Summer wouldn’t be complete without our annual Innovative Summer tips! This season, soak up the sunshine and get inspired by everything the city has to offer. From exploring the future of energy to dancing on a science museum rooftop, Amsterdam is bursting with opportunities to experience innovation, sustainability, and creativity. Here are six highlights from Amsterdam InChange to help make your summer not just memorable, but also meaningful.
Innofest is teaming up with Kwaku Festival to turn the festival atmosphere into a testing ground for sustainable innovations. For four weeks, Kwaku brings together music, dance, art, and food rooted in the Surinamese community and enriched by influences from the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. This summer, Innofest will be testing two of its innovations live at the festival. Curious to find out which ones? Check them out on their website.
Experience history and the future on open water. Every five years, the world’s largest tall ships dock in Amsterdam for SAIL: a celebration of maritime heritage and innovation. Due to COVID, it’s now been ten years since the last edition. In August 2025, SAIL returns not only with beautiful ships but also with important themes like the energy transition and green logistics.
Spend your summer evenings on NEMO’s rooftop, where live music meets stunning city views and a dose of science. The rooftop becomes a spot for concerts, interactive exhibits, and inspiring ideas around energy and sustainability. A good mix of culture, curiosity, and summer vibes.
Get active in the climate conversation. Set in the lush botanical gardens of De Hortus, the Climate festival offers workshops, talks, and art installations focused on climate change and ecological resilience. It's a moment to reconnect with nature and find actionable hope.
Reimagine how we power our lives. Hosted by Waag Futurelab, this edition of Waag Open explores the future of energy. You'll go on an excursion to the Buiksloterham neighborhood, where all aspects of the energy transition come to life. Discover how deep the boreholes for thermal energy storage go, and learn exactly where the heat for the district heating system comes from.
Discover how technology shapes conflict. At Pakhuis de Zwijger, this event explores how digital tools and social platforms contribute to modern political violence. Through research and open dialogue, you’ll learn more about the intersection of tech, power, and resistance.
Do you have any other interesting tips? Share them below!
Met trots presenteren we het jaarverslag 2024 van Amsterdam InChange!
We kijken terug op een bijzonder jaar waarin we niet alleen onze programmaonderdelen verder hebben versterkt, maar ook succesvol de transitie hebben gemaakt naar onze nieuwe naam en branding. Daarnaast hebben we nieuwe vraagstukken opgepakt en onze Challenge-aanpak verder ontwikkeld — lerend door te doen, samen met onze partners.
Het samenstellen van dit verslag is elk jaar weer een feest. De verzamelde Challenges en bijgevoegde verslagen laten zien hoe we samen bouwen aan een rijke, diverse broedplaats: een tussenruimte waar innovatie tot bloei komt.
In dit jaarverslag lees je meer over de Challenges van afgelopen jaar, de events die we organiseerden, en de thema’s die we als netwerk verkenden tijdens kennissessies, werksessies, deepdives en Data Dilemma’s.
Hieronder vind je alvast de highlights. Wil je meer weten? Lees dan hier het volledige jaarverslag 2024.
The pioneering innovations were presented of the Scale Up Future-proof artificial turf pitches project, a collaboration between Amsterdam and Haarlem focused on sustainable artificial turf pitches. Over the next few years, more than 250 sports pitches in both cities will be transformed into circular, energy-generating and climate-adaptive sports venues. These artificial turf pitches can not only generate and store energy, but also involve smart water management. An approach that is globally relevant for urban sports infrastructure.
Three consortia collaborate on the sport pitch of the future
The three selected consortia Antea Sport, EnergieVeld and GOO4iT together comprise more than 15 market players. They join forces within this innovation partnership, where there is room for long-term collaboration, co-creation and scalable innovation. The pioneering solutions will make it possible to cool down sport pitches on warm days, help dispose of and collect rainwater, make the pitches more pleasant for the users and possibly even generate energy for the surrounding area. Find out how these innovations are shaping the sport pitch of the future here.
Two municipalities: joint procurement
The Scale Up Future-proof artificial turf pitches project is a unique collaboration between two municipalities and market players. The municipalities jointly procure pooling their purchasing power and use an innovation partnership to challenge the market to test and scale up innovative and sustainable solutions. In doing so, the solutions are also scalable and transferable to other cities in the Netherlands and Europe.
From prototype to pilot fields
The first prototype fields will be constructed in Amsterdam and Haarlem in 2026, in different capacities and combining multiple innovations, where they will be extensively tested and monitored for a year. Successful concepts are then scaled up to full-scale pilot pitches and tested and monitored for another year. This will form the basis for the new standard of sustainable sports pitches, with potential for adoption in other cities around the world. At the same time, existing pitches are already being improved with the most sustainable solutions available, making an immediate impact from the start. The project thus shows how cooperation between municipalities and market players can lead to innovative, climate-proof sports infrastructure with international relevance.
Join us
This project provides cities worldwide a blueprint for sustainable, smart, and future-proof artificial turf pitches. Interested municipalities and industry partners can get in touch and subscribe to our news updates by sending an e-mail to: sportveldvandetoekomst@amsterdam.nl.
Learn with the case study Amsterdam to anticipate future food disruptions. Understand the city's food supply chain vulnerabilities is critical for enhancing food resilience. Enhance food resilience in empowerment of people in urban food growing.
How can citizens reclaim transparency in a world increasingly shaped by networked safety and enforcement cameras? Join our ThingsCon workshop to explore the power of sousveillance—using the tools of surveillance to scrutinize the systems that watch us.
Networked safety and enforcement cameras increasingly shape urban life, yet their presence and function often remain opaque. This workshop explores how citizens can turn the tools of surveillance back onto the systems that watch them: Redirecting object recognition to identify street camera's for civic scrutiny. Building on several camera spotting tours supported with various versions of a “mobile transparency app”, we introduce a new prototype that uses object recognition to detect street cameras and log them through a civic annotation workflow.
The workshop is for anyone interested in civic tech, democratic oversight, and human-scale alternatives to opaque “smart city” systems. Together, we explore how civic sousveillance might evolve into a deeper practice of scrutinizing—and reshaping—the technologies embedded in our streets.
More info and tickets: https://thingscon.org/events/things-2025
More info on the Human Values for Smarter Cities research project we are conducting: https://humanvaluesforsmartercities.nl/
