An exploration of cohousing in Amsterdam from the perspective of the urban commons

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University of Amsterdam

Graduate School of Social Sciences

An Exploration of Cohousing in Amsterdam

from the Perspective of the Urban Commons

Master’s Thesis

Author: Lily Maxwell

Programme: Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning

Supervisor: Prof. Richard Ronald

Student Number: 12283525

Date: August 2019

Email: l.o.maxwell2@gmail.com

Word count: 19, 975

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Plagiarism Declaration

I hereby confirm that this thesis is my own work, that it is not copied from any other person's work (published or unpublished), and that it has not previously been submitted for assessment either at the University of Amsterdam or elsewhere. I have used the Harvard-UVA Convention for citation and referencing; each citation taken from the work(s) of other people and used in this thesis has been accordingly cited and referenced.

Name: Lily Maxwell Date: 12/08/2019

Student Number: 12283525 Signature:

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Abstract

There has been an upsurge in both actualised urban commons and cohousing initiatives and academic research into such projects, in the last two decades, in response to the growing social, economic and environmental crises we are facing globally – notably the global affordable housing crisis and climate change. With different views on how we should face such crises and provide effective solutions that prioritise socio-environmental justice for all, academic theory in both fields has become caught up in an ongoing and fairly polarised debate around questions of property relations, accessibility and inclusion. On one side, strict anti-capitalist scholars, often cohousing ‘cynics’, dismiss certain types of cohousing – notably privately-owned cohousing – as “corrupted commons” or “gated communities”, neglecting to consider, let alone investigate, the potentially radical ‘seeds of collective action’ present in such spaces (Tummers, 2016, p.2024; Stavrides, 2016, p.70, p.100; Chiodelli, 2015). On the other side, new urban commons, ‘cohousing believers’ and eco-feminist scholars have begun to examine and report the ‘emancipating potentialities’ of practices of commoning happening across all types of property ownership, promoting the potential of cohousing as a solution not only to the affordable housing crisis but also to other societal issues, such as ageing populations and the breakdown of “community” (Tummers, 2016, p.2024). The former are accused by the latter of being too “capitalocentric”, abstract and neglectful of the radical potentialities of ‘actually existing’ but imperfect commons, the latter are accused by the former of diluting their politics and celebrating false “commons” that are in fact only vehicles of neoliberalism’s insidious strategies to dispossess and enclose (Gibson-Graham, 2015; Williams, 2016; Harvey, 2014; Federici & Caffentzis, 2014; Stavrides, 2016; Eizenberg, 2012 in Noterman, 2015, p.434). Cohousing, as a real-life case of potential commoning, thus lies at the heart of this tension around accessibility and inclusion and, through empirically-grounded research, offers ways to elucidate the central arguments at the centre of both fields.

We argue that a nuanced pathway between both “capitalocentrism” and “post-capitalocentrism” is needed in order to recognise both the ‘emancipating’ and enclosing potentialities of different kinds of cohousing and to explore in more depth the relationship between property relations and practices of commoning happening within cohousing. Through qualitative, inductive, and comparative research across four cohouses in Amsterdam, Netherlands, we discover that a balanced approach to “assessing” commons reveals, in turn, a balanced picture. Our findings reveal that cohousing tenure – or ownership model – is an important but “mediating variable” when it comes to influencing the types and degrees of practices of commoning being reproduced in cohouses. Five other variables, which ‘pivot’ around tenure, appear to be key to influencing the degree and type of practices of commoning reproduced within any given cohouse: the political ideology of the community, the scale of the cohouse (number of occupants), the ratio of private to common spaces, the age-range of occupants, and the socio-economic and political context. In particular, we find that the rental cohouses in Amsterdam under study have a much more political ethos than the owner-occupied cohouses and engage in practices of commoning that would be considered more genuinely ‘post-capitalist’. The owner-occupied cohouses are seemingly more enclosed but nevertheless offer important insights into practices of commoning within large-scale communities and across generations. Our argument, therefore, concludes as it begun: there is a need for more in-depth, comparative research that explores the ‘emancipating potentialities’ of possible practices of commoning occurring across a range of cohousing with different ownership structures, while also recognising their potential to enclose and exclude. Through such research, we may better be able to identify persistent patterns within certain cohousing tenures and clarify if the conclusions found in this study can be generalised the cohousing and urban commons field at large. This would allow us to adjust urban policymaking practices to facilitate the development of cohousing that is accessible to a range of ages, economic backgrounds and political agendas in future, actively engendering ‘worlds of commoning’ that lead to “beyond-capitalist” subjects, identities and relations (Stavrides, 2016, p.32).

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Foreword

This thesis is the final proof of competence for obtaining the master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Amsterdam.

I would like to give huge thanks to the cohousing community members from Vrijburcht, Nautilus, Nieuwland and De Groenegemeenschap, who welcomed me into their homes, eagerly shared their intimate, personal experiences of “living together” with me and even let me volunteer and run my own events in their common spaces. I would also like to thank my thesis supervisor, Richard Ronald, for all his calming and encouraging guidance throughout this process. Thanks also go to my family, friends and to Joran for the endless support they have given me during the past year.

Please note that a glossary of the key terms used in this thesis and more detailed information about some sections of the thesis can be found in the Appendices. These should help to answer any queries about contested terms and provide information for readers who are unfamiliar with certain concepts.

Lily Maxwell, 11th_{August 2019}

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1. Introduction

1.2 Problem Statement and Motive

In the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in research into both cohousing and the urban commons. This increase in academic interest attests not only to the urgent need to theorise solutions to the social, economic and environmental crises we are facing globally - such as the affordable housing crisis and climate change – but also to the concomitantly growing list of examples of real-life urban commons and cohousing initiatives being created in response to such crises (Federici & Caffentzis, 2014; Mullins, 2018; Jarvis, 2010). Indeed, while the commons has long been a critical mode of survival for communities across the world, particularly those who are situated on the socio-economic margins, the spread of neoliberal capital’s ‘new enclosures’ has led many scholars, activists and commoners alike to position the commons as a “rediscovered” pathway towards potential post-capitalist ‘other worlds’ where social, environmental and political justice are prioritised (Stavrides, 2016; Shiva, 2006; Federici & Caffentzis, 2014; Harvey, 2011; Linebaugh, 2008; Gibson-Graham, 2008; 2013). As such, more and more communities – both poor and rich(er), both in the Global North and the Global South – are using various modes of ‘commoning’ to reclaim their right to common urban spaces. This has been visible in the rise of cohousing projects and “pop-up” public space initiatives, such as community gardens, across many European cities since the global financial crash (GFC) in 2007/8 (Tonkiss, 2013; Eizenberg, 2012; Harvey, 2014; Jarvis, 2015a). Given how nascent both the cohousing and the urban commons fields are, however, there are still major gaps and tensions in both areas that could potentially be addressed through research that better links the two.

One of the central tensions in the urban commons field, as in the general commons field, remains the question of access and inclusion, essentially who can access and use the commons, who benefits from it and who takes responsibility for sustaining it. On the one hand, many strictly Marxist and anti/post capitalist commons scholars insist on the ‘access-to-all’ principle of the (urban) commons, rendering many potential commons “corrupted” in their eyes – notably Hardt and Negri (2009), Stavrides (2016,p.70), Shiva (2006), Federici and Caffentzis (2014). On the other hand, there is an emerging strand of commons scholars who conceptualise the commons as ‘more-than-property’ and contend, in contrast, that commons can occur anywhere, including in privately-owned property (Gibson-Graham, 2008, 2013; Bollier, 2015; Williams, 2016; Huron, 2015).

Both groups’ ideas are strongly embedded in Marxist and anti/post-capitalist theory and both generally support the new theorisation of the commons (from around 2005 onwards) as ‘relational social frameworks’ underpinned by “practices of commoning” – everyday practices of sharing, mutualising and cooperating. Where the more strictly anti-capitalist scholars, the “open-access-ists”, are accused by the “beyond-property” scholars of being too ‘capitalocentric’, too abstract and neglectful of the radical potentialities of ‘actually existing’ but imperfect commons, the latter are accused by the former of diluting their politics and celebrating false “commons” that are in fact only vehicles of neoliberalism’s insidious strategies to dispossess and enclose (Gibson-Graham, 2015; Williams, 2016; Harvey, 2014; Federici & Caffentzis, 2014; Stavrides, 2016; Eizenberg, 2012 in Noterman, 2015, p.434). Cohousing, as a real-life case of potential commoning, lies at the heart of this tension around accessibility and inclusion. Like many other citizen-led initiatives, it is both promoted by cohousing ‘believers’ as one solution to the global affordable housing crisis and other related social and environmental issues, while simultaneously being dismissed by cohousing ‘cynics’ as another one of neoliberalism’s strategies to ‘empower’ communities while simultaneously dispossessing them of resources (Tummers, 2015, p.2024). Empirically-grounded research that explores the complex relationship between practices of commoning, access and property relations is thus needed in order to discover the ways in which different types of cohousing might (or might not) provide pathways to ‘other (post-capitalist) worlds’ (Gibson-Graham, 2009, p.4).

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1.3 Aims, Objectives and Research Question

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature, largely driven by feminist scholars working on the “new” commons and cohousing, that grounds research into the urban commons in explorations of ‘actually existing’ commons, conceptualised as ‘relational social frameworks’, not just property (Bollier, 2015, p.365; Williams, 2016). A balanced research approach is taken, simultaneously recognising the noxious impact of capitalist infrastructures on communities’ efforts to common while remaining open to the potentialities of commoning across all kinds of property (Gibson-Graham, 2015; Williams, 2016; Sharpe, 2014; Stavrides, 2016). This approach understands that limiting ‘conceptions of the possible city to the politically irreproachable, the financially untainted or the culturally un-hyped’ is not helpful since relying on capitalist infrastructures and being vulnerable to co-option by neoliberalism ‘is a condition of the work these [commoning] practitioners do if they want to make [common] space’ (Tonkiss, 2017, p.322). It also recognises, however, that remaining politically critical is important to examining the ‘emancipating potentialities of commoning for in and through space’ in cohousing (Stavrides, 2016, p.5).

By exploring and comparing the practices of commoning being performed by users (occupants and, in some cases, non-occupants) across four cohouses in Amsterdam, two RCs and two OOCs, this study aims to investigate the impact of tenure – ownership structure - (if any) on what kinds of practices of commoning are performed in cohousing. The hope is that this research will, firstly, give us insights into whether practices of commoning are performed in all types of cohousing, and secondly, whether such practices vary across tenures, an area in need of further research. Via this comparison, we hope to elucidate somewhat whether certain kinds of cohousing should be promoted and created above others – or, in other words, to tentatively discover how future cohousing projects might be implemented in a way that facilitates commoning both within and beyond their confines.

These aims have been translated into two central objectives:

1) To explore and compare the practices of commoning that occur in two different cohousing tenures (owner-occupied and rental) along three general lines of action: access, use, and benefits (Gibson-Graham’s Commons Identi-kit, 2016) and bearing in mind Stavrides’ theory of ‘expanding commons’, in order to ascertain the influence of tenure on practices of commoning in cohouses located in the given context and created in the last two decades (following the rise of neoliberalist policies);

2) To very briefly reflect on how urban planners and policymakers might contribute to facilitating practices of commoning in new and existing cohouses.

These objectives lead to the following key research question:

To what extent does tenure influence practices of commoning in recently created cohouses in Amsterdam?

Further details about why Amsterdam and the specific cohouses and neighbourhoods have been selected can be found in Chapter Three.

Cohousing is defined for the purposes of this study as all forms of rental and owner-occupied collaborative

housing that combine both private and collectively used and managed spaces and have an explicit commitment to a ‘community ethos’ (Heath, unpublished; Tummers, 2016). This was confirmed as an appropriate term during data-collection, during which both the owner-occupied and rental cohouse communities self-defined as cohouses, despite their differences.

Practices of commoning are defined as the ‘dynamic, relational, social, and negotiated processes’ involved in the

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Recently created is defined for the purposes of this study as any cohousing projects initiated after 1995, the era in

which neoliberal policies started to be more aggressively applied in Amsterdam.

1.4 Scientific Significance

Exploring the practical realities of commoning across different tenures and scales of cohousing within one city should help to create a completer and more complex picture not only of how commons are maintained and reproduced internally across different property relations but also the impact of commoning on the wider neighbourhood and the relationship between the emergence of certain types of cohousing (and their practices of commoning) and mainstream planning practices. If, as Savini suggests, we interpret urban planning as the ‘practice of organizing the production of new urban imaginaries [...] about a future state of a place’, then urban planning and housing researchers have a major role to play in exploring and realising the present and future potentialities of the cohousing commons - micro and macro – to create ‘other worlds’ beyond capitalism (Savini, 20, p.424; Gibson-Graham, 2009, p.4). We can only do this if we understand the impact of tenure - often the centre of urban policymaking, particularly in the context of the neoliberal drive towards home-ownership – on the practices of commoning being performed in cohousing, in turn exploring their potential (or not) to provide solutions to many of capitalism’s urban social, economic and environmental ills.

1.5 Methodology

An inductive, explorative and qualitative research approach has been chosen for this study applied across a multiple holistic comparative case study of four Amsterdam cohouses: two self-built OOC cohouses - VR and NA - with around 50 households located on the artificial Ijsselmeer islands of Ijburg and Zeeburg and two RCs - NI and DG - located in Amsterdam Oost and Ijburg respectively, which are both owned by housing associations and occupied and run by small activist groups of organised dwellers (woongroepen) of six to ten people. This approach supports our objectives of uncovering practices of commoning in ‘actually existing’ commons present in Amsterdam cohouses and exploring the influence of tenure on such practices (Eizenberg, 2012 in Noterman, 2015, p.434).

The central data-collection method for this study is semi-structured in-depth single and joint interviews with cohousing occupants; interviewees were selected via purposive sampling where possible and convenience sampling in cases of limited access. This data-collection method is complemented to achieve triangulation with limited participant observation via ‘incidental ethnographic encounters’ and participatory action research. Data analysis was carried out with the help of a qualitative CAQDAS software. More details about the research design can be found in Chapter 3.

1.6 Outline

This thesis is made up of six chapters. The following chapter - Chapter Two - provides a theoretical framework based on existing academic and activist research on cohousing and the commons. Chapter Three lays out our research design and methodology. Chapter Four explores the data collected and provides a detailed comparative analysis of the results for Access and Use and Chapter Five does the same for Benefits, exploring the ultimate influence of tenure, among other variables, on practices of commoning in the chosen cohouses. Chapter Six contains a concluding discussion of the main findings, related back to the theoretical framework, and reflexive recommendations are made for further research and actions in this field.

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2. Theoretical Framework

2.1 Introduction

This thesis seeks to investigate how the tenure arrangements of cohouses might influence the practices of commoning performed by their living communities via an exploration of differently “tenured” cohouses in Amsterdam. In order to embed this question in the field, this chapter explores two central theoretical fields: the urban commons and cohousing. In linking these two fields via Gibson-Graham’s commons identi-kit (2015) and Stavrides’ (2016) notion of ‘expanding commons’, this chapter seeks to justify this study’s comparative and politically embedded exploration of the micro-practices of commoning occurring in cohousing projects in Amsterdam, setting the scene for the following chapters’ analysis and discussion of the data.

2.2 Theorizing the Commons: The Central Debates

2.2.1 The Threat of Neoliberal Enclosure and Co-option of the Commons1

Marxist “new commons” scholars have sought to re-politicise theories of the commons over the previous two decades, embedding their research in both political theory and the everyday realities of global communities’ struggles to resist neoliberalism’s ‘new enclosures’, in both urban and rural contexts.2_{As Harvey (2014) has} continuously demonstrated, urbanisation via property-led development - and notably, the financialisaton of urban housing - are at the centre of neoliberalism’s drive to enclose, “accumulating through dispossession” and simultaneously displacing the responsibility of societal welfare from the government to its people (Ronald, 2008). At the same time as neoliberalism has long promoted housing as a financial asset - rather than a human right – actively dispossessing millions of people worldwide of access to adequate shelter, since the global financial crisis (GFC), it has also looked towards community-led initiatives as a privatised solution to social crises, including the housing crisis, often under the umbrella of ‘new urbanism’ (Jarvis, 2013a, 2013b 2015; Czinche, 2018; Mullins, 2018).

As Federici and Caffentzis (2014, p.92-3) highlight, once “radical” forms of resistance to new enclosures, like the commons are, therefore, ‘becoming a ubiquitous presence in the political, economic and even real estate language of our time. Left and Right, neo-liberals and neoKeynesians, conservatives and anarchists use the concept in their political interventions.” The simultaneous dilution of the commons due to neoliberal “co-option” and enclosure via dispossession, as Federici and Caffentzis (2014), Stavrides (2016), De Angelis (2014), Hardt and Negri (2009) and Harvey (2014) all suggest, requires that not only research into but also practical realisations of commons remain vigilant to - embedded in an anti or post-capitalist politics of the commons – the encroaching tendencies of neoliberal capitalism and the effects of injustice and dispossession it often produces. With the global housing crisis more acute than ever and community-led initiatives sitting on the threshold between genuine radical alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and government-promoted community “empowerment”, investigating whether new “alternative” and community-led forms of housing - such as cohousing - may help us to constitute new ways of living outside of and beyond capitalism is urgent (Czischke, 2018; Mullins 2018; Jarvis, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Stavrides, 2016).

1_{For a broader history of commons research and theory, please see Appendix Two: A Brief History of the Commons.}

2_{Initially theorised by the Midnight Notes Collective, among others, in the 1990s, Marxist commons scholars have since set out to show that}

capitalism’s tendency to ‘enclose’ collective resources was not limited to its initial stages in the 15th and 16th centuries (De Angelis and Harvey, 2014; Federici & Caffentzis; Linebaugh, 2008). Instead, its attempts to ‘enclose’ rage on. This constitutes a continuous and aggressive effort on the part of neoliberal capitalist forces - state and private - to accumulate material and immaterial commons and dispossess communities across the world of the collective resources they may have managed for centuries (Federici & Caffentzis, 2016; Stavrides, 2016; Nonini, 2007).

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2.2.2 Moving Beyond “Capitalocentrism”

Huron (2015) demonstrates that many property-centric theories of the commons fail to address the complicated nature of commoning in urban contexts, where definitively categorising what is private, public and/or collectively owned is difficult because of the multiple competing forces that constantly battle - on both a macro and micro level - to (re)claim and (re)territorialise space (Huron, 2015; Tonkiss, 2017).3_{With this in mind, Gibson-Graham} notes the importance of resisting the tendency to set up a ‘capitalocentric’ binary between capitalist enclosures and post-capitalist commons, especially in urban contexts (Gibson-Graham, 2015). First of all, scholars of the “new” and urban commons have begun, over the last decade or so, to view commons no longer as simply ‘things, resources or goods’ – property - but instead as ‘an organic fabric of social structures and processes” (Bollier, 2015, p.365; Williams, 2017; Gibson-Graham, 2015). Thus, commons are not just property: they are dynamic and constantly changing assemblages that are continually (re)produced by practices of commoning performed by “commoners” (Nonini, 2006; Bollier, 2015; Gibson-Graham, 2013; Harvey, 2012; Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2016).4_{If neoliberal capitalism continually (re)produces “neoliberalised” subjects and identities via ongoing} social processes and relations, then, it is argued, the ‘beyond-capitalist’ practices of commoning needed to continually (re)produce commons offer possibilities for new kinds of post-capitalist subjectivation (Foucault, 1979; De Certeau, 1984; Harvey, 2014; Stavrides, 2016; Gibson-Graham, 2008; 2015). Thus commons are not just passive things to be maintained: the very act of (re)producing them is a dynamic and ongoing process that can actively (re)produce beyond-capitalist social relations, subjects and identities within any kind of physical space (Stavrides, 2016; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Harvey, 2014; Federici, 2016; Gibson-Graham, 2008; 2013). Secondly, Gibson-Graham (2008; 2013) argues that these processes of commoning frequently offer glimpses into ‘other [post-capitalist] worlds’, while remaining reliant upon and intertwined with existing neoliberal capitalist structures (Nonini, 2017, p.24; Stavrides, 2016; Tonkiss, 2013). This is evident in the case of cohousing, where certain domestic practices may constitute practices of commoning but the cohouse as a whole may be reliant upon capitalist financial infrastructures to survive (Tonkiss, 2013; Jarvis, 2010). While capitalocentrists continue to argue that all forms of commons must be collectively-owned and open-access, Gibson-Graham and others contend that urban ‘commoning can take place within any form of property, from privately owned property to open access property’ (Gibson-Graham, 2013, p. 196). This involves using ‘theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility’, while still recognising the limits of spaces of commoning that contain practices that may simultaneously reproduce and resist capitalist relations (Gibson-Graham, 2008; 2013).

2.3 The Central Theoretical Framework: Finding a Pathway Between “Capitalocentrism” and “Post-Capitalocentrism”

2.3.1 A Community Economies Approach to the Commons with the Commons Identi-Kit

Gibson-Graham (2015) identifies a number of adaptable criteria for the commons in her conception of ‘community economies’.5_{A ‘community economy’ is the ‘ongoing process of negotiating our interdependence [...] the explicit,}

3_{Practices of commoning can be defined as the ‘dynamic, relational, social, and negotiated processes’ involved in the everyday}

life of the commons (Williams, 2016, 19). These can be anything from making a cup of tea for a fellow commoner to negotiating the use of a space in a group meeting (Williams, 2016). Practices of commoning are often reproductive and affective practices: they involve social acts of caring, sharing, taking responsibility and cooperating that very often go ‘beyond’ or lie outside capitalist economic logic (Stavrides, 2016; Gibson-Graham, 2013).

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democratic co-creation of the diverse ways in which we collectively make our livings, receive our livings from others, and provide for others’ (Gibson-Graham, n.d.). According to the community economies approach, in alignment with other conceptions of the commons, (re)producing commons involves affective and reproductive practices of care and support for physical and social “resources”, self-governance and collective decision-making processes, and constant ongoing negotiation between individual and collective needs. This approach offers an open, guiding framework through which to explore practices of commoning being performed by communities through her ‘commons identikit’, below: ‘to be a commons:

• access to property must be shared and wide, • use of property must be negotiated by a community,

• benefit[s] from property must be distributed to the community and possibly beyond, • care for property must be performed by community members, and

• responsibility for property must be assumed by community members.’ (2013, np)

Due to the limited scope of our research – in time and words - only the first three criteria of the commons identi-kit will be explored in this study. These three are considered the most important criteria for the research question since they focus on questions of access and inclusion - who can access, use and enjoy the benefits of the commons - the central tension at the heart of the commons and the cohousing fields.

2.3.2 Stavrides’ ‘Expanding’ Commons

Given the openness of Gibson-Graham’s Commons Identi-kit, which may leave us at risk of forgetting the politics of the commons somewhat, we will also make reference to Stavrides’ commons theory, which centres around the concepts of ‘expanding’ commons and ‘threshold spatiality’. Stavrides considers that for spaces to be truly ‘common’, they must be ‘threshold spaces’, underpinned by ‘practices of space-commoning that transcend enclosure and open up towards new commoners’, a process he calls ‘threshold spatiality’ (2016, p.5). Stavrides distinguishes between ‘common worlds’ – those where people ‘perform shared identities, shared habits and, often, shared values’ but which have recognizable boundaries’ – and ‘worlds of commoning’ – ‘not simply worlds of shared beliefs and habits’ but also worlds that are ‘strongly connected to ways of sharing that open the circle of belonging and develop forms of active participation in the shaping of the rules that sustain them’ (2016, p.32). As such, linking back to Gibson-Graham’s (2015) Identi-kit, use of space in a commons should, according to Stavrides, be ‘negotiated by a community’ that is always open to ‘newcomers’ and ever ‘expanding’ in terms of its sharing of access to, use of, and enjoyment of the benefits of material and immaterial resources. As he explains, “expanding or open common space explicitly expresses the power commoning has to create new forms of life-in-common and a culture of sharing’ (p.5). Only through this ‘expanding’ can life-in-commoning ‘exceed the limits capitalism imposes on it through enclosures and privatization’ as Federici (2014, 2016) also highlights (Stavrides, 2016, p.39).

Common worlds also offer hope, however: ‘in the process of their creation and reproduction lies the possibility of transforming them into worlds of commoning’ (p.32). Despite his seemingly binary stance, then, Stavrides, like Tonkiss (2013), Williams (2016) and Gibson-Graham (2015) recognises that ‘commoning practices are necessarily caught in an antagonistic social context which supports dominant capitalist command forms of capitalist usurpation of the commons’ arguing that ‘we have to carefully study common spaces not as pure expressions of a different culture but as necessarily hybrid collective works-in-progress, in which glimpses of a different future emerge’ (2016, p.61). This, similarly to Gibson-Graham, gives us space to explore the potential practices of commoning happening across different types of property, and acknowledge the ‘emancipating potentialities’ they offer, while also paying attention to Stavrides’ important distinction between ‘common worlds’

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and ‘worlds of commoning’, constantly asking questions about whether the practices of commoning we observe contribute to ‘expanding’ commons, or not (2016, p.5; p.32).

2.3.3 Combining Gibson-Graham and Stavrides for a Balanced Approach

As Gibson-Graham’s (2015) commons identi-kit is so open, we have combined it with the more “radical” and politically embedded ‘expanding commons’ theory of Stavrides (2016), based around his concept of ‘threshold spatiality’ and ‘expanding’ commons. By broadening our willingness to explore the actually-enacted potentialities of commoning in any form of property, while maintaining a critical political eye with the help of Stavrides (2016), we can develop a better understanding of the urban commons. This not only helps us to avoid being too abstract and ‘absolute’, fully addressing ‘the question of the reproduction of everyday life’ (Federici, 2016, e-book). It also allows us to be more nuanced: rather than assessing and firmly categorising certain kinds of cohousing as ‘urban commons’ or not, we can instead remain open to the possible insights that different cohouses can offer us into the (re)production of practices of commoning. This, in turn, may help us to discover how existing ‘corrupted’ commons (according to some scholars) might be made more accessible and to (re)produce future commons with better knowledge of the barriers to post-capitalist commoning that currently exist (Stavrides, 2016, p.70).

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3. Research Design and Methodology

Introduction: this chapter gives practical details about the research design and chosen data collection and analysis

methods. A brief background to the choice of Amsterdam as a city is given. More detailed information about the cohouses and their surrounding neighbourhoods can be found in the following chapters.

3.1 Research question and sub-questions

Research question:

To what extent does tenure influence practices of commoning in recently created cohouses in Amsterdam?

Research Objectives:

1) To explore and compare the practices of commoning that occur in the two different cohousing tenures (owner-occupied and rental) along three general lines of action: access, use, and benefits (Gibson-Graham, 2015), and bearing in mind Stavrides’ (2016) notion of ‘expanding commons’, in order to ascertain the influence of tenure on practices of commoning in cohouses located in the given context and created in the last two decades (following the rise of neoliberalist policies);

2) To very briefly reflect on how urban planners and policymakers might contribute to facilitating practices of commoning in new and existing cohouses.

3.2 Research Strategy and Design

In order to answer the research question, a multiple holistic comparative case study was carried out across four strategically selected cohouses located in the east of Amsterdam. Given the research question and this paper’s chosen definition of cohousing as ‘intentionally communal’, the selected cohouses all had an explicit commitment to a ‘community ethos’ and represented the two different tenures explored in this study (owner-occupied and rental cohouses):

- Two OOCs: VR (referred to also as VR henceforth) and NA (referred to also as NA henceforth), CPC (collectively privately-commissioned) architect-led cohouses located, respectively, on Ijburg and Zeeburgereiland, with around fifty households and one hundred people living in each; both were designed by the same architect, Hein de Haan.

- Two RCs: DG (referred to also as DG henceforth) and NI (referred to also as NI henceforth) owned by two different housing associations and inhabited by living groups (woongroepen) of six to eleven people, located, respectively, on Ijburg and in Dapperbuurt.6

Henceforth, the rental cohouses will be referred to as RCs an the owner-occupied cohouses as OOCs.

Inductive qualitative research methods were chosen for this thesis as they are well-suited to in-depth, open and exploratory research into everyday practices, such as those performed by cohousing occupants. Indeed, an inductive approach allows “patterns, themes, and categories [to] emerge out of the data rather than being imposed on them prior to data collection and analysis.” (Patton, 1990, p.306). Rather than simply collect data and then analyse it, an iterative “loop-like pattern” of data-collection and analysis was carried out, inspired by grounded theory scholars. This involved continuous stages of data collection, analysis, memo-writing and theoretical sensitivity and sampling (Charmaz, 2014).

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As Yin (2003, p.46) suggests, multiple-case studies are likely to be stronger than a single case: ‘evidence from multiple cases is often considered more compelling, and the overall study is therefore regarded as being more robust’. Exploring the practices of commoning performed in the different types of cohousing tenures (owner-occupied versus rental) allowed us to find patterns of similarities and differences through which to determine the impact of tenure on commoning. In this particular study, literal replication - exploring two cohouses of each tenure that also had similar characteristics in terms of design and scale - was undertaken to increase the reliability and validity of the results found and to facilitate triangulation.

The primary research method, semi-structured interviews, was appropriate for soliciting in-depth subjective and experiential responses from participants; limited participatory action research was also carried out in line with Gibson-Graham’s (2009) call for more experimental, co-creative research methods for exploring the commons. Gibson-Graham’s (2015) commons identi-kit and Stavrides’ (2016) theory of ‘expanding commons’ were utilised to inform and guide the exploratory research and analysis; they were not a form of “assessment” for the commons, per se, but rather a way to more tightly situate the exploratory data-collection and analysis within the selected theoretical framework. All fieldwork was carried out across the course of 6 weeks, between the end of March and the beginning of May 2019. The spatial boundaries defined were the limits of the cohouses (and their surrounding streets and green areas), although their relationship with the local neighbourhoods and their place within the wider Amsterdam context was considered throughout.

3.3 Contextualising the Research Design: Amsterdam as a ‘Peculiar’ City

Over the last three decades or so, the Netherlands has shifted from a ‘unitary’ housing system, with a high proportion of social housing stock and a strong squatting (kraker) movement, to a dualist model with increasing home-ownership, decreasing social housing stock and rising social and private rents (Kemeny, 2010; Ronald, 2008; Aalbers e.a, 2008). Amsterdam, the country’s largest city, has been affected by this and is now the site of a ‘peculiar’ mix of socially progressive initiatives and strong marketization (Savini, 2016). The city ‘still exhibits a very mixed population in terms of class and ethnicity’ and social housing stock is still higher than most of its European counterparts (Savini, 2016, p.104). However, policies to foster home-ownership, “affective citizenship” and creative “broedplats” (breeding places) are increasingly criticised as “dispossessing” city-dwellers of their right to access urban spaces (Nonini, 2017; Bulcholz, 2009; Aalbers e.a., 2008; Savini, 2016; Tonkiss, 2013; Duyvendrik, 2018).

As a neoliberalising city that nevertheless retains strong elements of its anarchist traditions, with squatting and co-living communities at the centre of its recent history, Amsterdam currently lies on the border between radicalism and neoliberalism. It thus provides the ideal backdrop to examine and compare the potentialities of urban cohousing, accused of being both neoliberal and radical itself. The chosen areas represent particularly contested zones - experimental development areas (the Ijsselmeer islands) and one area facing high levels of gentrification (Dapperbuurt), both of which have been subject to increasingly neoliberal policymaking in recent years - and thus concentrate many of the central debates around urban policy in the city within their limits (Duke, 2011).

3.4 Qualitative Methods Used for Data-Collection

As noted above, qualitative research methods were chosen for this research design because of the focus on inductively and exploratively gathering data about cohousing occupants’ everyday reproductive practices and relations. Primary data was collected via seventeen single and joint interviews with cohousing occupants living in VR and NA and three interviews with cohousing occupants living in NI and DG. One twenty-minute interview was carried out with the café manager at VR to ascertain practical and experiential information about the relationship between the café, the wider neighbourhood and VR residents. One interview was also carried out by phone with a RC expert based in Utrecht. Two short twenty-minute interviews were carried out with previous

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interview subjects later on in the data-collection process to follow-up on ideas generated through initial analysis and to ensure theoretical saturation.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and then coded, categorised and compared thematically, using CAQDAS software. Detailed notes were taken during and after the events about the commons and the right to housing in Amsterdam and also after two feminist reading groups organised and run by the researcher herself at NI. These notes inform the results of this study but will not be directly quoted for ethical reasons. Two presentations given about NI by a resident of the woongroep were also recorded and transcribed verbatim; the presenter gave written consent for quotes to be used in this study. All interviews can be considered stakeholder interviews, although eight of the interview participants were also professional housing activists, researchers and planning/design experts.

Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect the rights to anonymity of individuals interviewed. All communications were conducted in English (which most of the participants spoke fluently). All interviews were recorded on the basis of informed consent and all participants who asked for a copy of the final document received it by email on August 12th_{, 2019.}

3.4.1 Main Data Collection Method: Semi-Structured Single and Joint interviews with Cohousing Occupants

The main phase of the research involved qualitative narrative and semi-structured single and joint interviews with 20 cohousing occupants or “households” across the four cohouses. All interviews took place in the cohousing occupants’ homes or in the cohouses’ commercial or collective spaces. Each interview lasted between forty-five minutes to two hours long. The cohouses were initially contacted via email, explaining the intent of the research project, and the gatekeepers of both communities then provided lists of specific individuals who were willing to participate. Carrying out the interviews onsite and predominantly in the occupants’ homes allowed us to see different parts of the building and be given tours from different residents’ perspectives.

Interviews involved initial elicitation of an unstructured narrative about how and why participants became involved in the given projects, principally to uncover practical information about the project and ascertain levels of initial and ongoing access to it. Given that the interview can be seen as a partnership between the researcher and the respondents, this initiation to the interview allowed us to “break the ice” with interviewees and give them some time to “ease in” to talking about their personal lived experiences (Weiss, 1994, p.65). This was then followed by a semi-structured exploration of various aspects of their past and current experiences of practices of sharing, social interaction, cooperation, and community self-governance within the cohouse and the benefits they felt they had experienced from living there, in order to ascertain information about the practices of commoning performed (or not) across the different cohouses and their relationship with questions of access to the commons,

use of common spaces (and by whom), and the specific benefits of commoning (and for whom) within and beyond

the cohouse (Gibson-Graham, 2015).

This semi-structured interview method allowed us to balance gathering information with maintaining a conversational flow and building trust, encouraging participants to talk freely about personal experiences without feeling “investigated”. Building trust helped us to tease out the ‘small stories’ inherent to community life and social interaction within informal, everyday spaces (Georgeakopoulos, 2006).

3.4.2 Purposive sampling

For the interview participants, a purposive sampling approach was taken where possible and a convenience sampling approach was resorted to in the cases of the RCs due to limited access and time constraints. Age and gender diversity were sought: eleven men and nine women were interviewed, aged between twenty-five to eighty years old at VR and NA. As the bulk of interviews were carried out first with residents of VR and NA, theoretical sensitivity to the initial concepts arising from the data allowed the interview questions and interviewee selection

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to be refined during later data-collection. Due to this theoretical sensitivity and access and time constraints, only three interviews were carried out with NI and DG: one joint interview with one man and one woman from DG, and one individual interview with a man from NI, all between the ages of twenty – forty years of age, were carried out. The interview with the RC expert in Utrecht - both a long-term occupant and consultant on RCs in Amsterdam and Utrecht - was also carried out later on in the data-collection process to increase theoretical saturation for this tenure type, given the access and time constraints noted above.

Socio-economic and ethnic diversity were sought for all interviews but was not achieved, which was unsurprising given the well-documented demographic homogeneity (largely white, middle-class and well-educated) of most cohousing communities in Northern Europe (Jakobsen & Larsen, 2014). Differing levels of involvement in the community were also sought but, again, were difficult to achieve given limits to access and the voluntary nature of interview participation. Site visits and tours of individual and collective spaces were carried out at the same time as interviews at all of the sites except NI, where access was only granted for the public space(s). As noted above, the sample of cohouses represent a diversity of sizes (number of units range from six to fifty-five) and all were founded, built or renovated and opened during a twenty-year period (1998 - 2016).

3.4.3 Attempting to Combat ‘Attitudinal Fallacy’ via Joint (dyadic) interviews and ‘Ethnographic Encounters’

Joint Interviews

As Sherolmack & Khan (2014, p.200-1) suggest, when choosing individual interviews as a primary data collection method, ‘attitudinal fallacy—the error of inferring situated behaviour from verbal accounts of sentiments and schemas’ is always a risk. This is because ‘individual-level accounts of behaviour can remove the ‘‘social’’ from social action’ and miss the crucial importance of the fact that ‘people [...] make meaning [...] in relation to other people and in particular situations’ (Sherolmack & Khan, 2014, p.200-1). Thus, it was decided that some dyadic interviews - three with couples and two with cohousing ‘neighbours’ -would be sought in “recognition of the shared, intersubjective, and interdependent nature of [occupants’] experiences” of performing practices of commoning in a cohouse (Zarhin, 2018, p.844). Choosing this method ‘expose[d] the negotiated and contested nature’ of perceiving and performing practices of cooperation, sharing and reciprocity within the cohouse, as participants disagreed and challenged each other throughout the interview process. This helped to contribute to ‘more complex and nuanced understandings’ of the processes and relations underpinning practices of commoning in the cohouse, beyond some of the idealised accounts of commoning given by individual occupants (Valentine, 1999, p.67).

Incidental Ethnographic Encounters

Given the tight time constraints of this research study (only one month for fieldwork) and the spatially exclusive nature of housing, it was not possible to carry out extended participant observation of interactions between cohousing occupants. Limited participant observation could, therefore, only be carried out via what Pinsky (2015) calls ‘incidental ethnographic encounters’ when we happened to be onsite - sitting in the café at VR, observing interactions between residents in the cohouse during extended site tours and interviews and through attending events in and outside the cohouses with occupants. Pinsky (2015, p.281) acknowledges the empirical value of ‘observational interactions’ through ‘chance encounters with interviewees, extraneous conversations, observing living spaces [...] and sharing meals with research participants’ (2013, p.282). Following Pinsky’s (2015, p.281) argument, we observed and sometimes took notes about site visits during and after these ‘encounters’ in order to place the interviews within their wider ‘extended interaction’.

3.4.4 Participatory Action Research

Limited participatory action research was also carried out in order to embed this study in the lively debate about the commons in Amsterdam. We participated in one event about the commons, organised by De Meent and The

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Commons Network and hosted by NI in order to gather commoners across a range of initiatives in Amsterdam, including cohouses, to collectively define, map and explore how to proliferate examples of commoning in the city. We also took part in a housing ‘action’ tour about the history and development of collective and social housing in Amsterdam, organised by a resident of NA, which sought to both inform attendees about the history of Amsterdam’s housing regime and also to protest against the financialisation of housing via a number of temporary street occupations. These events allowed us to participate in co-defining the commons and the right to housing in Amsterdam. It also gave us a contextualised understanding of such terms as defined by Amsterdam’s commoners themselves. We also organised and ran a feminist discussion event hosted at NI. This gave us direct insight into the processes and dynamics behind collectively organising and running open-access events in NI’s public space and opened up more opportunities for further ‘incidental ethnographic encounters’ (Pinsky, 2013).

3.5 Comparative Analysis

Interview transcripts and notes were coded over a series of rounds using CAQDAS software; comparative memos were made throughout and there was continuous recourse to new and already referenced literature. The commons identi-kit criteria (Gibson-Graham, 2015) and Stavrides’ (2016) commons theory provided a loose framework but were further fleshed out via coding. Verbatim transcription was important to this approach, as it allowed us to go over the interviews several times and enabled more in-depth discourse analysis of the interviewees’ “written-verbal” accounts.

To make data analysis and comparison less complicated, analysis was at first separated by tenure type, although constant comparative memos and notes were made. This memo-writing later contributed to a more systematic, comprehensive comparison of the results in the intermediate and advanced rounds of coding. Given the large bulk of data collected and the breadth of this topic, the results and analysis were merged together at points (in the next chapter) to reduce unnecessary description and maintain analytic thought throughout.

3.6 Methodological Limitations and Reflections

There are inherent limitations to the recruitment methods and the sample. Firstly, twenty-four interviews constitute a small sample and, therefore, is likely to be missing important perspectives and experiences of practices of commoning in cohouses. Given that the interview sample was often determined by the gatekeepers’ pre-selection of email addresses and by occupants’ voluntary participation, the data cannot be seen to be representative of the cohousing population, even within the selected cohouses.

The mismatch in the number of interviews between owner-occupied (seventeen) and rental (three), due to access and time constraints, also means that the internal validity and reliability of the data for the owner-occupied cohouses is much higher than that for the rental cohouses. This reduces the reliability and validity of the overall comparative conclusions drawn from the results and discussion. However, given that theoretical sensitivity was gained during the first round of interviews, limited theoretical sampling and “follow-up” data collection was carried out and triangulation was sought via other data-collection methods, this reduced validity was to some extent combatted.

Very few interviews were carried out with organisers of the ‘public’ spaces within the cohouses and no interviews were conducted with members of the surrounding community who may use (or not) such spaces. This means that the data collected about the access, use and benefits of the collective spaces for the wider neighbourhood was inevitably biased because it came solely from cohousing occupants.

Choosing to include four cohouses of different tenures as units of analysis within the study also means that internal validity and reliability are reduced overall, since more variables are likely to be influential in determining the outcomes of the research. There were, however, a number of fixed variables either between or across the different tenures, such as location within Amsterdam, architect who led the project, scale of the project, and physical design, among others. Furthermore, given that the research design was based on an inductive and explorative approach

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and sought to explore whether tenure, among other variables, contributed to practices of commoning in cohouses, discovering the influence of other variables was key to our final conclusions.

The language barrier between Dutch and English was at times a problem both for interviewees and the researchers, impacting the interpretation of meaning during interviews (both ways). Allowing interviewees to take their time and use Dutch words instead of English ones, however, helped to increase the accuracy of interpretation of meaning. The language barrier did, however, reduce our ability to find statistical background information about the neighbourhoods and projects.

As noted above, the potential for ‘attitudinal fallacy’ in our data was high given the choice of individual interviews for our primary data collection method. Triangulation via other data methods was sought to try and reduce this potential. While joint (dyadic) interviews corrected this fallacy to some extent, they also created the potential for participants to hide their true feelings, agree with their partner or neighbour due to ‘peer pressure’, or talk over each other (Zarhin, 2018). Given that only 5 interviews were dyadic, the risk of this reducing the reliability and validity of the overall data-set was small. Furthermore, although interruption was sometimes a problem, our experience of joint interviewing was that participants often challenged each other to more rigorously explain, defend or develop their own point of view, providing more nuanced insights into their experience.

3.7 Ethical Considerations

Becoming quite intimately embedded in the life of the cohouse - particularly in VR - and carrying out participatory action research made balancing both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ stances difficult, especially when in the intimate home environment and during participation events where the line between observer and participant was fuzzy. To maintain good ethical standards, anything said outside official interviews, for example at dinners or events, was not quoted in the thesis. All interviewees were anonymised in this study for ethical reasons.

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4. Results and Analysis: Access and Use

4.1 Introduction

Using Gibson-Graham’s (2015) ‘commons identi-kit’ and Stavrides’ (2016) conceptualisation of ‘expanding’ commons, we will explore the practices of commoning being performed in different cohouses in Amsterdam in this chapter with a view to assessing the impact of tenure and property relations on such practices. Section 1 addresses the accessibility of the living community over time. Section 2 addresses everyday access to and use of the cohouses’ common spaces, with a focus on how use of common spaces is negotiated. Section 3 looks at the benefits arising from the practices of commoning performed in the cohouse – for society, for occupants and for non-occupants – with a focus on the environmental, social and political benefits, related back to the theoretical framework. Analysis and results are intertwined throughout the chapter.

4.2

Access to Living in the Cohouse

4.2.1 Vrijburcht and Nautilus: Speculation and ‘Market Exclusion’ Threatening Accessibility to the Cohouse Over Time

Initially Accessible to the “Squeezed Middle”

Both OOCs initially provided access to (fairly) affordable housing for the “squeezed middle” in Amsterdam. Jonathan from NA noted that the project “[...] fills a gap in the market [...] because we have social housing and

then there's the private sector. And in between that, there's a gap and it's growing. And more and more people have to go there, so it's terrible. Especially when you've just finished studies....[or] are thinking about starting a family.” The initial affordability of VR and NA (for Amsterdam’s middle-classes), among other important factors

such as scale, spatial design and political ambiguity, made them more accessible to a wider variety of age groups, political leanings and lifestyle choices – including families and the elderly - than NI and DG.

However, economic barriers to entry were much higher for VR and NA than the RCs because of initial deposits, individual mortgages, and high monthly payments for maintenance of the collective spaces. VR and NA were thus subject to some screening at their initiation – anyone who did not have sufficient savings, and/or a stable job (or a partner with one) could not enter. It is thus unsurprising that the OOCs house a more affluent demographic than the RCs and seem to have a higher proportion of stable, white-collar workers. As Ruiu (2016, p.10). contends, OOCs may, therefore, come with ‘higher costs’ that ‘represent invisible barriers [preventing] the access of disadvantaged people’.

Speculation: Reducing Accessibility Over Time

This economic barrier has become entrenched over time due to the OOCs’ private ownership model and their consequent vulnerability to rising house prices and financial speculation. Both OOCs no longer, therefore, fill the

“gap” that Jonathan mentioned: indeed, the selling price of the apartments, as many occupants noted, has risen

two or three times since the cohouse was built. Most of the current occupants could not afford their own apartment if they tried to buy it today, as Isabelle from NA highlighted: “we all know people who would be interested to buy

a house, but […] they cannot afford the price [now]”.

This has entailed a commodification that goes beyond simply financialising the cohouses’ bricks and mortar to actually commodify the value of the practices of commoning needed to create the cohouse and its subsequent communal life. As Tamsin from NA put it, the “collective labour that went into making [it] happen. So: no project

developer, loads of free time [that] people put it into it” was a significant factor, along with the reduced municipal

land lease, in ensuring that the apartments were initially affordable to current occupants. Due to the owner-occupied tenure structure of both projects and a failure to implement any kind of anti-speculation clause, the value

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of this initial and ongoing reproductive labour – or “human capital” - has been commodified and fragmented. It is now under the control of individual resident-owners: social value has been translated into economic value. As Martin from NA lamented: “we have one family now that's moving out. And they want to sell for the highest price

possible. And they just don't acknowledge that the value of their house has been produced because of the collective labor of everybody working here”. The apartments are individual economic assets and have become inaccessible

over time, rendering OOC residents simultaneously victims of the new enclosures, many of them forced into home-ownership because they could not find any other long-term, stable housing options, and active agents of neoliberalisation, contributing to the commodification of housing as a speculative asset. This trend, leading the cohouses to become less accessible over time, goes against Stavrides’ (2016) principle of ‘expanding commons’ – commons that remain open to outsiders in the present and future and, ideally, proliferate.

‘Market Exclusion’ as a Threat to the Sustainability of Commoning and the Potentiality of ‘Expanding Commons’

With the market in control, residents thus lose their capacity to influence who enters their community. Indeed, individual legal ownership of apartments not only excludes those without significant funds but also renders illegal any kind of occupant recruitment process. As Sarah and Juliet from VR highlighted, anyone is entitled to buy an apartment within the cohouse if they have enough money, whether or not they buy into the ‘communal ethos’ of the project (Heath, unpublished). Many residents, like Isabelle at NA and Juliet at VR, expressed concerns that this could affect the community’s ability to sustain communal practices. As Isabelle put it, “how do you make

sure that you kind of keep a community? […] there is […] a high chance that the ones who can afford such a high price [might] have different standards.” Juliet from VR worried that “keep[ing] the values of the beginning” of

the project would be difficult if many original members left and “very rich” newcomers did not buy into the collective “spirit” of VR. While, on the one hand, this indicated a slight hostility to outsiders, characteristic of ‘common worlds’ with established, closed boundaries and a shared set of ‘values’, it also indicated a legitimate fear on the part of residents that the cohouse would become an individualistic enclave only for the very affluent. Some OOC occupants, notably at NA, imagined ways out of the “system” , in order to better maintain and possibly ‘expand’ their commons. Juliet suggested selling “at a reasonable price” instead of the market value. One couple at NA, with previous experience of more radical living groups, ideally wanted to implement an anti-speculative model: “you could eventually buy the whole building. So little by little, you become a collective owner of the

houses that come free, and then you can rent it out.” Most occupants seemed resigned to market exclusion being

inevitable, however, indicating that they “just don't see [either above option] happening” because of the generally widespread desire not to “disadvantage” neighbours economically by imposing anti-speculative agreements. Many residents’ ideological concerns about the commodified state of the housing market seemed at odds with their personal desire to access a kind of financial security that directly relies upon and reproduces this process of commodification. As James from VR lamented: ‘I always said I'm not spending a Euro in my own home, because

that's not what I want and finally I was forced to do it […] but that's absolutely a wrong thing […] for starters on the market, the younger people, it's nearly impossible to find a reasonable and an affordable house […] it's absolutely not a reasonable situation”.

4.2.2 The Rental Cohouses: Political Radicalism, Anti-Speculation and ‘Critical Exclusion’ Ensuring the Sustainability and Accessibility of the Commons Over Time

Providing Much-Needed Affordable Housing after the 2010 Squatting Ban

The rental cohouses provide accessible housing to low-middle income individuals, particularly those from the ‘Amsterdam alternative’, radical left-wing, anarchist and squatting movement(s). Occupants from both DG and NI reported that the cohouse provided a vital opportunity for them to access affordable housing after the 2010 Dutch anti-squatting law. Andrew from NI recalled: “I was living in a squat. And we were kind of threatened by

an eviction [...] And [with] this project, I felt, “okay, you know, if I do something here [NI], it's actually, you know, it stays for a while”. Similarly, Tilly from DG noted: “there was the squatting ban [...] it was much more

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difficult to squat and everyone was threatened with eviction [and] because you have to wait for at least 15 years in the waiting list if you want a social house […] for many of us, it was not an option at all to find another house. So, it [the cohouse] was really […] an amazing option.”

DG, owned by the housing association, Rochdale, is social housing; it, therefore, has income restrictions and is also eligible for rent subsidies, meaning that tenants cannot be charged more than €720.42 a month for rent and many receive grants that lower this cost significantly. NI, owned by a nascent activist housing association, Soweto, has a more open recruitment process; it is not subject to official guidelines on social housing admission but nevertheless also houses residents with lower incomes than VR and NA, with an average monthly rent of around €500. NI and DG both practice income distribution, thus making them more accessible and secure forms of housing for low-income and/or precarious workers. Although the communities of NI and DG seem to constitute a more economically precarious demographic, they are still largely highly-educated and middle-class, including a number of political activists and those working in the creative industries and/or academia.

Sustaining and Even ‘Expanding’ Accessibility to the Commons Over Time

The RCs have managed to avoid restricting access over time due to their anti-speculative legal frameworks, influenced by occupants’ explicit political commitment to anti/post-capitalist practices. As Simon from NI put it:

“the key thing […] is that the building remains the property of the housing association [and] the association cannot ever sell. It's written down in our statutes”. This means, as Andrew put it, that “the people from the house cannot really decide to just sell it and leave”, and so cannot profit from the project financially like those in the

OOCs can. The residents of NI and those working for Soweto’s have ensured that the project’s original and ongoing collective “capital” – the time, energy, and labour (the practices of commoning) put into creating and maintaining the cohouse by its residents and others – remains outside the grip of the market. Thus, as Simon reflects, NI has been “taken out of the real estate market forever: it can't be commodified any longer”, in turn retaining its accessibility for future occupants and helping to “reverse gentrification” in the local area.

In the case of DG, its social housing model means that it should remain accessible to low-income individuals in need of housing for generations. However, acknowledging the fact that the cohouse may be vulnerable to the profit-driven agendas of its owner, Rochdale, residents are engaged in joint research and negotiation with the association to buy their building, inspired by Soweto’s model. DG is also a living, breathing example of how anti-speculative cohousing can sustain (fairly) open access over time: the original group who envisioned and designed the project dissolved due to the lengthy 7-year construction period, allowing a new group from a similar income bracket to eventually move in. This would not have been possible had the project been affected by rising house prices, as in the case of the speculative OOCs.

Although both NI and DG have a mortgage, it is the overarching housing association that manages this and individual occupants are not personally responsible for paying it back; instead, whoever lives and/or works in the cohouse, or rents the common spaces, contributes to paying a lump sum to the housing association, which the latter then uses to pay the cohouse overheads, including mortgage payments, utility bills and maintenance costs. This means that the burden of keeping the ‘bank at bay’, as it were, is shared by all community members – the living group and other users. The responsibility for rent payment is thus ‘commoned’ among the whole cohouse community, reducing the pressure on individuals to engage in productive labour and creating a shared sense of responsibility for the upkeep of the cohouse - both to maintain present living standards and those of future occupants. Following Majer-Bruun (2015, p.154) and Han and Imamasa’s (2015, p.96) reading of cohousing occupants in Denmark and South Korea as temporary ‘caretakers’ or ‘guests’ of their homes, occupants of NI and DG similarly, therefore, take on the responsibility of maintaining and ‘expanding’ their common housing resource for future ‘newcomers’ (Stavrides, 2016, p.3).

Both communities also actively seek to ‘expand’ the commons. DG is also a member of Soweto and a co-financier of NI and other projects; they also participate in various cohousing and co-living advocate associations, such as the Dutch co-living association, LCLW, and are involved with the Delft University of Technology for the research

An exploration of cohousing in Amsterdam from the perspective of the urban commons

University of Amsterdam

Graduate School of Social Sciences