Amsterdam Doughnut
In April 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Amsterdam announced the adoption of the doughnut as its official framework for post-pandemic economic reconstruction. Working with Raworth and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Amsterdam produced a "City Portrait" — a detailed accounting of the city's current position relative to both the social foundation and the ecological ceiling, adapted to local conditions.
In the AI Story
The Amsterdam portrait revealed, on the social-foundation side, gaps in affordable housing, healthcare access, and participation in public life. On the ecological-ceiling side, it showed Amsterdam's consumption footprint transgressing multiple boundaries, with a particularly large contribution from imported goods whose ecological costs occurred elsewhere. The city committed to designing policies — in procurement, housing, food, circular economy, and climate — explicitly oriented toward moving the portrait toward the doughnut's safe and just space.
The adoption has been imitated by cities including Copenhagen, Brussels, Portland, Nanaimo, Berlin, Melbourne, and Barcelona. A network of doughnut cities now shares implementation tools, measurement methodologies, and policy design. The movement from academic framework to operational municipal policy in three years is unusual in the history of economic thought.
Applied to AI governance, the Amsterdam precedent suggests a pathway. Cities and regions can adopt doughnut frameworks that include AI-specific considerations — data center siting, platform governance, algorithmic procurement, digital literacy infrastructure — as part of the portrait. The framework enables local authorities to evaluate AI deployments against social-foundation and ecological-ceiling criteria rather than against growth metrics alone.
The limitation is scale. Municipal action can shape local outcomes but cannot, on its own, redirect the global AI industry's trajectory. Amsterdam's procurement choices affect Amsterdam; they do not affect Anthropic's training runs or TSMC's manufacturing lines. The doughnut framework needs national and international adoption to bear on AI governance at scale.
Key Ideas
First major implementation. Amsterdam's 2020 adoption demonstrated the framework's operational viability at municipal scale.
City Portrait methodology. The diagnostic tool that translates the framework into local accounting of social and ecological performance.
Network effect. Amsterdam's adoption catalyzed dozens of subsequent municipal implementations worldwide.
Scale limitation. Municipal action is necessary but insufficient for governing industries of global scale.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Creating City Portraits (2020)
- City of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Circular Strategy 2020–2025 (2020)
- Ciaran Mundy, "How Amsterdam's Doughnut Could Change How We Measure Economic Success," Guardian (2020)
- Thriving Cities Initiative, Network Updates (ongoing)
- Leonora Grcheva and Andrew Fanning, The Amsterdam City Doughnut (2020)