LEARNING EXPEDITION IN AMSTERDAM

As a city full of citizens deeply believing in European culture and values, Amsterdam chose to foster solutions and ideas meant to help societies moving towards a more sustainable and inclusive development. As a result, Amsterdam now is one of the cities with the largest number of social enterprises. To accelerate and encourage social entrepreneurship, the city’s administration launched triennal plans since 2015 that establish concrete objectives in health, education, employment and sustainability. These objectives are to be solved by citizens in the way they want, promoting therefore uniqueness and innovation state of mind. 

With a National Environmental Policy Plan in place for more than 20 years and more bikes than people, the Netherlands sustainable culture makes it a leader in new innovations and policies to make transportation, energy and industry more sustainable. 

The Netherlands is ranked 2nd best country for its positive contribution to humanity (Country Good Index), after Finland, scoring particularly well on Culture, and Prosperity and Equality.

Early understanding how data could be used to improve life in society, Amsterdam has been a pioneer in data management, as it has made its City Data open source. This initiative has enabled entrepreneurs to tap into them and develop innovative solutions to improve life and functioning of Amsterdam. The Dutch capital administration has for example set up a list of challenges the city faces and a privileged access to data to any startups willing to solve through the Social Urban Data Lab, which gathers all the knowledge about the citizens. 

Right after the Paris Agreement in 2015, Amsterdam has been the first city in the world to conduct a study on the ability to create a circular economy inside the city. This study helped to put in place an ambitious plan fixing the objective of reducing by 50% the use of primary raw materials by 2030 and reaching a 100% circular economy by 2050. Following that plan, the number of projects has skyrocketed making Amsterdam a true urban lab. 

Amsterdam is known to be the most connected city in all of Europe, through its dense network of infrastructures, and intermodal platforms. This makes the Dutch capital a perfect mobility lab where to test different kinds of new mobility services and new vehicles. It already is the city with the highest density of public EV charging stations and is on track to be emissions-free by 2025. In order to achieve this ambitious objective, many startups like ViaVan, Felyx and Roboat are promoting Mobility-as-a-Service in order to better match supply and demand in a more sustainable way.