Urbanites United: Amsterdam, as a Living Canvas

Amsterdam, as a Living Canvas

How Urbanites United turned the city into a shared artwork

In September 2025, something subtle but powerful happened in Amsterdam.

Walls started talking.

Streets began listening.

Neighbourhoods recognised themselves in colour, line and story.

Urbanites United: Amsterdam, as a Living Canvas was never meant to be a festival you “visited.” It was something you walked into. Something you stumbled upon. Something that unfolded while you were on your way to work, school, the shop or nowhere in particular.

For one weekend — and in many ways long after — Amsterdam became an open-air museum. Not behind doors or tickets, but out in the open. On walls, in passages, in playgrounds, studios, gardens and streets.

A city-wide conversation

Across Nieuw-West, West, Noord, Zuid, Zuidoost and the city centre, artists and residents worked side by side. There were guided Street Art walks, open studios, live painting sessions, film screenings, pop-up exhibitions, neighbourhood BBQs, poetry, conversations and quiet moments of watching paint dry. Some people came intentionally. Many more just passed by — and stayed. Children painted alongside artists. Elders shared memories of streets that were changing. Visitors discovered neighbourhoods they had never been to before. Street Art did what it does best: it created a reason to pause, to talk, to look again.

Art that belongs where it lives

Three participatory mural trajectories formed the heart of the project. Each one shaped by its surroundings, its people, its realities.

Plans shifted — as they often do in real life.

Policies changed.

Buildings changed hands.

Communities moved.

Instead of forcing the original plan, Urbanites United adapted.

New locations emerged.

New collaborations formed.

And the work continued — rooted, responsive and real.

In Dichtersbuurt, small artworks appeared across five streets. A neighbourhood BBQ brought people together. Poetry echoed between houses. In West, a former milk factory passage transformed into a shared canvas, with residents of all ages present. In Noord, the energy of Paint & Beer flowed into the project, connecting graffiti heritage with new audiences and thousands of visitors. Each artwork carries something of its place:a story, a memory, a gesture of shared authorship.

These are not decorations.They are markers of presence.

Mapping what is often unseen

Alongside the artworks, something else took shape: the Amsterdam Street Art Map.

Printed and digital, the map brings together murals, galleries, legal walls, broedplaatsen, museums, routes and hidden corners. It invites people to explore the city differently — beyond the centre, beyond the obvious. And the map didn’t stop in Amsterdam.

It travelled. To Placemaking Week Europe in Reggio Emilia, where it was shared during a STAR 2.0 workshop with youth workers from across Europe. One of the artworks created during Urbanites United — A Girl with a Bear by Pipsqueak Was Here! — found a second life as the visual mascot of the STAR 2.0 toolkit, carrying Amsterdam’s stories into an international educational context.

More than a weekend

Urbanites United reached thousands directly, tens of thousands in the streets, and many more online. But numbers were never the goal.

The real impact lives in quieter places:

• in young people seeing their ideas taken seriously

• in neighbours meeting for the first time

• in artists being seen in their own city

• in a street becoming a place of memory instead of passage

What remains are artworks, relationships, a map that keeps circulating, and a shared understanding that Street Art is not just something you look at — it is something you do together.

Amsterdam didn’t just host Urbanites United.

It became it.

And the city is still listening.

💛Urbanites United is a project by Stichting Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA), realised with artists, residents, partners and many hands and hearts across the city. Sponsored by https://www.amsterdamsfondsvoordekunst.nl/