Network Effect Amsterdam explored the latest debates on social diversity and cities, focusing on what can be learnt from community activists, politicians and social entrepreneurs and what the wider implications are for Europe.
'Cities can be sites of hope, but they can also be places where hopesare dashed. As leaders, we need to find ways to capture and create that hope, and to turn hopes and dreams into realities.' Melissa Mean, Demos
The Network Effect workshop in Amsterdam explored social diversity and the role of cities with young people from Europe. It focused on what can be learnt from people already trying to answer some tough questions.
Should City Councils actively mix the population of neighbourhoods? What role can urban youth culture play? How do we respond to the radicalisation of Muslim youth inside our cities?
To get to the bottom of these issues, Network Effect participants went out into Amsterdam to look at projects dealing with these issues on the ground. Real world investigations took them to organisations like FunX, a new multicultural radio broadcasting organisation targeting a young audience. They toured the Joop Westerweel School, unique in Amsterdam for its part in the 'peaceful schools project'. They visited the Turkish Aya Sofya Mosque, one of the most well-known mosques in Amsterdam. It is currently being re-designed to represent multiculturalism, and it will be the first Turkish mosque in the Netherlands with the same entrance for men and women.
By hearing about and actually seeing how issues concerning social diversity are being explored in Amsterdam, participants were able to start visualising new kinds of futures for their own cities. One of the Finnish participants, Tommi Laitio, wrote a winning essay about the future of social diversity in European cities in the Dutch newspaper, De Volkskran: ‘Our biggest challenge is creating public domains that are free from representational minority and majority roles. Immigration is an easy scapegoat when most problems are really due to socio-economic differences. It is extremely easy but irresponsible to point the finger at the people who have the most adjusting to do. We can do better than that.
By 2007 more than half the world's population will live in a city. The urban environment gives people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to live, work and play together. However a list of recent events has thrown into doubt the widely held belief that European cities combine the qualities of diversity, cohesion, openness and tolerance as witnessed in the riots in Paris, the bombings in Madrid and London and the murder of the politician, Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam.
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