Together – Strategies on How to Make the City of Tomorrow



Around the world, we see an increased awareness that in order to tackle challenges of that scale, we need to work together.

Our cities today are facing many urban challenges. They may arise from the continuous growth of our cities, climate change or the fact we have reached the limits of non-renewable resources. Wider societal dynamics such as globalisation, migration, and digitisation affect changes in the urban economy, the social composition of neighbourhoods and the way we work.

We set the stage for the five-day WeMakeThe.City festival and through a variety of lenses we will be looking at approaches that successfully experimented with the collaboration between multiple stakeholders. We will learn how this is not just a strategy to solve problems but a way to pursue innovation.

Amsterdam has a rich history of multi-stakeholder approaches, initially meant to protect the city from being flooded by the high sea level. But over time, this has resulted in a fertile ground for collaboration, now known as the Amsterdam Approach. In 2016 Amsterdam won the Innovation Capital of Europe award, because of its urban innovation ecosystem which consists of stakeholders from public, private and non-profit sectors, working together to make the city better. Collaboration pays off and makes our future cities more resilient, successful and inclusive.