 I wanted to ask you, let's say you wake up tomorrow and Amsterdam just disappeared, just gone. How different would that day be? For the Netherlands? Yeah. No, that would not work. It won't change the Netherlands, I think. Amsterdam is of course, it hosts our financial economy like stock exchange and all banks are there, big offices are there, so big companies. So a lot of, you would gain a lot of unemployment, but it's not like the country would stop working if Amsterdam wasn't there anymore. So my name is Natressen Schendel. Well, my name is Lars Munoz-Walfi. Hello. I'm a famous comp-huis or camp-shis, or I don't know, the Brazilian Portuguese word for camp-home, but that's my name. I'm Max. I'm 22 years old. I studied urban design in Defter, or at Saksjön. I graduated urban design at Saksjön University in the Netherlands. And I'm now studying urban studies at Malmo University in Sweden. I'm 23 years old. I'm studying currently studying a master's program at Osmos University in Rotterdam. I graduated my bachelor's degree in environmental science and now I'm studying my master's in environmental and society studies. Now I'm doing my master's in urbanism from the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is really important for the, yeah, for the finance and for the economics in the Netherlands. There's a lot of companies based in Amsterdam. There's so much to do, like Amsterdam is the kind of city, and that's what I love about cities in general, but Amsterdam has that more, that where you walk out of your front door, everything you want to do you could possibly think of in your mind is within a 10 minute biking radius. Well, I have everything here. It's my work, my school. Yeah, I have everything in my street, two supermarkets and grocery stores, and everything here is walking distance, actually. Can you tell us, like, how it came to be when it first became Amsterdam? Well, when it became Amsterdam was something different than when it became to be, was around the year 1000 mark, maybe 1200s, but when it actually became Amsterdam, so in other words when they dammed the river Amstel, that wasn't until a couple of hundred years later, so 1400 to 1500, is when they dammed the body of water to the north, which is called the A, that's the body of water that connects to the sea, and the river, the Amstel, and the reason they dammed that is basically so they could make taxes. Amsterdam, so it started making money out of these taxes, like ships that had to come in to trade? Yes, exactly. And it was kind of small scale at first, so a lot of fish, and a lot of beer, and a lot of bread, local products, basically. And when did Amsterdam, like, start actually growing to a rich city? I'd say that happened right around the 1500 mark, so after the Middle Ages. And that's also when we become, or when we're nearing the Dutch golden ages, what they call it, so the 1600s. And in the 1600s, it was really booming, and blooming, for that matter. So that's when trade expanded internationally, the city grew larger. So beyond its medieval core, you can still now see on city maps that this central sliver of Amsterdam is filled with tight little streets and small little houses. You can literally see that's kind of medieval age city planning. And then around that is this larger system of canals, which were required for the larger trade and larger boats. And how did Amsterdam, like, how were the, this moment after the Golden Age of Amsterdam, let's say, 18th century to the 19th century? So the city expanded, where a lot of people in the hinterland, first providing for the city, came to the city to seek jobs in other sectors. And that's when these massive areas around the city center were built, sort of like in a half shape, half moon shape. At first, industrialism was portrayed as something beautiful, something good. So in the beginning of the industrial age, you'll find paintings of Amsterdam where these factories, they would build factories with neighborhoods around them. So the neighborhoods catering to the factories, which meant the factories were in the city, right? And these factories were painted in beautiful colors and sunlight on them. And everything was golden and shiny and all was good. And it took a while, maybe a generation or two, at least a couple of decades, before people realized, hey, wait a minute, these factories aren't good for our health. Yeah, around the turn of that century, when not only the people, or not only the poor people, but also the rich people and the people in power started to realize, this is a problem and it's not only the poor people being affected by it, but now it's also us. That's when on a political level, Amsterdam, two different things. They introduced the new housing laws at the turn of the century. I believe they're from 1904 or 1903, which meant a lot of changes in sanitation in how you're supposed to live in new building codes and new building regulations. But it also meant that a lot of the older buildings had to be modified. They were not suitable to live in. The world seemed to be heading in this direction, like even Chicago, Sao Paulo, nobody seemed to realize that it was such a problem to design for cars. But the Netherlands realized it quite soon. How and how did it change? The Dutch have kind of a culture of complaining about things. People took to the streets. So there were massive riots and protests against government legislature allowing all these cars to use a drive freely to the country. They were calling for more space or giving space back to the cyclists. At some point, it got really personal because a lot of these deaths in traffic were cyclists, were children. So the whole country kind of got off their seats and they wanted something done about making cycle traffic safer. Let's say that you wake up tomorrow and Amsterdam is gone. How do you think that changes the Netherlands? I would hate that. I think it matters more to foreigners because Amsterdam is the only thing most people know. The majority of the population of Amsterdam is foreign. Not that I hate foreigners, but it's 51% of the population is from different countries. Amsterdam is by the way the only city in the world that hosts every nationality of this world that this planet has. And it's also nice just to have a decent mix between Dutch and foreign people because also the spoken language in Amsterdam is English. Yeah, so I think we just lose a very old tourist city with millions of people. It would have a huge economical impact. The social, cultural, financial, international hub that it is cannot be replaced by another city in the Netherlands. Would you live there? I think, yeah. I absolutely would if it wasn't so damn expensive. Not so sure yet. No, I don't think so. The problem is that it's really expensive. A small apartment, a really small apartment like a 24 square meter apartment could be like 1,000 euros each month, so that's ridiculously much. I still have to finish four more years. So yeah, maybe I can't imagine having a studio or something here, but maybe not the whole thing. I like private space and private space is pretty uncommon here in Amsterdam. But yeah, maybe not in the city center, but a little out of the city center. There's a lot of nice places to live. It's full of tourists, so if you live there, I think after a few weeks, like you're like done with the tourists. You're like, you know, they're everywhere in the street, making pictures, like blocking the roads, and I think you would go crazy after all. So what happens? Did something happen? Oh, yeah, yeah. To the video, by the way.