'Co-designing a safer, more accessible and more liveable Amsterdam Red Light district'

Eelco Thiellier (Royal HaskoningDHV) & Erik Roscam Abbing (Livework)

Case study
‘Co-designing a safer, more accessible and more liveable Amsterdam Red Light district’

Like many other cities, Amsterdam faces numerous liveability challenges, due to increases in population and tourists and their mobility and transportation. One of its well-know areas is the The Red Light District, currently a complex ecosystem with millions of visitors, passers-by, workers and residents, managed by an even more complex and crowded ecosystem of organisations, departments and individual experts.

To let this area function well, and offer to each user the best experience to live, work and pass by, the city government has been searching for a smart solution. To get from abstract, numeric data to actual solutions in the streets, a service design approach was introduced.

Close collaboration between the city of Amsterdam and its inhabitant with the use of an iterative, people-centric and data-driven service design approach, made it possible to define a complete set of new design measures. Together and in co-creation with stakeholders like the police, these measures are currently being piloted and implemented. A smart city solution is now being rolled out, combining sensors and data analysis algorithms to generate data about people movements and crowdedness.