Partnership
Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute)
AMS Institute is an internationally leading institute where talent is educated and engineers, designers, and both natural and social scientists jointly develop and valorise integrated metropolitan solutions. The mission of AMS Institute is to develop a deep understanding of the city – sense the city – to design solutions for its challenges, and integrate these into the city of Amsterdam. This is done through three main activities: education, research & valorisation, and data.
Together with Delft University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Wageningen University & Research is the academic heart of AMS Institute. We closely collaborate on research assignments, education opportunities and establishing a data platform.
News about AMS projects
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The City of Amsterdam and AMS Institute take an important step in continuing partnership
- Last Thursday, June 15, the Mayor of Amsterdam (Femke Halsema) and the Presidents of the Executive Boards of Wageningen University & Research (Sjoukje Heimovaara) and TU Delft (Tim van der Hagen) visited AMS Institute. The visit revolved around the signing of the letter of intent between the City of Amsterdam, TU Delft (TUD) and Wageningen University & Research (WUR) for the next phase of AMS Institute. -
Making urban food production circular
- This week, a project was launched that focuses on making urban food production circular: 'Circular Urban Food Production, safe by design'. Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR) is the driving force behind the project and the Municipality of Amsterdam is one of the partners. -
Bio-based construction getting into gear: from a Wageningen lab to practical application in Amsterdam
- Circular and bio-based building materials are gaining ground. Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) are joining forces in the field of bio-based construction. Together, WUR and AMS Institute (which WUR is a founding partner of) have set up several collaborative projects in order to accelerate the pace of bringing construction innovations, like bio-based asphalt, from the lab into practice and to test them in public space. This is a crucial stage in the innovation process before scaling up becomes possible. -
A green city for everyone
- How can we ensure that all inhabitants benefit from nature in the city? Various researchers of Wageningen University & Research are seeking to answer this question. ‘We want as many people as possible to benefit from green cities, which is why the social aspect must feature high on the agenda of climate adaptation and urban nature projects.’ -
Social media helps to map tourist flows in overrun cities
- Tourism has always been considered a profitable activity. However, over-tourism can cause problems, such as traffic jams on narrow roads. In addition, the needs of, local property tenants may not be met due to the demand for holiday property rentals, and tourists may not be able to visit and view landmarks because of the crowds. Therefore, innovative solutions need to be developed to deal with and manage these tourist flows. -
Building blocks for a self-sufficient metropolitan food system
- In the last decades, more and more local stakeholders have recognized the need for local food policies. They want to increase the proportion of consumed food that is produced and processed in the direct surroundings of their cities and wish to diminish the ecological footprint of urban food consumption, or guarantee the quality of the food. At the same time, there is too little land for agricultural production available in metropolitan areas to meet consumer demand. It is a challenge to optimally organize a food system for the production, processing and distribution of healthy food. -
Weather balloons measure heat difference city and countryside
- Researchers of Wageningen University & Research and Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) launched every two hours weather balloons from the Dam in Amsterdam on Wednesday 24 July during 24 hours. This in support of better understanding urban climate. The weather balloons measured the height up to which heat in the city differs from temperatures outside the city. The last time vertical measurements were ever taken, was by helicopter above New York in the 1960s. -
Essay book Feeding the City with contributions by WUR
- On 6 December 2018, the essay book ‘Feeding the city’ was presented. This book contains a wide range of future perspectives on the relation between urban areas, rural areas and food production. Martin Scholten, Sigrid Wertheim-Heck and Ron Methorst were among the contributors, and the preface was written by Louise O. Fresco. The English translation is now available. -
Open Bajes plan wins international design competition for Bijlmerbajes
- The Open Bajes plan is the winner of the international competition Design the Ultimate Urban Greenhouse - a plan for the 21st-century redevelopment of the Bijlmerbajes former prison in Amsterdam. The winning design by the GreenWURks team from Wageningen comprises a sustainable green oasis for the local production of vegetables, run mainly by local residents. -
Renzo Akkerman in AMS Science for the City event
- How do we feed the increasingly car-free, yet growing city of Amsterdam? And more specifically, what kind of data-driven approaches do we have to look at the related logistics challenges? And what data would we actually need to support decisions related to food supply chains in metropolitan areas?
These were some of the questions that were addressed in a recent event in Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam. Researchers from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the University of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam, as well as Renzo Akkerman from the Operations Research and Logistics group, presented their views on the topic of food-proof cities and evidence-based food systems.
After these presentations, participants of the event discussed several specific topics in groups, especially focusing on the kind of data that would be required to support more intelligent decision-making in urban food systems.
AMS Institute: how it came into being
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New Institute for Urban Problems - Engineers in Amsterdam
- Researchers in Amsterdam have started mapping out the city’s metabolism. In the new Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan Solutions, they hope to find solutions to metropolitan problems related to energy, water, waste, food and traffic. -
Establishment of Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) moves a step closer
- The Amsterdam City Executive and the Executive Boards of TU Delft and Wageningen University & Research have reached agreement on the establishment of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), which will specialise in applied urban technology and design.
Projects of Wageningen University & Research in AMS Institute
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Flagship 4: Circularity by Design
- Within the Flagship project Circularity by Design, we apply (re)design principles to develop a sustainable agrifood system within the Amsterdam metropolitan region. We test and develop different instruments in various Living Labs, to achieve high-quality reuse of food (waste) streams. In this project, we collaborate with the AMS institute, 12 different disciplines within WUR, and several local partners in Amsterdam. -
Metropolitan Solutions: the Living Labs approach
- Complex societal challenges in metropolitan regions demand integral solutions to guarantee quality of life. In a Living Lab approach academic, societal and business based knowledge is integrated to create integral solutions. -
Towards Water Smart Cities
- Cities around the world face great challenges with water. We have to rethink the way we deal with water in our cities and need to (re)design cities from drained cities to green, resilient and circular cities, so called Water-Smart Cities. -
Healing Gardens
- We are testing to what extent gardening can help (former) cancer patients meeting the norms of physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake, and to what extent gardening in a group can function as a form of social support. -
The Feeding City
- The Feeding City — a collaborative research programme between the AMS Institute, municipality of Almere, province of Flevoland and Aeres University of Applied Sciences — is embedded on the Flevo Campus, thus facilitating opportunities for research, education and entrepreneurship relating to the ‘Food and the City’ theme. The programme objective is to innovate the urban food system by working closely with the business community, institutions and residents from the city and the surrounding region. -
Green Junkie
- Amsterdam, as many other cities, suffers from high particulate concentrations which have a negative impact on the air quality and the health of citizens. In this project we will analyse the effect on the particulate concentration of the special developed plant Green Junkie. -
Research programme: The urban Nexus of food, water, energy and the environment
- This research programme at ENP aims to study the connections and trade-offs between the provisioning of water, energy and food in urban areas. We conceptualize this interdependence as the urban Nexus. -
Smart Urban Retrofitting of Housing Estates in China and the Netherlands
- Urban retrofitting, the redesign of buildings to increase energy performance, is a key policy for the global energy transition. The energy use in domestic practices that are affected by urban retrofitting are central in this project, next to the identification of the (new) social relations amongst and between households and housing and energy providers that come along with them. The project entails a comparative multiple case study of smart urban retrofitting projects in the Netherlands and China. Relevant stakeholders: residents, project initiators, local authorities, housing corporations, and grid operators will be interrogated on the set up, governance and implementation of these projects in Amsterdam and in Mianyang. -
The Urban Nexus of the Environmental Flows of Water, Energy and Food
- Cities are becoming increasingly more populated and rapid urbanization is taking place all around the world. This requires larger supplies of input and output resources to sustain human and urban needs. Water, Energy and Food (WEF) have long been acknowledged as essential inputs to feed cities. -
PhD I Voskamp - Systemic understanding of Urban Water and Energy flows for the design of Green Blue Infrastructure
- The PhD research of Ilse Voskamp builds upon the AMS Urban Pulse and is co-supervised by Sven Stremke of the Landscape Architecture Chair Group, Wageningen UR. The other supervisors involved are Jan Vreeburg and Huub Rijnaarts (promotor) of the sub-department of Environmental Technology, Wageningen UR. In this PhD research, a model will be developed that can provide insight in a cities resource flows, to inform resource efficient design of our cities.