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struggles across the globe with the most important being the French May protests ; Porter, 2016;
Ross, 2002), the US-centred counterculture (hippism, pacifism, sexual liberation), and the anti-colonial struggles (Ross, 2002). University students often emerged as the avant-garde of the movements (Handler, 1992; Mayer, 2009), with workers and other groups following and playing their own – often concealed in popular historiography (Ross, 2002) – role (Porter, 2016).
Some years later, this optimistic and ambitious wave was substituted with a more down-to-earth and at the same time angry one. The late seventies and eighties saw the rise of punk. The focus went from theory to praxis. In Europe at least, the previous revolutionary avant-gardes were disregarded as too absorbed in theoretical contestations, patronising and in the end not helpful for the movement (Andresen & van der Steen, 2016; Boggs, 1986). Some groups were alienated from the prospect of any positive political change to the extent that they brought forth a self-image of despair and hopelessness, which fed anger. Such groups were highly present in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and London (Braungart & Braungart, 1990). The new youth movements in Europe were more focused on locality and the neighbourhood (van der Steen et al., 2014). Instead of mass, nationwide popular mobilisation and revolution, the preferred purpose was an alternative way of living in the spaces that capitalist growth neglected. Concurrently, large protests continued to emerge. Highly popular in Western Europe were the peace protests, mainly against USA strategies, as well as the environmentalist and anti-nuclear protests (Braungart & Braungart, 1990). Nonetheless, we should not forget that these social movements involved a limited percentage of the population. At the same time that some youths sought emancipation and clashed with the state authorities, we had the rise of a yuppie and apolitical youth (Andresen &
van der Steen, 2016). The highly politicised landscape that characterised the century was withdrawing in favour of a compartmentalised reality, where extremely different cultural and political spheres would coexist in a parallel way, without interacting with each other.
The second, narrower circle, refers to the squatting movements that appeared mainly in North-western Europe. Several writers limit the phenomenon of expanded squatting movements in a small number of European states: The Netherlands, Western Germany and Denmark, and to a smaller extent Switzerland and Austria, while some influence came also from Italy (Andresen &
van der Steen, 2016; Katsiaficas, 2006; van der Steen et al., 2014). The authors suggest that the power of the social welfare which is common between these states is the reason that mass
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squatting movements emerged there (Andresen & van der Steen, 2016). As a side remark though, we can see that these movements also pushed the social welfare measures further, as seen in the case of social housing in Amsterdam Centrum. Thus, we could consider this relationship as a bidirectional one. Social welfare meant that a lot of young people had the means to live without the need to work or study very hard in their twenties. This provided time to invest in the movement (Kadir, 2014). At the same time, social welfare states were open to compromise and giving space to the movement. Finally, as we will see in the Dutch case, the legislation sometimes benefited the movement. In many cases, these relations led to a shift of the movements’ interest towards collaboration with the government. They became movements “within and against the state” (Mayer, 2009). In response, the respective states started to cooperate with the movements in order to facilitate urban revitalisation and raise their legitimacy (Mayer, 2009; Owens, 2009). In Amsterdam, this strategy would become very impactful starting from 1998 (Draaisma, 2019).
These squatter movements were interconnected and the one influenced the other (Katsiaficas, 2014; Owens et al., 2013). The slogan shouted by aspiring squatters in Hannover “Bremen – Zurich – Amsterdam, jetzt ist auch Hannover dran’” manifests this (Andresen & van der Steen, 2016).
Within the movement, Amsterdam squatters were considered among the most experienced: some of them would even travel to Barcelona to provide the local movement with expertise (Owens et al., 2013).
Other countries had of course their own, similar movements, though there are important differences that mark other paradigms. For example, Southern Europe was recovering from right-wing dictatorships and had mainly Marxist movements, while eastern Europe had underground movements working in the little space that Stalinist regimes left open (Andresen & van der Steen, 2016).
The movement in Amsterdam
The size of the squatting movement in Amsterdam was massive. According to Duivenvoorden (2012 [2000]), 45-70.000 people had some kind of relationship with the movement between 1964 and 1999. This size is more understandable if we remind ourselves that the bulk of squatting was
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not linked with strictly political reasonings. A lot of people squatted just for housing (Owens, 2009). There was of course a core of ideologically equipped activists who were acting as catalysts in many cases, organising the action of squatting, providing expertise and support. But there were also persons that squatted without any communication with those activists.
We should keep in mind that in the Netherlands, until 2010, the act of breaking into a house for squatting may have been illegal, but squatting per se was not (Gemert et al., 2012). For many years, a law defined that someone could prove that they use a space as a residence if they could display a chair, a table and a bed. If you were considered a resident, the legal owner had to go on a judicial fight to evict you. Through the years, squatters instrumentalised further legal tools, such as housing policies for singles and two-person households in the late seventies and early eighties (Kadir, 2014). Generally, there have been a variety of cases in which the state came to compromise with the squatters. After some years of squatting, many squats were legalised with the help of the municipality, which paid a large part or the whole amount for the purchase of the building (Draaisma, 2019; Owens, 2009).
Places and Parts
The movement was active in a variety of neighbourhoods. The most active squatting neighbourhoods were those in the centre (Nieuwmarkt, Grachtengordel, Plantage) and those on the surrounding 19th century belt (Staatsliedenbuurt, De Pijp, Indische Buurt, Dapperbuurt) (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]; Kadir, 2014; Owens, 2009). The squatting scene had different characteristics from place to place, and the movement was primarily organised at the level of the neighbourhood. However, squatters from each neighbourhood met for coordination in structures like SOK (Stedelijk Overleg Kraakgroepen / City-wide Consultation of Squatting groups), a periodical meeting for all the city (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]).
Kadir (2014) pays a lot of attention to the diversity of the movement, which is often underplayed in the common narratives around it. She claims that there is a reified image of the movement centred on white, male, highly politicised, violent activists. In what she calls a “funhouse mirror effect”, the movement’s representation is focused on certain minorities who did ‘mediagenic’
activities, such as riots and interruptions of the city council. “Many squatters”, she states, “were
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constantly negotiating with this imaginary ideal”. Militancy and violence, for Andresen and van der Steen (2016), should not be considered as central events, but as a “cultural common ground”.
According to Kadir, the historic literature does not avoid the same bias (Kadir, 2014). As researchers, we should avoid falling for the charm of violent confrontations, which are only a part of the movement’s reality (Haunss, 2016). One of the reasons for such biases is that it is exactly the politically determined and educated people and groups that most often leave texts. We should not take into account only those who produce pamphlets (Friedrichs, 2016). Thus, any research that hopes to be inclusive in the future needs to follow to a certain extent an oral history perspective.
In any case, there was and still exists an amount of highly politicised squatters that facilitate squatting (Kadir, 2014; Owens, 2009). Back in the seventies and eighties, these people would be present when someone wanted to squat a house, or when a squatter faced the threat of eviction.
But the squatters themselves were various kinds of people. In older decades, a large part came from the working class of the city. There were also a lot of students and youths (Gemert et al., 2012). Another group were those who squatted for a place that could house their art or craft. The latter current created a lot of art spaces, which still form an important spine of Amsterdam’s alternative scene. OCCII and OT301 are two great examples. There were also pacifist squatters, whose activities were centred more on an alternative lifestyle than politics. Ruigoord is a very special example of a squat following such a trajectory. An old village about to be torn down for the development of the port, it was saved by squatters who use it till today as a space for alternative ways of living. These groups were not always mutually exclusive. They can better be described as tendencies, sometimes merging together in the squatting stories of individuals (Owens, 2009).
To these, we must add the paradigm of the Bijlmer squatters. In the 1970s several people, mainly of Surinamese origin, squatted in this southern new neighbourhood of Amsterdam for housing.
Here we have a squatting wave that was almost completely unlinked with the situation in the centre, the krakers’ assemblies and the battles against redevelopment (Kadir, 2014). This part of squatting in Amsterdam is largely neglected by historiography (Kadir 2014).
39 Periods
The start of the movement goes back to the middle of the 60s (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]).
There were small traces before (Owens, 2009), but without significant continuity, and consequently, we will take the sixties as a start for the sake of briefness. The first stage was centred around housing problems of the youth and the working class (Gemert et al., 2012). In this period, many people squatted only for housing (Owens, 2009), with the help of youth support organisations that even received funds from the state (Duivenvoorden, 2012; Kadir, 2014). In 1971, a Supreme Court decision provided squatters with access to the right of domestic peace, a decision that made evictions very difficult (Duivenvoorden, 2012[2000]). In this period, the movement coexisted with relative yet different movements, such as the Provos (Kennedy, 1995;
Mamadouh, 1992). After the end of the Provo movement, many of them would join the squatters, especially through the organisation “Koöperatief Woningburo de Kraker” (Gemert et al., 2012;
Kennedy, 1995).
In the second stage, we have the central battle of Nieuwmarkt. There, squatters were mobilised to stop a specific plan for the redevelopment of the city, which included a motorway and a metro line passing through the neighbourhood of Nieuwmarkt, in central Amsterdam (Kennedy, 1995).
This redevelopment was part of a greater vision for building radial and circular highways which would open the city of Amsterdam to the car.
Nieuwmarkt lies on the eastern part of medieval Amsterdam, between the Red-Light District and the Plantage. There falls part of the old Jewish neighbourhood, which was stripped of its population in the Shoah. A lot of buildings collapsed after the war and there were many open spaces. Generally, the area to be affected by the redevelopment contained a dense, historic, yet in bad condition urban fabric. The main organisation of the squatters in the area was Action Groep Nieuwmarkt (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]). The squatters opposed the plan by occupying a large number of houses in the development line (Mamadouh, 1992), and finally, in 1975, by confronting violently the police forces that came to impose the demolitions (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]).
Finally, the plan for the motorway was abandoned; till today, the high traffic road ends at Sint Antoniesluis, in front of Huis de Pinto, an important historic stately house that was saved from demolition. The metro plan however continued, and a large part of the neighbourhood was demolished and rebuilt (Duivenvoorden, 2012 [2000]). In this battle, the squatters’ movement had mobilised heritage to an important extent (See De Cesari and Herzfeld 2015). This aspect of the
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movement bears great potential for future heritage research. Nevertheless, this is not the object of our current research.
The next stage of the movement is generally perceived as more violent. It is marked by famous events, such as the Vondelstraat and the coronation riots. There, the riots escalated with military tanks mobilised by the state to destroy the barriers (Owens, 2009, 43). Also in this stage, the targets of the squatters widened to include large buildings, often owned by speculators, like those in Grachtengordel (Gemert et al., 2012). In this era, a specific group of highly militant activists, generally called the politicos and based on the neighbourhood of Staatsliedenbuurt (northwest part of the 19th-century belt), came to dominate the movement (Kadir, 2014). The politicos were a controversial avant-garde. They were the most organised group, helping more loose groups to get out of tricky situations. At the same time, their violent behaviours towards people that they considered harmful for the movement and their insistence on violence regardless of its effectiveness created hatred toward them by other squatters. Eventually, they became marginalised within the movement (Kadir 2014).
Various historical accounts of the movement like to put ending titles right here. The violent climax, followed by the defeat of the squatters and the fall of the politicos seem as a matching end to the drama of the kraakbeweging (Owens, 2009). However, as Kadir (2014) notes, this is a narrative bias. The movement changed and went into new phases, but no one can objectively put a full stop somewhere. In the eighties, at the same time that radical squatters preferred confrontation with the police, others pushed for the legalisation of their squats, often with success (Draaisma, 2019). Owens warns that the decline of the political power of a movement like this is not necessarily equal to a decline of the movement as a whole (Owens, 2009). The decline however deepened the already existing divisions within the movement (ibid).
Nevertheless, the late eighties and nineties saw a series of legal reforms that made things more difficult for squatters. To this, we should add the stricter rules for welfare benefits and university scholarships, which made life more difficult for the youth that used to devote themselves to the movement. The huge surplus of time that supported a squatting life was not there anymore (Kadir 2014). At the same time, Amsterdam was becoming largely gentrified. The irony is that one can link the kraakbeweging itself with the circumstances that enhanced gentrification. The squatters contributed to the saving of the iconic historic urban fabric of Amsterdam and took part in the establishment of its myth as a creative, libertarian city. In other words, the city was ideally
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attractive now for tourists, creative middle class and expats: the frontlines of gentrification. At the same time, the nineties and early 2000s saw new synergies between the municipal authorities and the creative sector of the movement (Owens, 2009), which led to the creation or consolidation of a large inventory of alternative hubs, contributing to the image of the creative city (Culturele Stelling van Amsterdam, 2021; Draaisma, 2019).
In any case, the last decades witnessed a large number of evictions. The squats that are active nowadays are a very small percentage of those that were once present (Squatting Europe Kollective, n.d.). There is a good percentage however that have not been evicted but legalised. In many cases, these legalised squats are administered by the societies of the people that live in them. In some cases, legalised squats also maintain a radical political identity.
The decrease of the squats falls together with a wider phenomenon in the politics of the country, which is described as the “Dutch turn to the right” (van den Hemel, 2018). This has to do with the withdrawal of the Workers Party (PvdA) from their prominent position in the political scene and the movement of the central binary to the right-wing, in terms of its liberal and populist versions (see the central election binary for a large part of the 2010s: VVD versus PVV). Class issues have lost their important place in political discourse, while capitalism and to an extent neoliberalism are not as easily questioned as they were 40 years ago. This relates to a Pan-European trend. At the high point of the movement, synergies and compromises were common between them and social-democratic authorities and institutions. Now, this is far less possible, lowering the potential of the movement to achieve material victories.
Today, Amsterdam is still facing a housing crisis. Some activists view it as even more serious than in previous decades. There are reasons for this: Since the 90s, neoliberalism has transformed many of the previous housing verenigingen into private corporations. The abovementioned rise of tourism, the hype of the creative city and the development of Amsterdam to a world-class financial centre have seen house prices rise significantly. A largely unregulated market has benefited from the abovementioned capital inflow, with permanent residents driven more and more to the distant suburbs where the prices are affordable, or even to satellite cities like Almere.
In the autumn when this research took place, 2021, there was a re-emergence of a housing rights movement. In the margins of massive demonstrations against the power of the markets, groups
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with an anarchist and feminist background moved to squat attempts and clashed with highly aggressive police. Two new squats opened.
At the same time, former squats that are now legalised artistic spaces like OCCII, OT301 and in a different way Ruigoord, are now vital hotspots of creativity and are entangled in semi-institutionalised networks of the culture sector (Culturele Stelling van Amsterdam, 2021). Pruijt (2004) speaks about a flexible institutionalisation of the movement. For him, the movement is long term oriented and can survive keeping its central aim, which continues to be squatting, despite the involvement with institutions. On the other side, Uitermark in response to Pruijt claims that the artistic scene of the movement is being co-opted by the municipality and this leads to de-radicalisation (Uitermark, 2004).
Amsterdam has changed a lot since the emergence of the movement, but it faces similar housing problems as in the past. It is in this context that the squatters’ movement of the past becomes heritage. The movement has been addressed through a historic perspective but has not been thoroughly analysed as heritage. To do this, one needs to go beyond the linear narratives. More than that, one should step out of the representation of the movement through its texts and mediagenic events. One way to do that is by digging into the deeply individual perspective of the participants. There is a large potential there, very often neglected in accounts of historical movements, who tend to turn around social and mass perspectives. My methodology, I hope, can shed some light on these areas.
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