About me
My name is Romee Nicolai (25) and am elected as a bicycle mayor of Amsterdam since February 2024. From my background born and raised Amsterdam resident and bike lover, I am familiar with the city structure and related mobility issues and learned from a young age to cycle everywhere and learned how to maintain my own bike. Nowadays I combine my expierence as projectlead of the Bike Kitchen UvA with a master urban planning at the University of Amsterdam. Here, I see the opportunity to build and intensify bridges between societal- practical- and academic knowledge about cycling by getting a better understanding of the behavioural patterns and individual norms around mobility.My vision here is to form a collective of ‘thought leaders’ around cycling in- and outside the city.
My plans for the term
During my role as bicycle mayor of Amsterdam I want to fulfill in this goal by creating awareness and consciousness about the value of products (in this case: bicycles), by stimulating ownership and autonomy over bicycles. This can be achieved by means of self-repair facilities as Bike Kitchens or street experiments in which interaction and encounterment become new norms, instead of efficiency or speed. By creating this possibility of creatig ‘the slow city’ or ‘the safe city’, the conceptualization of a bicycle can be transformed in not only seing it as a functional transport-mode but more as a means of self-expression and freedom.
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