For Alua Akhmet, Jochem Bosters, Rosanna Meijer, Kika van der Schans, and Nathalie Waelbroeck, students in the MSc MADE program at AMS Institute, that question became the foundation of a real-world Living Lab case — and a crash course in what it means to work as an urban engineer.
This is the first article in a four-part series on how MSc MADE students, as part of their 'Living Lab' course, learn to approach pressing urban challenges via the Living Lab Way of Working. The series highlights how students develop solutions as future urban engineers while navigating the complexities of co-creation with city officials, urban experts, and citizens.
The students approached the challenge using the Living Lab Way of Working (LLWOW), a method that combines rigorous research with hands-on community and stakeholder engagement. They began with site visits, walking and observing the locations to understand each site's character and potential. From there, they conducted market research into global trends and held expert interviews spanning architecture, policy, and environmental science.
But the heart of the project was co-creation. The team organized three distinct sessions to gather input from residents and professionals alike. At the Marineterrein's Green Market, they invited passersby to reimagine a gas station using LEGO bricks — a deliberately playful format that sparked genuine creativity. "People built everything from fruit stands to green roofs," the students noted. A second, more structured workshop was held at the Roze Tanker — a former gas station itself, now a cultural venue — where residents and experts collaboratively designed their preferred futures for specific sites across the city. A final online session brought together specialists in soil remediation, EV infrastructure, and municipal policy to pressure-test the team's ideas against real-world constraints.
The iterative process wasn't without friction. One significant constraint was that the students were discouraged from engaging directly with gas station owners and operators, given the sensitivity of ongoing municipal negotiations. It was a limitation that, paradoxically, underscored the project's core lesson about inclusive processes. "This actually reinforced the importance of doing these kinds of projects and involving all stakeholders," the group reflected.
Their final deliverables included transformation recommendations tailored to different gas station typologies within the A10 ring, alongside a discussion tool embedded with QR codes — designed to keep the conversation going among stakeholders long after the project ended.
“This collective exercise turns individual preferences into a shared conversation. This will reveal not a single solution, but a landscape of possibilities.”
Jochem Bosters, MSc MADE student
For the MADE program, cases like this one are precisely the point. Students aren't just studying urban challenges in the abstract — they're practicing the skills needed to navigate complexity, broker between stakeholders, and help cities move from intention to action. Beyond design proposals, the project demonstrates how MADE students are trained to become urban engineers. They learn to move between fieldwork and policy, find the middle ground between creativity and feasibility, as well as vision and pragmatism.
The group summed up their experience in three words: "Embrace the chaos."
With shifting mobility patterns and growing environmental awareness reshaping urban life, the challenge wasn't just about Amsterdam — it pointed to a transformation likely to ripple across the Netherlands and beyond. The municipality, meanwhile, continues to develop its gas station transition strategy, and these five students have already started mapping the landscape of what's possible.
Read the student's findings on Openresearch Amsterdam
Photocredit: Coen Dijkstra