Regenerative Intensive – 16th of April

It was our honor and pleasure to host Jenny Andersson, from the Really Regenerative Centre (Home – The Really Regenerative Centre), on April 15 and 16, 2024.

Two inspiring days at the Amsterdam Urban Leisure & Tourism Lab of Hogeschool Inholland, where on day 1, in collaboration with the tourism industry in the Netherlands, we explored the future of urban tourism in Amsterdam and the Netherlands.
This involved examining complex questions facing tourism.

• How will the role of tourism change in light of planetary overshoot?
• What new roles might emerge within tourism to restructure and redesign it as an economy to meet these challenges?
• How can tourism build capacity to integrate into multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder approaches to climate, biodiversity, energy, transportation?

In doing so, we worked collectively on questions such as:

• What are the systems in which your enterprise is nested?
• How can you regenerate the dynamic relationships between those systems so that you create future viability and vitality for ecology, economy and culture?
• How can you help organizations design for wholeness rather than fragmentation?
• How can you always consider the health of whole systems?

On Day 2, Jenny Andersson, Zac Woolfitt (lab director) and Roos Gerritsma (lab lead) had created a customized program for the lab track students. The students designed interventions for Amsterdam North to heal narratives of separation and polarization in the community. Central was the “Law of Three” model through which we looked at the three forces (activating, reactive and connecting) that are often present in the field with which you seek change. We actively searched for the connecting force, which we summarized within the lab track as bridge-building through tools such as storytelling and tours/tours.

Power of Place, PD (professional doctorate) and NUT (new urban tourism)

Power of Place, PD (professional doctorate) and NUT (new urban tourism) Ko Koens and Roos Gerritsma followed Jenny Andersson’s Power of Place training from the Really Regenerative Centre in recent years (Home – The Really Regenerative Centre).

Jenny’s trainings on April 15 and 16 are part of Roos Gerritsma’s PD (professional docterate in higher education); she is one of the critical friends from the field involved. In the afternoon the three of them went through the first version of Roos’ conceptual model on urban forms of regenerative tourism. It caused quite a redesign 😉 .

The conversation also sharpened thinking about the possible role of the NUT lectureship toward co-shaping a regenerative way of working in tourism.