The Project

Fietsstraat Amsterdam is a project at the intersection of ethnography and art, focusing on a particular bike street in Amsterdam. The intention is not to dramatize or explain, but to create an immersive encounter with the rhythms of urban life as they unfold, to show how infrastructures orient movement while also becoming sites of contested rights and priorities.

The film asks what happens when we apply anthropological attention to urban space without the pressure to conclude or categorize. Instead of presenting cycling simply as a solution, we see it as an ongoing practice—one that requires constant negotiation and that reflects the politics of urban development and demographic change.

Fietsstraat Amsterdam is also an experiment in understanding urban life through the simple act of watching carefully, without interruption. This is what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls "wayfaring," a form of knowing developed through sustained attention rather than detached analysis. With the stationary camera providing a path of attention, the film invites viewers to join in the act of noticing, dwelling, and determining the meaning of what we see. I used to sit in the median here for hours, watching such scenes pass by, and I find it relaxing, meditative, and, with all the different bikes and bikers, compelling to view.

The camera runs without commentary so that the viewer encounters the scene much as I did. For some, it may serve as a sort of background ambience — the whoosh of bike wheels, the click of footsteps, the murmuring of voices forming an urban soundscape. For others, it provides a window into what street-level cycling looks like in practice: the flow of commuters, families, and visitors; the interactions with traffic and space; the daily rhythms of city life. Still others may read it critically, reflecting on mobility, sustainability, and the politics of urban design.

Fietsstraat Amsterdam’s length is crucial to the project. The almost 7 hour duration resists simple explanatory closure, as patterns surface slowly: commuters rushing to work in the morning in varied styles of clothing and bikes, teenagers gathering in the median after school, delivery trucks creating momentary blockages that ripple through the flow of bicycles. There are also conflicts and negotiations. In theory, bikers have preference, and cars should act like guests, but we see tensions periodically erupt. These are not staged spectacles but the micro-politics of a contested shared space.

The result presents the viewer with an unmediated ethnographic encounter: observing everyday life, noticing the small negotiations that animate the city, and situating those observations within broader cultural and political contexts. In doing so, it proposes that anthropology can be both a way of documenting the world while also opening it to new ways of seeing.