Smooth Amsterdam
A perfectly curated “clean girl” itinerary: riding a VanMoof S6 to hunt down the next viral, fusion satellite dishes while moving carefully between selected vintage stores and stainless steel aesthetic cafés. In the city, we are where we go: neighbourhoods, cafes, stores, they all shape our identities. Yet in today’s metropolises, all that once was complex, spontaneous, and experimental in now seems smoothed into a comfortable, consumable surface. As author René Boer has coined it, we are increasingly living in the “smooth city”.
What are the political, socio-spatial implications of the smooth, generic and homogenised infrastructures? Is there any more space left for experimentation, and what does it mean to attend to the self and others in the city? How does our visual culture and these online platforms shape the ways we identify ourselves with?
During this panel, we will explore the politics of visibility in our everyday lives, and particularly how neighborhoods in Amsterdam are shaped by a drive to be ever more efficient, digestible, and ‘perfect’. And what does it mean to live together in a smoothified city?
Speakers
Dominika Mikołajczyk is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen researching modes of remembering and forgetting histories of migration at the Bulgarian–Turkish–Greek border, and how these shape the built environment that frames contemporary patterns of mobility. Her work more broadly examines the entanglements of postsocialist and postcolonial temporalities, memory, and environmental and migration studies, with a particular focus on (Central) Eastern European film, literature, landscape and art.
Sarah Postema-Toews is a researcher and local union organiser. Her research focuses on the intersections between the aesthetics of the everyday, political resistance, infrastructure, and affect theory. She recently completed a research Master’s in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her Master’s thesis, Activated Objects: A Material Analysis of Contemporary Activist Aesthetics traces how everyday objects become politically implicated through activism. Her research is featured in several peer-reviewed journals including Diffractions, Membrana Journal of Photography, and Amsterdam Museum Journal.
Marije Peute is a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the research group Urban Geography, specialized in urban ethnography and new media cultures. She currently studies how social media platforms change neighbourhood dynamics in the city of Amsterdam, and how places are curated to become visible online. In previous research projects she has also studied identity formation on Instagram and how young people curate themselves online.
René Boer works as a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, design, heritage and the arts. In his practice he articulates new perspectives on spatial conditions and facilitates fertile ground for imagining and materialising alternatives. He is a founding partner of Loom—practice for cultural transformation, part of the transnational platform Failed Architecture and affiliated with various urban social movements as well as art, architecture and design schools in Amsterdam and beyond. In 2023, he published ‘Smooth City’ with Valiz Publishers.
Pedram Dibazar is a lecturer in the Humanities at Amsterdam University College, the University of Amsterdam, and an affiliated researcher at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Pedram’s research integrates cultural studies, media studies, visual culture, urban studies and architecture. Pedram is interested in questions of space, everyday life, visibility and walking. He is the author of Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran: Non-Visibility and the Politics of Everyday Presence (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021) and “Walking With and Caring For: Attending to the Self and the Other in the Pedestrian City.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 8, no. 2 (June 2023).
