Who makes the city? Across the globe, citizens, governments, private actors and academics are witnessing a multiplicity of approaches to urban development in their cities. Top-down planning, bottom-up grassroots movements and entrepreneurial motivations collide, revealing conflicts, existing power relations and opportunities for cooperation. Who will make the city of the future? Dynamic, complex and ever changing, this question begs to be answered now more than ever.
The students of the Research Master Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam explored this question at the ‘Who Makes the City? Learning from Global Cases’ symposium on June 2nd 2015. The symposium was partly based on the thesis research that students have done in Amsterdam and cities around the world, ranging from Santiago to Hong Kong and from Berlin to Vancouver.
Along with this symposium we present you with our publication series on The Proto City, published between May and August 2015. We would like to invite you to read the photo essays and academic articles by the Research Master students, plus contributions by external international urban academics and professionals. In this publication series, you will find a compilation of our most striking reflections on a wide variety of urban environments and phenomena. These range from drinking craft beer in Boston to cycling in Mexico, confronting people with Santiago’s mobility issues and digging into the housing market and rapid urban transformations in Hong Kong.
We have chosen to share our thoughts on the urban developments that we have been researching around the world in 2014 and 2015 in two different formats. On the one hand, we present a more in-depth approach to urban issues in academic essays, whilst on the other hand photo essays tell their story through photographs of the writer’s experiences in various cities around the world. In both formats we aim to draw a link between academic perspectives and our experience as urban citizens.
We hope you enjoy reading these impressions and reflections of urban phenomena across the world, and look forward to receiving input drawn from your own experiences: feel free to join the debate online on the Proto City!