Amsterdam as a Lab?
An interview series on producing knowledge on and from the city
In urban studies circles, we often come across the idea of cities as “laboratories”. In the recently launched Amsterdam PhD Programme, for instance, the city is understood as an unruly living rather than a sterilised and controlled environment, making it a generative site of investigation. Participation in an “Urban Lab”, a research apprenticeship led by a UvA researcher, has also long been a requirement of our Research Master’s in Urban Studies.
For their apprenticeship, students Lies Domen and Nik Waldram grappled with the very notion of “Amsterdam as a lab”, in long-form interviews with differently positioned urban thinkers. In the wake of the city’s 750th anniversary, their conversations engaged situated and changing experiences of producing knowledge about Amsterdam. They also explored what it means to investigate other urban environments from Amsterdam, through the city’s institutional and intellectual infrastructures.
“We tried to explore these questions from a variety of perspectives by interviewing people with very different relationships to Amsterdam. Some are deeply embedded in Amsterdam itself, in its neighbourhoods, institutions, histories, and political struggles. Others work from Amsterdam as a node within wider urban networks, drawing on the resources that converge in the city to think through places such as Accra, Hong Kong, or elsewhere. Together, these interviews approach Amsterdam as research site and in terms of the knowledge production infrastructures it provides.” – Lies Domen and Nik Waldram, students of the Research Master’s in Urban Studies (2025-2027)
Explore the first interviews in the series through the links below:
- Thinking from the periphery and envisioning urban futures otherwise, with Julie Ren (Urban Geographies, University of Amsterdam)
- From smooth cities to porous urban horizons, with René Boer (Loom - practice for cultural transformation)
About the interviewers
Lies Domen has a background in sustainability studies and is currently pursuing a Research Master’s in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, with particular interest in urban political ecology. She works on energy poverty and social housing renovation for the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) research project ‘JUST-PEPP’. She is currently based in Brussels, where she studies urban waste metabolisms.
As a Research Master’s in Urban Studies student, Nik Waldram is interested in urban economies and cultures, and in understanding how others learn and write about them. These interests expand into his work on transdisciplinary education and circus arts. His current research engages the urban geographies of art creation spaces in Hong Kong and Amsterdam.