Amsterdam City Centre - Amsterdam Underground - Real stories of life on the streets.
A walking tour through Amsterdam's centrum, told by the people who have lived it from the margins, on the Saturday after KFF26 closes. Lived experience as expertise, the city's underside revealed by the narrators usually rendered invisible.
Saturday May 30 · 14:00–15:30 Starting point: Outside of Café Dwaze Zaken, Spuistraat 172, 1012 VT Amsterdam
Amsterdam Underground runs walking tours guided by people with first-hand experience of homelessness in the city. The streets you've walked past as a visitor become something else when the person leading you across them has slept on them, found shelter in them, and worked their way back from them. Survival, resilience, recovery, and the systems that shape all three, narrated from the inside.
The tour winds through Amsterdam's centrum on foot in a small group of fifteen, with stops the guide chooses based on their own story. You'll hear about the city's social infrastructure (and its gaps), the institutions and people that mattered along the way, and how a place looks different depending on who's standing in it. It's not a typical tour. It's a deliberate flip in who counts as the expert on a city.
This lands at lunchtime on the Saturday after the festival closes, an unhurried way to spend a chunk of the afternoon if you're still in town and want to keep meeting Amsterdam through voices most visitors never hear. It pairs naturally with a slower-paced morning, and rounds out the festival week with one of its most grounded experiences.
The metamorphosis at the heart of KFF26 is also at the heart of this tour: the listener and the teller flipped, the people usually spoken about doing the speaking instead.
YOUR EXPERIENCE INCLUDES (Free)
90-minute guided walking tour through Amsterdam's centrum
A small-group format (max 15) for genuine conversation along the way
First-hand storytelling from a guide with lived experience of life on Amsterdam's streets
A different lens on the city's social infrastructure, institutions, and the gaps in between
EXTRA
For anyone who would like to end the day together, we’d like to suggest an informal and completely optional get-together at for example Brouwerij De Prael (at your own expense).
Location: Oudezijds Armsteeg 26, 1012 GP Amsterdam
YOUR HOSTS
City of Amsterdam, coordinating with the Amsterdam Underground guide team for KFF26. The guide team at Amsterdam Underground, all of whom have personal lived experience of homelessness in the city.
A NOTE ON THIS EVENT This is a community-organised side event on the KFF26 Luma calendar, hosted by Amsterdam Underground in coordination with City of Amsterdam. It's not part of the official KFF26 programme; it's one of the gatherings the community is putting on around the festival to extend the conversation and the connections.
Capacity is intimate (~15). Reserve early.