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 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, residents, 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.
Fietsstraten (“bike streets”) are a Dutch infrastructure innovation: streets on which bikes have priority and cars are permitted as “guests.” While we usually don’t think of them at all, infrastructures are not neutral: they reflect particular moral and political values, channeling certain possibilities while foreclosing others. A fietsstraat, for example, embodies a ethical stance that cars should act as guests, privileging bikes and pedetrians. Yet, instead of presenting cycling simply as a solution to urban ails, we see it here 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 the pressure to conclude or categorize. This is what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls "wayfaring," a form of knowing developed through sustained attention rather than detached analysis. 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. With its stationary path of attention, the film invites viewers to join in the act of dwelling and finding meaning in what we see.
The location, Elandsgracht, brings particular ethnographic depth to these observations. A former canal serving Amsterdam's leather trade, later a market street that sparked food riots in 1917, now a gentrifying corridor lined with cafés and boutiques—the street carries layered histories of working-class struggle and contemporary urban development. The film captures these temporal layers not through historical exposition but through careful attention to who uses the street how: the luxury cargo bikes of young families alongside battered commuter cycles, the tourists consulting phone maps while locals navigate by embodied knowledge. We also see neighbors water the plants in the median and pick up litter unasked, small gestures that sustain a sense of community ownership even as the street’s social composition shifts.
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. There are also conflicts and negotiations, such as bikers intentionally slowing down a vehicle (usually a luxury car). In theory, bikers have equal rights to the carriageway, and cars should accommodate them, 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.