On 4 October 2025, Zone2Source and the Municipality of Amsterdam, together with the Zoönomisch Instituut, signed a contract to manage the Amstelpark in the future as a ZOÖP and a learning place for multispecies politics for the city. This made Amstelpark ZOÖP the first public ZOÖP.

In the year that Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary, Zone2Source, a testing ground for art and ecology in Amstelpark, has challenged the municipality to manage Amsterdam for the next 750 years as a city for trillions of lives instead of 1 million people, for a radical democracy in which everyone truly counts. We propose turning Amstelpark into a testing ground for the city, where we will learn and practise, together with citizens and administrators, what politics, rights and practices we need for a good society for all life in our city.

Amstelpark as the first public Zoöp

We invited the Zoönomisch Instituut (Zoönomic Institute) to collaborate with the municipality of Amsterdam to explore managing Amstelpark as a Zoöp, an organisational form in which non-human life is also represented in decision-making. With Zone2Source, we decided not to become a Zoöp ourselves, but to work with the municipality and, in the future, with other educational and social organisations to make Zoöp Amstelpark a learning environment for the systems needed for a radically inclusive politics of diversity of life.

As human inhabitants of Earth, we face the urgent challenge of reversing the tide of global warming and ecological decline. In order to preserve a liveable world, we must relearn how to live and work together with many other species and understand how we are interdependent.

Thinking and doing come together

We propose Zoöp Amstelpark as a place where we not only discuss how a multispecies society can be shaped based on “multispecies justice”, but where we also experiment in practice and learn to work on the systems needed for a radically inclusive society where every life truly matters. The invitation to the Municipality of Amsterdam to jointly develop Amstelpark as Zoop and a testing ground for the city stems from our long-standing interest in exploring the role of art and artistic methods in ecological transitions by linking art and science to policy issues. With Amstelpark as our testing ground, we will learn and experiment together to determine what politics, rights, design, planning, etc. are needed to achieve this. Artists not only develop the much-needed new narratives and imaginations, but also embodied and situated forms of collective research and experience in which we relearn how humans can play a constructive role in the ecosystem.

Zoöp Amstelpark as a monument

This comes at an opportune moment, as Amstelpark – created for the 1972 Floriade – was recently declared a monument. This raises the question of how we can give shape and substance to an ecological monument that is alive and dynamic, rather than static. The Amstelpark is a complex ecosystem of visitors, organisations and companies based in the park organised in a friends’ association, the municipality of Amsterdam as the park’s administrator, and all non-human inhabitants who help shape and have an interest in the park. How can we draw attention to the intangible heritage of this Floriade park, where we can jointly practise new practices and experiences for a more balanced future on a shared earth?

Speakers of the Living and the ZOÖP method

Each ZOÖP has a speaker for life, who represents the voices and interests of all life within the organisation from an independent position and incorporates them into decision-making. As a public ZOÖP, we have chosen to establish a Council of Speakers for Life. The first two speakers for life are Theun Karelse and Anne de Andrade. A ZOÖP goes through a cyclical, iterative learning process with all participants and the Speakers for Life to find out, step by step, how the organisation can become symbiotic with the ecosystems in which it participates, based on an organic, growing process. On 7 November 2025, we will organise the first baseline measurement, in which, in addition to the speakers, Zone2Source employees, representatives of the Municipality of Amsterdam, new partners, the MBO programme Applied Biology and Urban Greening Yuverta, and researchers from the Sustainability Institute of Vrije Universiteit will also participate. During the baseline measurement, we will jointly set the short- and long-term goals, forms of cooperation and trajectories that we will focus on with Zoöp Amstelpark in the coming year.

Are you interested in participating/contributing your ideas, or would you like to know more about this initiative?
Please contact Alice Smits at info@zone2source.net.