Nobody gets excited about roadworks. Detours, waiting, mess, noise, and in Amstelveen receiving it all of it at once, for years on end, while the A9 highway is widened and partly covered over. The municipality asked for a communications strategy that would bring the area development around the A9, and the three new land bridges in particular, to its residents as a single coherent story. The aim from here on: involve residents in the planning, the participation and the milestones. The real question wasn’t how to explain the works. It was how to make people feel positive about a city that's a building site.
Three insights carried the strategy.
1. Coherence creates meaning: With eleven sub-projects and almost as many channels, one recognisable story is what gives every single message its context.
2. Perspective creates patience: When the end result stays vague, disruption is harder to bear, so we moved the focus off what's happening now and onto what's coming.
3. Involvement creates ownership: Residents who think along become ambassadors, which makes participation the core of the strategy rather than one more channel in it.
All of it landed on a single line (in Dutch): Amstelveen samen verder. 'Samen' (Together) because the city belongs to everyone, and because north and south are literally being reunited. 'Verder' (Moving forward) for the progress being made and the passage being opened.
From there we built a visual language on the municipality's existing identity: dynamic enough to show movement, timeless enough to still hold up years from now, open enough to speak to every resident. An interplay of lines travels across every medium, with circles and dots marking the intersections where people and projects meet, and smart crops that let the system zoom in on western, central or eastern stretch without ever losing sight of the whole.
We won the pitch, and with it the room to develop the full picture: the umbrella concept, the visual identity across all three districts, and a hyperlocal multi-channel plan that meets residents both on the street and on their screens alike. For years, the A9 has been what separates Amstelveen. We get to help turn it into what connects it.
