Inside Amsterdam's efforts to become a smart city

January 25, 2015 1:06 AM

Amsterdam wants to be smarter than you. And it’s well on its way. The Netherlands capital is on a mission to turn itself into the smartest city in the world. Through a collaboration with government officials, private companies including telecom giant KPN, and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the city is quickly becoming a futuristic tech hub.
posted by ellieBOA (14 comments total)

Well, it's got a sane social policy (safety net, healthcare, inexpensive higher education, rehabilitation based justice system, inclusion of GLBT, etc.) which gives it a big head start. It's much lower risk to start a new company there, because you don't need to worry about bankruptcy if your kid gets sick.

Educated population, sane and humane laws, functional government (unlike California, for example), sounds like a good bet.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:44 AM on January 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

In some ways the open source movement owes its current fruition to Amsterdam; Andrew Tanenbaum, author of Minix (the OS which served as the inspiration for Linux), is faculty emeritus at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:38 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

Is it enough to note that there has been a long history of friction between Linux and Minix supporters, and not go any further down that flaming rabbit hole?
posted by benito.strauss at 5:52 AM on January 25, 2015

It's much lower risk to start a new company there, because you don't need to worry about bankruptcy if your kid gets sick.

Intuitively I would very much agree (and I know two people who were able to quit their jobs and start new businesses thanks to Obamacare), though I wonder how that plays out on the aggregate level. Not just the raw percentages of people starting businesses, but if that level of security results in people choosing to start riskier businesses in place of safer bets, for example.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:15 AM on January 25, 2015

Well, it's got a sane social policy (safety net, healthcare, inexpensive higher education, rehabilitation based justice system, inclusion of GLBT, etc.)...Educated population, sane and humane laws, functional government...

... and systematic discrimination against a discontented Muslim minority amounting to 13% of the population...
posted by Segundus at 6:52 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

...yeah I was planning on mentioning that, a non-integrated and radicalized Muslim minority is the one hiccup here. I don't have an answer to that, or why the US doesn't have the same problem. Maybe it's easier to become ( i.e. envision oneself) 'American' than 'Dutch' because of our country's 'nation of immigrants' heritage? Or it could just be that it's difficult to get to the US in the first place, due to our immigration policy?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:06 AM on January 25, 2015

... a non-integrated and radicalized Muslim minority is the one hiccup here.

Hopefully Amsterdam's long history of radical / countercultural resistance is another. Dutch or not, the smart city is inescapably a panopticon.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:24 AM on January 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

The Netherlands is also flat. Really, really, flat. I thought it seemed like the Dutch had their act together, and that it would be a cool place to live. Until I flew in there and saw what the terrain looked like. Flat.
posted by Windopaene at 8:11 AM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

leotrotsky, I don't know that I would characterize Muslims in the Netherlands as less integrated or more radicalized than other Western European countries? I wouldn't say that this would impede innovation in Amsterdam.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:18 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Where the heck did the MINIX detour come from? This article is about the living lab and open (not the same as open-source) models at play in Amsterdam. WAAG have a fab lab in a castle in the middle of the red light district. The innovation here comes from brokering between communities, academia and industry, and it's very much a pan-EU success story. CitySDK is a great idea, a civic-funded platform that brings together the disparate open data sources that describe the urban environment and offer a single, standardised API to interrogate them - and it's not owned by google, HP, Cisco or IBM. Smart cities and smart citizens come hand-in-hand.
posted by davemee at 8:58 AM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the Minix comment seems weird and it's not "friction" but it was a debate about kernel structure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate#Aftermath
posted by I-baLL at 9:21 AM on January 25, 2015

I don't know about more or less radicalized since I don't have a good basis for comparison. What I do know is that I was warned, several times and from several different sources, that public identification of myself as a Jew could result in me being singled out for confrontation or even attack. This leads me to suspect that it's a genuine issue.
posted by 1adam12 at 10:35 AM on January 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

I know two people who were able to quit their jobs and start new businesses thanks to Obamacare

They would appear to be the exception
posted by IndigoJones at 4:36 PM on January 25, 2015

That link by ryanshepard is quite insightful.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 10:30 PM on January 25, 2015