Fietsstraat Amsterdam is a project at the intersection of ethnography and art, focusing on a particular bike-centric 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. For some, it may serve as a sort of background ambience: the whoosh of bikes, 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: how people, bikes, and vehicles navigate a shared space.
Fietsstraten (“bike streets”) are a particular Dutch infrastructure innovation: streets on which bikes have priority and cars are permitted as “guests.” Infrastructures, when they work, are largely invisible, observes Paul Edwards: taken for granted and encoded in peoples’ behavior. At the same time, they are not neutral: they reflect particular moral and political values, channeling certain possibilities while foreclosing others. These values are built into form, from a curb’s height to a street’s color to a line’s thickness. A fietsstraat takes a moral stance on the relationship of cars and people, asserting that cars should act as guests in pursuit of the greater common good of a more human-oriented city.
Fietsstraat Amsterdam documents how people actually inhabit such designed spaces. In theory, bikers have equal rights to the carriageway, and cars should accommodate them, but the practice is more complicated. We sometimes see bikers intentionally slowing down cars or drivers honking at cyclists, the tensions that erupt as bikers defend their right of way and cars push back. These are not staged spectacles but the micro-politics of a contested shared space. What emerges through extended observation is that these spaces are neither harmonious nor conflictual, but sites of constant micro-negotiation.
The location, Elandsgracht, brings particular depth to these observations. It was a former canal serving Amsterdam's leather trade, later a market street that sparked food riots in 1917, and now it is a gentrifying corridor lined with longstanding local stores alongside hip cafés and boutiques. The film captures these temporal layers through attention to who uses the street how: the luxury cars and cargo bikes alongside battered commuter cycles; neighbors watering the plants in the median, small gestures that sustain a sense of community even as the street’s social composition shifts.
The western portion Elandgracht’s 450 meters is marked with the “Auto te Gast” signage of the classic fietsstraat; to the east (across Marnixstraat), the road width and red color remain, but there are no “Auto te Gast” signs, indicating that both bikes and cars have equal right to the whole carriageway. This is where Fietsstraat Amsterdam was shot, a place where the politics of urban mobility and privilege get worked out daily at street level.
The film is also an experiment in understanding urban life through the simple act of watching carefully, a way of understanding based on sustained attention and engagement rather than detached analysis. Anthropologist Tim Ingold calls this "wayfaring." I used to sit in the median here for hours, watching such scenes pass by, wayfaring. I find it relaxing and meditative but also, with all the different bikes and bikers, compelling to view. In the film, the camera runs without commentary so that the viewer encounters the scene much as I did. With its stationary path of attention, the film invites viewers to join in the act of dwelling and finding meaning in what we see.
Fietsstraat Amsterdam’s length is crucial to the project. The almost seven 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. The result presents the viewer with an unmediated ethnographic encounter: observing everyday life, noticing the small negotiations that animate the city. 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.