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Title: A Visit to Amsterdam
Author: Colin Ward
Language: en
Topics: Europe, Freedom, Netherlands, squatting, United Kingdom
Source: Retrieved on 1 January 1999 from http://www.tao.ca/~freedom/ams.html
Notes: From Freedom

Colin Ward

A Visit to Amsterdam

Explaining the British political climate to Lewis Mumford in the summer

of 1945, Frederic Osborn wrote that “In the last few weeks there has

been organised squatting in empty mansions, with enough public approval

to force the government and the authorities into more active

requisitioning — a score for the anarchists”. Nearly a quarter of a

century later, squatting was revived in the London boroughs because of

the scandal of publicly-owned housing left empty for years awaiting

future redevelopment that frequently failed to happen. It was met with

ruthless mayhem by ‘bailiffs’ employed by councils and the deliberate

wrecking by council employees of habitable houses.

Then some local authorities aimed at a more constructive policy. It is

significant that Ron Bailey, one of the initiators of the 1968 squats,

dedicates his recent book Homelessness: What Can Be Done? to a

Conservative local politician “in admiration of the astonishing courage

and vision he showed in entering into the first legal agreement with

squatters in 1969”, and he goes on to say that “as a result of his

action, tens of thousands of homes that would otherwise have stayed

empty have been brought back into use and hundreds of thousands of

homeless people given new hope and dignity”.

This provides interesting insights into the ‘threshold of tolerance’ of

politicians, for since the early 1970s governments of both major parties

have sought to update the laws of 1381 and 1623 relating to squatting

and to shift it from the realm of civil law to that of criminal law,

finally (so the government thinks) settled by the inclusion of a clause

about Aggravated Trespass in the Criminal Justice Act of 1994.

It is always useful to make international comparisons and the first of

these that occurs to most people is that of Copenhagen where the big

area now called Christiania has been a squat for almost a quarter of a

century. A visit to its variegated site is by now part of the tourist

agenda.

But it is Amsterdam, for many people the most enjoyable city in Europe,

that provides the most interesting lessons about squatting. As in

London, there were always people who were squatters ‘on the quiet’, not

wanting to be seen as unofficial inhabitants, but the public phase began

with that interesting movement, first called Provo and then called the

Kabouters, who pioneered the occupation of empty property in the old

city.

Much more recently Edward W. Soja, who teaches urban and regional

planning at the University of California, came to the University of

Amsterdam as a visiting professor and in a lecture sponsored by the City

at the Centre for Metropolitan Research there, he talked about the

Stimulus of a little Conffesion. He took this phrase from an account of

the Netherlands by Henry James in 1875, and as his text a passage from

Simon Schama’s great book on the evolution of Dutch culture. Schama says

in explaining his historical theme:

‘What, then, is the Dutch culture offered here? An allegiance that was

fashioned as the consequence, not the cause, of freedom, and that was

defined by common habits rather than legislated by institutions. It was

a manner of sharing a peculiar — very peculiar — space at a particular

time ... the product of the encounter between fresh historical

experience and the constraints of geography.’

It is in this light that Soja sees Amsterdam’s squatters, “a remarkably

successful example of gentrification by the youthful poor”, and he notes

that:

“... the squatter movement was more than just an occupation of abandoned

offices, factories, warehouses and some residences. It was a fight for

the rights to the city itself, especially for the young and for the

poor. Nowhere has this struggle been more successful than in Amsterdam.

Nowhere has it been less successful than in Los Angeles.”

But as our failiar property boom and the lust for lucrative

redevelopment hit Amsterdam too, pressure for law-and-order came from

the development industry. In 1980, which was coronation year in the

Netherlands, street battles between police and squatters brought a great

wave of public sympathy, not for the state’s over-reaction but for the

young and lawless. In the Centrum, squatters displaced by new office

blocks were provided with alternative sites “in an accomplished give and

take trade-off with the urban authorities”, and Sojapraises the new

accommodation between the city and its squatters, which he calls “highly

regulated urban anarchism”. This is precisely the kind of deal that Ron

Bailey attributes to the wisdom of the late Councillor Herbert Eames of

Lewisham.

In steps another witness. David Carr-Smith as spent five years watching

squats in abandoned industrial buildings in Amsterdam, not in the

central Spuistraat district studied by Soja, but in the waterside

equivalent of say, London’s Docklands, full of vast buildings outmoded

by economic change. On 28^(th) November at the University of North

London, he dazzled an audience of designers by showing 200 slides to

demonstrate the aesthetic qualities of this improvised architecture,

which provides “the vitality of a modern urban-vernacular based on

recycling of rich-city refuse, improvisational intelligence and

individualistic self-interest, enabled and sustained by its context of

co-operation”. He went on to illustrate how these buildings have

engendered:

‘... an astonishingly rich variety of self-invented architecture:

living-places, apartments and indeed whole houses build within the vast

and simple or labyrinthine factory spaces. Improvised from basic

construction products and the detritus of their sites and the

surrounding city, they evolve from simple enclosures through stages of

increasing complexity — some become ‘expressive’ espousing daring

structural inventions, others develop into ‘aesthetically superb

city-apartments’ or complete little ‘family-homes’ bizarrely nested

within the impersonal factory spaces.”

He showed pictures of Tetterode as a place where the squat had evolved

from huge living-spaces into self-contained family dwellings as the

occupants had children and were alert to their needs. Both sides in the

arguments over squatting had learned from the battles over the site now

occupied by Holiday Inn, and the unofficial occupiers of Tetterode won a

collective 50-year lease with collective mortgage terms in their favour.

And he showed slides of a site of long former railway sheds near the

central station which had been converted by its occupants into a

waterside idyll of little houses, and of another huge grain warehouse,

Silo, transformed into “an enormous warren of cave-like spaces”. Despite

the lessons of the past, these sites are threatened. Carr-Smith had seen

the members of the City Redesign Team walking around the northern edge

of the city without noticing these creative transformations since their

minds were fixed on redevelopment proposals, as in similar areas of

Bntish cities, for office blocks, up-market residences and appropriate

boutiques and restaurants. He doesn’t envisage the confrontations of the

past, but thinks that very inadequate alternative sites will be offered

to these creative squatters. In British terms, the very thought of

negotiations with squatters belongs to the past — ‘licensed squats’ and

short-term housing co-ops and Ron Bailey’s negotiations with

councillors. Government has settled for the Criminal Justice Act. Our

assumptions about the nature of urban living have been shrivelled down

to the quick-buck culture of the property development industry, and it

is left to the disinherited young to protest against the loss of the

stimulus of a little confusion.

Now I’m aware of course that there are anarchists around who regarded

Ron Bailey and people like him as renegades for entering into deals with

local authorities for licensed squats, even though there are housing

co-ops in London today which grew out of them. These critics would

rather that the squatters had gone down fighting under the banner of ‘No

Surrender’. Maybe they have their equivalent in Amsterdam too.

I don’t share this view. When Bailey had the chance to write a book on

The Squatters his publishers, Penguin Books, cut out his chapter called

‘In Defence of Direct Action’ which, no doubt, they thought was only of

interest to a partisan audience. He eventually got it published in 1974,

and in it he explained that:

“In the squatters movement I have worked with ordinary non-political

people for admittedly small gains, and we achieved a large measure of

success. Ordinary people acted and won; and ordinary people manage the

houses in which they now live. So when councils offered to hand over

houses, we accepted these rather than fight over them unnecessarily. And

I make no apology for this, for a number of reasons: first it achieved

the immediate aim of the squatters, a decent place in which to live, and

secondly it achieved more — additional houses were handed over to the

squatters. What do those who claim that these deals were a sell-out

suggest we should have done? Should we have refused to accept the houses

and so leave them empty? Or perhaps we should have insisted that the

squatting in them remained unlawful so that a confrontation could

occur.”

His belief was that the squatters’ movement of those days “demonstrates

daily the message that badly housed people are capable of organising

their own lives. This is the kind of message that revolutionaries should

be seeking to get across day after day month after month”.

Bailey was writing twenty years ago, and the appalling thing to my mind

is that public attitudes towards the squatters have shifted in harmony

with those of politicians and bureaucrats. My Dutch friends always chide

me for having too optimistic a view of the culture which enjoys the

stimulus of a little confusion. But that’s because they haven’t

experienced the descent into claustrophobia of British politics in the

1990s. They haven’t experienced a piece of legislation like the Criminal

Justice Act.