Amateur Cities is a multidisciplinary research and publishing platform for reimagining the politics of urban space. We set research in action and make it public through engaging formats. We enjoy working with partners and are not afraid of challenges. Get in touch.

Publication

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance–Feminist Finance Syllabus

The Feminist Finance Syllabus ponders how to embrace alternative values in economies by focusing on locality, cooperation, and caring. The Syllabus supplements the Feminist Finance Zine titled Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance. It is a result of the Twitter conversations during three launch events of the zine between April and May 2020. This syllabus is […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The Racism Onion

The racism onion has discrimination at its core.  You do not need to be American to be moved by the seismic events that shook cities and mobilized people around the world in response to police brutality against Black people in the US in the summer of 2020. However, if you have ever been subjected to […]
Research

Nearest Neighbour

How to use maker ethic, creative tinkering, and critical thinking to strengthen citizenship? The Nearest Neighbour was a research collaboration between Creative Coding Utrecht, Creative Urban Methods of Utrecht University, and Amateur Cities with the objective of learning how to think critically about the relationship between urban politics of space and technology through hands-on creative […]
Publication

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance–Feminist Finance Zine

The Feminist Finance Zine is a diverse collection of voices introducing you to those ideas about finance that lie outside of our current economic paradigm. It invites you to think about how, individually and together, we could put them into practice. Today we live in a world that is dominated by an economic system that […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance

Amateur Cities and the Institute of Network Cultures are proud to present a feminist finance zine titled ‘Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance’. It is a cooperative future-thinking effort from the MoneyLab network, a collective of artists, designers, researchers, geeks and activists dedicated to the task of experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Public Anagrams

Public Anagrams is based on the manipulation and subversion of mainstream slogans describing well-known public art and urban development paradigms and strategies, such as “smart cities” or “urban regeneration”. By mixing up letters and by turning upside-down the slogans, the artist aims at raising critical awareness about the hidden outcomes of urban development strategies. Slogans […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Monument

Modes of urban authority traditionally seen to be wielded by the State, such as the production of public realms, provision of security, and administration of infrastructure, are now shifting into the hands of private corporations. In line with such erosion of state sovereignty is the emergence of a specific type of capsular urbanism – the […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Military check point in the street, Kimihurura Neighborhood, Kigali, 2017.

Contemporary Urban Paranoia

Why We Should Look into the Surveillance Camera The permanent spatial state of exception in the urban environment is a much-discussed topic in postmodern discourse, yet a critical re-assessment of the contemporary situation is needed. The global proliferation of urban enclaves, and in consequence their ghettoization, indicates an urgent need for social sustainability.1 There is […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The Other City Map

Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identify – a computational city. Cities […]
Article: Critical Imagination

From Exclusion to Autonomy: Publishing as a Spatializing Act

Why we should publish even more. The current and potential role of publishingPublishing, understood as a process of ‘making a public’1 that informs a ‘capacity to act’,2 has the potential to develop as an institutionalizing means, an interface for connecting people with different backgrounds, and as a way to relate with each other. It can […]
Research

Feminist Economies Collective

We create contexts to break the crisis of imagination in capitalist realism. Together with others, we imagine futures, in which shared values are no longer primarily appropriated for profit and accumulation of wealth but open up new perspectives on economic realities. Through this process, we build fragments of new worlds based on feminist values, facilitating […]
Research
Making Public identity by Loes Claessens

Making Public

How can independent publishers manage speed, quality, and positioning to better respond to contemporary urgencies? Making Public was a two-year-long research project led by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with 1001 Publishers, Amateur Cities, Amsterdam University Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Hackers & Designers, Mind Design, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, […]
Publication
Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing cover

Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing

Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to publishers in the cultural and research domains to conceive, produce, and position their contents in an urgent way? Revolving around the key notions of relations, trust, and remediation Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing presents methods and prototypes that counter the […]
Publication
Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam cover.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Five manifestos by Rotterdam’s architects. Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam publication emerged as a follow-up to the exhibition under the same title organized by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. The publication includes five short manifestos on the most pressing issues for the city accompanied by […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Bottom-up Turned Inside Out

Decision-making in urban development today isn’t defined by the needs of empowered citizens but by two mutually supporting mechanisms: big corporate interests and retreating governments. Rather than a political vision of how life in cities ought to be organized, contemporary planning resembles a managerial task that coordinates flows of money, materials, people, and information. Paradoxically, […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The City as Advertising

Anyone interested in getting a first-hand experience of the dynamics behind the transformation of global cities, should pay a visit to one of the biggest real estate exhibitions in the world – the MIPIM in Cannes. Every year, this event gathers ‘the most influential international property players’ for four days of ‘networking, learning and transaction’, […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Social media faces

Today there is a social network for everything. There is one for sharing lol cat memes, another for checking out your friends’ party photos and one for posting latest CV updates. Sometimes, we put on our serious face for a skype interview and other times we publicly rant about a delayed flight using an angry […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
The White House by Ryan Mendoza

The White House

Ten years after the onset of the housing crisis, Detroit is still afflicted with emptiness and blight that it left behind. Ryan Mendoza preserved this part of American history by bringing an abandoned single family house around the world. What if we could make places so telling about the inglorious urban histories more prominent? Should […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Microbial Money – Stock Analysis

The current finance and banking system is often considered unchangeable and uncontrollable. It is often mystified and presented as having a life on its own. Could other ways of looking at finance help us see the flaws that rule it, independently of the form it takes? What if we imagined money as living organisms? What […]
Research
Letters to the Mayor Rotterdam. Photo: Petra van der Ree. Courtesy of Nieuwe Instituut.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Our Letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam. The exhibition ‘Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam’ is a result of a collaboration on the theme of ‘City Forces’ between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. As a part of this project, 66 architects and urbanists wrote 46 letters to the Mayor […]