Amsterdam, a growing city of over 800,000 people in the Netherlands, is struggling to collect waste. While residents in most districts of the city use underground bins to deposit their garbage, the historic Centrum district continues to rely on curbside collection. As such, the streets around the UNESCO World Heritage canals are lined with garbage bags as trash trucks rumble down roads centuries old and ill-fitted for vehicles of such size. This paper assesses the viability of moving Centrum trash collection to the canals with a fleet of tug boats and floating dumpsters. It does so by using a combination of GIS tools and integer programming to determine the quantity and optimal collection locations while ensuring that an average Centrum resident walks no farther than denizens of the other Amsterdam districts. Additionally, it proposes a schedule for emptying floating dumpsters based on one comparable to the current truck system. The results of this paper suggest that mobile trash collection using the canals is a viable solution that could reduce noise, pollution, and congestion, thus improving the quality of Amsterdam’s historic cityscape.
Introduction
Amsterdam, a major European port city, has hundreds of kilometers of canals, some of which date from the 17th century. In addition to serving as iconic imagery, the ubiquitous canal network defines the structure of the city and is an anchor of everyday life, as 39% of the buildings in Amsterdam-Centrum are near the edge of a canal.
Historically, canals in Dutch cities “had a combination of functions: trade and navigation, drainage of the settlement itself and—via a network of field ditches—of the water-logged soils of the surrounding landscape, and even (until far into the nineteenth century) waste disposal” (Kingdom of The Netherlands, 2009: 127). However, over the years, Amsterdam’s canals have lost many of their original functions and are instead dominated by small pleasure crafts and tourist boats. The canals are an undeniably character-defining part of Amsterdam, and these historical waterways should perform an equally integral function in the city’s urban life.
This shift in perspective on the role of landscape—as a site for leisure rather than a guiding force for organizing the urban fabric—creates a missed planning opportunity, especially in the case of Amsterdam. Infrastructure networks in general tend to be socio-technical systems composed of many components, and they tend toward “stability or obduracy” (Bulkeley et al.: 1473). However, an important body of literature in urban studies has been advocating for the incorporation of heavy infrastructures as part of the city landscape. Frederick Law Olmstead’s nineteenth-century use of parks and green corridors as part of the urban infrastructure has recently gained renewed attention with projects like New York City’s High Line, which reclaimed a disused elevated railway as a popular park. As Charles Waldheim asserts, “one of the implicit advantages of landscape urbanism [is] the conflation, integration, and fluid exchange between (natural) environmental and (engineered) infrastructural systems” (Waldheim, 2016: 43). Equally interestingly, scholars and practitioners are advocating for including infrastructures as integral parts of urban landscapes, which requires an “intellectual and disciplinary realignment” to account for the public benefits and social demands of these multifunctional systems (Shepard and Genevro, 2017: 110). This method addresses the criticism that “mono-functional approaches to the design of infrastructures have typically segregated the basic provisions of water, waste, transport, food, and energy into separate, unrelated departments” (Bélanger, 2009: 85).
Multifunctionality turns static infrastructures into active ones that not only serve several purposes but also become integral constituents of urban life. In certain projects in Amsterdam, the decision to bury infrastructure (highways and railways) underground has created opportunities for more housing development (Salet, 2008). However, this does not take into account the possibility that infrastructure can perform a multitude of functions. While some cities are retrofitting abandoned infrastructures to create ecological networks of greenways, Kullmann (2013: 49) calls Amsterdam’s canals the “most intact example of a dense grade-separated urban network [that] truly rivals the orthodox grey network.” As the Amsterdam canals are the very identity of the city, regaining the infrastructural function of the canals in their full potential challenges engineers’ and designers’ common practice of hiding infrastructures away from landscapes that are “considered to be scenic” (Thompson, 2012: 13).
And, indeed, the concept of using canals for multiple functions, including waste transportation and other heavy-duty infrastructural tasks, is not novel. In Thailand, Hara et al. (2010) illustrate how agrarian canals, excavated mainly for irrigated rice cultivation, have continued to influence land-use patterns after urbanization. Kulcar (1996) compares waste collection by canal against rail and trucks in cost analyses in Brussels. The primary hindrance for Brussels, as evaluated by Kulcar, was that no waste treatment facility used the canal. This is not the case for Amsterdam, as the city’s incinerator is located right on the canal Aziëhaven. In other parts of the Netherlands, the city of Utrecht has employed a fleet of boats to deliver beer to restaurants and drinking establishments. Moreover, in Amsterdam, Mokum Maritime has been slowly implementing goods delivery and waste removal using barges in a small area in the city; the courier service provider DHL has a floating distribution center, from which bicycles depart and perform the last inland stretch (Janjevic and Ndiaye, 2014). A recent examination of the landscape and planning disciplines calls for the cross-pollination of ecology and design when considering urban environments, which are salient constructed ecologies (Grose, 2014). Lastly, and more specifically, where water is concerned, some argue that landscape can be closely tied to its inhabitants’ behaviors (Ramos and Aguiló, 1988). With this in mind, the Amsterdam canals are a readily available amenity waiting to be fully utilized.
This paper examines the possibility that Amsterdam could reclaim the key role of its canals as an urban infrastructure while still preserving the canals’ iconic stature. As Henriquez and van Timmeren (2017: 220) argue, “there are some cases of ancient water management methods being rediscovered that are proving not only to be cheaper and more efficient than incumbent systems but may also serve as archetypes for novel forms of urban design.” Reclaiming the canals for waste collection has the potential to be one such system, and we investigate this hypothesis by simulating the deployment of a fleet of waterborne dumpsters to improve waste collection in Centrum.