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Short Abstract

The Field Atlas reimagines Amsterdam Science Park as a living landscape co-mapped by artists, residents, scientists, and more-than-human life. This bottom-up atlas challenges top-down urban planning, fostering biodiversity awareness and new ways of sharing knowledge and agency in city-making.

Abstract

The Urban Ecology Field Atlas is a participatory mapping project that reframes the Amsterdam Science Park as a living place rather than a static master-planned site. Co-created with artists, local residents, scientists, and citizen scientists, the atlas highlights hidden biodiversity and invites new green interventions from the ground up.

Unlike the 2014 top-down Master Plan that defines the area in fixed zoning terms, Field Atlas continuously evolves, reflecting the shifting urban ecology and the perspectives of those who inhabit it, human and more-than-human alike. Through a mix of digital mapping, public walks, and artistic interventions, participants reveal sites such as a informal gardens, threatened species and overlooked “wild spots.” Citizen-generated nature observations (via iNaturalist) are layered into the map, merging local knowledge with scientific data.

This approach challenges power asymmetries in urban development by positioning residents as knowledge-holders and inviting non-human actors into planning imaginaries. It also demonstrates how collaborative mapping can nurture a shared sense of place, stimulate policy dialogue on urban greening, and transform planning from an expert-led exercise into an inclusive, ongoing conversation.

The Field Atlas shows that co-created citizen science can generate more equitable knowledge production and influence future-oriented decisions in rapidly changing urban environments. It suggests new roles for mapping as a civic and ecological practice that empowers communities while widening the circle of whose voices, human or otherwise, shape our cities.