TEDxAmsterdam partners in De Bazel (photo Jan-Jaap Heine).
On September 13, the TEDxAmsterdam partners had the pleasure of attending a small event at the Bazel, home to the Amsterdam City Archives. We were welcomed by Marens Engelhard, director of the archives, who spoke about the history of the Bazel, the gorgeously renovated building on the Vijzelstraat that was built between 1919 en 1926 for the ‘Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij’ (Dutch Trading Company). Architect Karel de Bazel designed it according to theosophical ideas: the building was to express universal harmony and the strict mathematical principles applied should express this higher message.
The Dutch Trading Company, founded by King Willem I in 1824, was mostly active in the trade of colonial goods; later, the Bazel was used as a regular bank, and achieved monument status by the time the city archives moved in. These days, the treasures kept safe within its vaults include 32 kilometres of city archives – as archives are measured by the length of the shelves needed to store it all – and these relics from the past are now shared with an ever-growing audience.
Digitisation of this immense resource is partly crowd sourced. The sections that get digitised first are those containing the files requested by the public via the website, an award-winning method now copied by many archives worldwide. Amsterdam’s city archive website currently offers access to over 280.000 images, and many wonderful collections (including a set of videos shot during WW II of life in the city).
Alderman Carolien Gehrels, responsible in the City Council for Amsterdam’s economic affairs, art, culture, local media, and monuments addressed the TEDxAmsterdam partners with a thoughtful contribution on the changes in our culture and the role of Amsterdam as a ‘’city of ideas’’.
She quoted from “I Barbari’’ by Italian writer Allessandro Baricco (translated into Dutch as De Barbaren), a book of essays in which Baricco tries to understand what the world is becoming, how shifts in our culture take place and where they take us. Gehrels shares Barrico’s interest in the signs of a world that is coming into being, a sensibility to the ‘’mutations’’ in our culture, both high and low.
How can the city of Amsterdam foster the free exploration of ideas? Culture and creativity are the driving forces of our modern society and knowledge economy, and the city offers and urban physical space as well as an ICT infrastructure. Gehrels mentioned some projects from both fields, but zoomed in on the role Amsterdam played in the development of the internet, as a driving force of change.
- On 7 november 1988 at 14.28 Piet Beertema, system operator at the Amsterdam Centre for Mathematics and Informatics, connected the Netherlands to the internet – the second country in the world, after the US!
- Professor Walter Hoogland of the University of Amsterdam, was science director of CERN in Geneva in the crucial years between 1989 and 1992 when the WWW was developmed.
- And the Amsterdam internet exchange Amsix, an independent organization founded as recently as 1996 and one of TEDxAmsterdam’s partners, has become the connecting point for most of the internet traffic between Europe, Asia and the US.
But a city is more than its physical or IT infrastructure, as Gehrels concluded. Despite a long history of tolerance and information exchange, none of this culture is a given. ”Amsterdam has to work hard to create, develop and keep its ‘free spaces” , be it physical, digital or social, and its core values, freedom, equality, pluriformity and quality”.
Especially in times when a society is uncertain about the world of tomorrow, there should be space – to quote Baricco – for those who master the art of deciphering the mutations about to happen. And TEDxAmsterdam strives to do just that.
Interested to read her exact words? The text of her speech can also be found on her own website (in Dutch), ”Ideas worth spreading”
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