Report from the Scholars United for a Sustainable Amsterdam (SUSA) Conference

During 2021, Scholars United for a Sustainable Amsterdam (SUSA) brought together Amsterdam’s academics to help Amsterdam realise its ambition to align with the model of donut economics. Amsterdam’s citizens shared stories about obstacles standing in the way of more sustainable ways of living or doing business. The goal of the collection of these stories was to get a first impression of the most important problems perceived by Amsterdam’s citizens in realizing the Doughnut Economy. During the SUSA conference, four interdisciplinary teams of academics shared their ideas on the topics of ‘A bottom-up city’, ‘Rethinking Garbage’, ‘Measurability’, and ‘Flipping the donut’.

On 1 December, around 30 people joined us in person in the Doelenzaal at the University of Amsterdam, for the SUSA conference. Moreover, there were also around 70 people who attended the conference via Zoom. The day started with an introduction by André Nollkaemper, dean of the Amsterdam Law School, who emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary work on issues like sustainability. After that, we listened  to Kate Raworth, author of the book Doughnut Economics, who gave an inspiring presentation on how the Doughnut Economy has the potential to make Amsterdam’s citizens thrive within their natural habitat, while respecting the wellbeing of people worldwide and the health of the planet. You can listen to the recording of Kate Raworth’s keynote here.

After this inspiring start of the day, the four interdisciplinary teams presented their ideas on how to make Amsterdam more sustainable. First of all, Team Bottom-up City presented some thoughts on individualism in Amsterdam. They explained that it may be difficult to solve individualism, first of all because it is a concept with many different sides and there is not one ‘good’ value to replace it with. Therefore, it is important to strive towards a balance between individual values and more community-based values. The team presented their ideas on how to move forward with this topic, by doing a small-scale empirical study in Amsterdam.

Next, team Rethinking Garbage presented a proposal for improving information and awareness about waste. Namely, they created a large number of very nice and funny illustrations, explaining to consumers the harsh facts on the amount of waste we produce and what happens with that waste, with the idea to spread these illustrations via the waste bins in Amsterdam. This presentation sparked a very interesting discussion on who should be responsible for reducing waste in Amsterdam.

The third presentation was given by team Measurability. They explored the potential of measurability for big system change. This team came up with some doughnut-proof indicators for Amsterdam, but also addressed the question whether the doughnut should be measured at all. They also presented two very interesting case studies, namely on measuring sustainable tourism in Amsterdam and on measuring the ground lease effect in Amsterdam.

Finally, team 4, Living in Harmony with Urban Nature ‘flipped the donut’ and put the nature of Amsterdam in the inner circle of the donut. They showed us a couple of ways in which we can move from a human-centered to a life-centered of the doughnut model and outlined 4 important questions in making the doughnut really inclusive: first, how to listen to nature? Second, what are the interests and needs of plants and non-human animals? Third, how do transitions affect plans and non-human animals? And fourth, how to include city nature in decision-making processes?

Finally, Philipp Pattberg concluded the conference with a very inspiring presentation on interdisciplinary sustainability research.

In this way, a couple of important points regarding the doughnut model were addressed in the conference, based on the real-life concerns of the citizens of Amsterdam. Of course, this conference was only the beginning: these topics all deserve much more attention, which is why the SUSA team is currently investigating the opportunities for moving forward with SUSA.

Other Resources

See Kinanya Pijl and Laura Burger's blog post about Scholars United for a sustainable Amsterdam

View the slidedeck from the conference

Listen to the keynote lecture