremely pressing. We should wasteno time in getting started.Yet we ne-vertheless must invest time and energyin changing governance structures,because these changes are a pre-con-dition to finding adequate solutions forthese same major issues. This systemchange should not become a systemdiscussion, but a social experiment towhich all stakeholders contribute. It isnot merely an administrative problem,but a problem involving the connectionbetween the administrative realityand the social reality. The systemchange must be entrenched in practice,precisely so as to make that practicepossible. At the same time, it shouldbe geared towards making the lessonslearnt tangible and accessible for otherpractices. Joachim Meerkerk is a strategist andprogramme maker at Pakhuis de Zwijger? the Amsterdam platform for innova-tion with daily meetings on bottom-upinitiatives, the new government andurban development. As a philosopher andcreative thinker Joachim is interestedin democracy, citizenship and the publicdomain.