From Blossoms to Belgium: SAMA brings the voice of Amsterdam Nieuw-West to ESEE2026

What can a Community Garden teach scientists? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

This July, Stichting Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA) will travel to Ghent, Belgium, to present our latest research at the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE2026)—one of Europe's leading conferences exploring how we can build fairer, more sustainable societies.

Our contribution, "Reclaiming Urban Voices: Street Art as Living Heritage and Environmental Governance in Amsterdam," was developed together with Geertje Tijsma (Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). But this story didn't begin in an academic conference room. It began in our neighbourhood.

It began in conversations on benches. During mural workshops. In the Community Garden of Stories. While watering flowers with children. Listening to older residents. Talking to young people about housing, safety, belonging and their hopes for the future.

Every blossom tells a story

Over the past years, flowers have quietly become one of the recurring symbols throughout SAMA's work. Not because they are simply beautiful. Because blossoms remind us that communities grow the same way gardens do: slowly, collectively and through care. Some flowers bloom immediately. Others need more time. Some survive difficult winters before flourishing. Like people. Like neighbourhoods. The flower palettes now emerging in Dichtersbuurt were chosen together with residents and will continue to shape projects over the coming decade. They are more than colours. They are a living language of memory, identity and hope.

Murals are more than walls

Our paper argues something we have believed for years: Street art is not decoration. It is a form of living heritage. Every mural contains stories that rarely appear in policy documents. Stories about migration, friendship, loneliness, climate, housing, growing up, losing places we love, and imagining better futures. When young people paint these experiences into public space, they are not simply making art. They are participating in democracy. They are helping their neighbourhood tell its own story. Rather than treating residents as people who provide information for researchers, our projects invite communities to become authors, designers and knowledge holders. In that sense, every mural becomes a living archive. Not frozen in time, but constantly growing through new conversations and new generations.

From Nieuw-West to Europe

Our presentation brings together experiences from several SAMA initiatives, including Buurttuin van Verhalen, the Erasmus+ STAR 2.0 Toolkit for youth workers, our collaboration with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the ongoing STRAATWIJS project. Together they demonstrate that creative practice can strengthen environmental governance by making local knowledge visible.

Questions like:

• Where do young people feel safe?

• Which places make them feel welcome?

• What green spaces matter?

• What memories deserve to be protected?

• What should our cities look like in the future?

These questions cannot be answered by data alone. They begin with listening.

A museum without walls

For us, this conference is about much more than presenting research. It is another step in demonstrating that museums can become living civic infrastructures. That neighbourhoods produce knowledge. That artists are researchers. That youth are experts in their own lived experience. And that flowers, murals and community gardens sometimes tell us more about sustainability than a thousand pages of policy. So while our Community Garden of Stories continues to bloom here in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, a little piece of that garden will soon travel to Ghent. Not in a suitcase. But in the stories we carry together.