Talking Impact with Prof. Marco te Brömmelstroet

Prof. Marco te Brömmelstroet from the faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and director of the Urban Cycling Institute (Image: Christa Romp).

Talking Impact is a series of conversations with lecturers and staff, students, innovators and entrepreneurs from the University of Amsterdam (UvA)’s Roeterseiland campus, about how their work makes an impact on society.

Who are you?

My name is Marco te Brömmelstroet - father of a beautiful daughter and son, terrible guitarist and serial academic director of many things.

What's the impact of your work?

As a researcher and teacher of urban planning and mobility, I aim to work as closely as I can with practitioners and citizens. In general terms, my intention is to show and teach them the power of rethinking their problems and solutions with new narratives.

Teaching that as a skill set has direct effects on individuals and organisations. By using mobility policies, projects and innovations it also impacts the physical world itself. One example that makes me proud is teaching traffic engineers of Amsterdam to not take rigid norms and guidelines, but instead use human behaviour as a starting point for redesigning intersections. This has lead to much higher quality experiences of already 10 different busy intersections throughout the city. And this way of working was institutionalized in offical policy.

Do you have entrepreneurial plans?

Thinking entrepreneurial is for me the way to scale up the impact that I aim to have. For instance, the goal to make streets more just, is so big that one cannot do this alone. By thinking in ways that help to create new positions and new capacity the potential impacts grows exponentially in my experience. 

What's the promise of REC-Impact? 

For me, REC-Impact would showcase how the social sciences can follow the entrepreneurial route to have real impact. I think that there are many colleagues who do not yet see their full potential and might be inspired to see how other colleagues and students are doing this.

It can also make us as researchers think more about the relations we want to have with society. Some will choose to stay as outside observers, others will want to work under the radar. But adding the REC Impact route will expand the options that one can consider.

What's valorisation to you?

Valorisation for me is the degree to which my work supports my goals, and the goals of my institution. I became a professor to not only publish articles and get a lot of citations. It is an important part of our work to work to generate high quality research in issues that matter. But in the end, I want my time as academic to contribute to changes in the world. This is why I like to work on translating research outcomes into documentaries, public books, contributions to newspapers, policy projects, skill training for others, mobility innovations, grassroots organizations and setting up crowd-sourced research platforms.

What do you like about it? 

I really like to challenge myself in thinking how my abstract work on the importance and power of narratives can be communicated and activated for all different kinds of partners. 

Where can we meet you?

At UvA I am located in REC C4.15, but my Lab of Thought foundation holds office at Barentzplein 7 in Amsterdam. Please come by to get confused on a higher level! Hopefully we will soon move to a location on the Roeterseiland Campus itself…