departments and agencies publicly available in order to for-profit initiatives. Unfortunately, dividing up the initiatives increase transparency and devise new services. in this way is not easy, because many startup initiatives are initially funded by government projects, even if most of them To test ASC’s pilot projects, three parts of the city were are still thought out by citizens. Amsterdam’s configuration selected for use as urban living labs, with each of the three of initiatives is difficult to accurately delineate. Indeed, the having a specific focus: volume of initiatives and projects Amsterdam is undertaking • Nieuw-West: this is a mostly residential area that emphasizes the importance of how Amsterdam’s public offers a good representation of an average Amsterdam sector (as well as the Dutch public sector more broadly) has neighborhood. Initiatives piloted here mostly focus on the helped to create a private sector that works for the benefit of development of new models for energy generation and everyone. This relationship between public and private and consumption, making use of the smart grid deployed in the smart moves made by the city government have directly the area. contributed to the progress that the city has made. • Zuidoost: this area, characterized by the presence of large commercial and recreational estates, is used by ASC when The most important outcomes of Amsterdam’s smart city it needs to test out the scaling-up of projects. projects are summarized below. • IJburg: this area, sited on reclaimed land, is a recent expansion of the city. It is used to test out projects that Recycling services: The Great Bubble Barrier, a Dutch make use of fast fiber optic connections. startup, is using existing technology, namely an underwater device that blows bubbles toward the water’s surface and is Many other ASC projects have been developed outside of commonly used to contain oil spills and reduce underwater Amsterdam, including in neighboring cities such as Almere, noise levels, for a completely new purpose (Hutt, 2019). Haarlem, and Zaanstad. Since its inception, ASC has helped In Amsterdam, the technology is being used for waste to manage more than 150 projects, and it has involved 2,300 collection. Bubbles are blown to the surface of canals to members and two hundred organizations. ASC has initiated make waste float toward one area before it reaches the sea this large number of innovative projects to create a more so it can easily be collected (Hutt, 2019). sustainable and energy-efficient city. This smart city program has provided opportunities for businesses located in IJburg, Mobility: With approximately nine hundred thousand bikes for Nieuw-West, and Zuidoost to test new products in a real-life over eight hundred thousand citizens, Amsterdam has more setting known as an “urban living lab.” Amsterdam is now bicycles than it does people (Dam, 2017). In Amsterdam, experimenting with a large-scale application of photovoltaic biking is the most common form of transport, with a daily roof panels in one of its newly built areas. mode share of 48 percent (Sutton, 2017). Dutch city planners have become experts in the “classic” mobility feat of creating The Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (MRA) consists of excellent street design and cycling infrastructure. Still, they multiple authorities, but it is a single city.2It is easier are open to new services that further improve biking mobility, to understand the numerous initiatives that have been including bike sharing, a global innovation now available in launched in the MRA by organizing them according to the over 712 cities (Shaheen et al., 2015). The city has a “carless specific topics, analytical categories, and dimensions from agenda” grounded in twenty-seven measures that aim to our study’s three-layer framework. (For a description of remove cars from the city center and expand bicycle and that framework, see the Executive Summary of this ebook.) pedestrian infrastructure; it has been estimated that the cost An alternative approach would have been to separate the of implementing this agenda will be between five hundred direct initiatives undertaken by the city government (such million and seven hundred million euros by 2025 (Deloitte as the different MRA plans, the functions of the Economic City Mobility Index, 2020). Board, and the recent appointment of Amsterdam’s chief technical officer (CTO) from more “private” startups and Green Spaces:Amsterdam has set various objectives to (2) According to the website of the MRA, “The Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (MRA), known in Dutch as Metropoolregio Amsterdam) is comprised of 32 municipalities, two provinces (North Holland and Flevoland) and the Transport Authority Amsterdam. Around 2.5 million people—more than 14 per cent of the Dutch population—live within the MRA. It is the country’s most robust economic region and the MRA also performs well on the international stage.” https:// www.metropoolregioamsterdam.nl/about-mra/ (Accessed on 30 April 2021). 59 Quélin and Smadja | HEC PARIS | SMART CITIES | The sustainable program of six leading cities | 2021