Volume 43 There is a theory that the more organized (read: devel oped) a society is, the less self-sufficient it becomes. All sorts of services and amenities, from housing to energy, from culture to justice, are centrally organized and distributed. Are we heading for a new order in which decentralized and self-reliant become the norm? This Volume issue zooms in on housing and self-building as a field of (inter)action.
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Editorial Arjen Oosterman
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Screensaver Architecture Timothy Moore
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New Urbanisms: Theories
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Dictionary of Confusion
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New Urbanisms: Realities
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Individual Dream
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The Almere Case
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Building Your Own Jacqueline Tellinga Interview
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Creating Space Eric van der Burg Interview
It’s the Economy… Léon Heddes and Friso de Zeeuw interviewed 50
Communal Resilience
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The Cairo Case
A Ring Road With a View René Boer
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The Christchurch Case
The Transitional City Barnaby Bennett and Timothy Moore
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The Portugal Case
SAAL, Sweat and Tears Nelson Mota
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The Islamabad Case
Urban Theatrics Javeria Masood
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Collective Dream
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Empowerment of ‘Self Power’ Adri Duivesteijn Interview
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The Bucharest Case
Collaborative Bricolage Constantin Goagea, Cosmina Goagea and Stefan Ghenciulescu
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Necessary Collectivity
The Art of Connecting Lilet Breddels
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overning a Networked Society G Maarten Hajer Interview
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The Right to Build Alex Retegan
Feels Blind Matthew Stadler
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The Stockholm Case
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Connected: AMBEBUST
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Colophon
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Collective Capitalism
he Self-Building City T and Urban Resilience Jan Rydén
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The Amsterdam Case
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Recently, I learned about a new research program at Utrecht University focused on cycling. It is not part of their health department, as one might expect, but of a department specialized in modeling data. The researchers want to investigate cycling in the city as a complex sys tem and produce a model to describe its dynamics. My first response was: people take their bike and move from A to B. How complex can that be? But with a little more information I started to understand that the bicycle has a dynamic relation with its surroundings. We take it for granted that an airport is a logistically complex system and has become a city on its own. We know that the car and the highway produce new functions and organize their distribution. We see that gas stations turn into super markets, that football stadiums are built next to or even across motorways, and so on. But the bicycle seems to escape such interactive relations. It is a faster way of walking, not a producer of space and program. But it is. With the ongoing growth of inner-city bicycle use to the detriment of the car, a kindergarten or daycare can be located in a street without parking facilities and yet be commercially viable. A small supermarket or baker will locate itself next door, taking advantage of the flow of potential customers bringing their children. If we see the bike as the producer of such arrangements, and not just as the means to reach them, we start to understand that to promote bicycle use and eventually even to exchange cars for bicycles in the city has far-reaching implications. There is more to it than constructing bike lanes and bike sheds. It’s changing the city’s systems.
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It’s become fashionable to use the adjective ‘smart’ to indicate that an organization or a city is future oriented and competitive. Most of the time it relates to the appli cation and use of technology to enhance comfort and efficiency, and to reduce operating costs. Think of sensor networks and interactive systems, but also think of who’s in control. The manufacturer of tech systems is often also the provider of the software to operate these systems and the actual system manager. Old industries like gas and electricity companies, for instance, are changing into service providers. We dedicated Volume 34: City in a Box to this development. Now, we’re addressing the ‘smart’ issue again, but from another angle.
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Take housing. In most European countries, social housing programs produced a substantial part of their housing stock. With the shift towards neoliberalism some twentyfive, thirty years ago, this changed considerably. In some countries the construction and providence of social housing just stopped. In others it continued, but on a smaller scale and under different conditions. The credit crisis of 2007/2008 put a halt to this system in which people use, buy, or rent what’s being provided; be it by a housing association, by a developer, an electricity com pany or a municipality. This change didn’t start in 2008, but it was reinforced by the credit crisis. The credit crisis struck the real estate sector particularly hard, and defi nitely so in the Netherlands. The number of working archi tects halved, developers and builders went bankrupt and municipalities got stuck with land they couldn’t sell. To get things going again, some municipalities experimented with selling small plots of land to private home builders, to people willing to invest in their own house. If the banks were no longer in a position to lend big lumps to big insti tutions, maybe private savings could be activated. It proved a great success. And it also proved some other things
along the way, like that people are willing and capable to take things in their own hands. But another, more unex pected find was that when people can decide for them selves, they are often more ambitious when it comes to sustainability or construction quality than the government or municipality requires. This suggested another perspec tive: if we, as society, have to transform, have to become sustainable and resilient, go ‘circular’ and ‘neutral’, then maybe this should not be done by replacing existing national systems for smarter centralized ones. Maybe we should consider a mix of top down and bottom up, of big and small-scale, of (inter)national and local. If living ‘off grid’ is becoming a viable alternative these days, maybe the task of the government or municipality is to organize continuity, reliability and security, making use of dispersed networks and fragmented systems. Maybe we can call this inclusion of individual and small-scale inventiveness and intelligence ‘smart’. The credit crisis made us more aware that we, as individ uals, but also as global community, have new options to work with. There are new production technologies avail able, there are new ways for social interaction and col laboration, there are new ways to finance. The challenge now is how to connect these dots. Mapping what's already taking place is one way to start. We see architects responding, for instance. They have discovered this relatively new terrain of process and development and are adjusting their role to new realities. Some small offices excel in proposing ‘smart’ solutions for complex problems. We’ve included a few in this issue. They meet approval and even applause. They’re able to find the spotlight, this time with unconventional methods, by combining and experimenting, not with mindboggling design and form. As interesting as this is, we realize that such projects have a context. The award winning brilliant solution was provoked by some rules and constraints, and maybe even made possible by some finance a municipality provided. Something preceded what we see. Maybe there is a less visible component in this ‘self-building city’ that is needed nevertheless. We started to look for the interaction, for the intelligence behind the scene.
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A small temporary community garden was installed at Nine Smith Street in Melbourne prior to it being developed into a seven-storey apartment block. The garden provided 22 plots for 12 growers, but was managed by organization 3000 Acres (rather than the ‘community’ themselves). The project was part of several temporary activities, including a non-profit gallery and cafe, to accompany a display suite for the new development. The temporary garden lasted for just over a year.
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Photo: www.jennyhumberstone.com
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Photo: Daniel V창lceanu
Romani Houses, C창mpia Turzii.
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Photo: Arjen Oosterman
Street in the Baishizhou Chengzhongcun (Village in the city), Shenzhen.
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Jacqueline Tellinga interviewed by Arjen Oosterman and Alex Retegan
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wn New Town Almere in the Netherlands is famous for being a manmade town (designed from scratch) on man made land (reclaimed land). Since the late noughties, it is also known for its extensive ‘self-building plots’ in Homeruskwartier, a district in the borough of Almere Poort. Some 1,000 plots on municipal land are available to individuals who want to build their own home. People building their own home is not a big deal in most parts of the world, but in the Netherlands it is experimental and almost revolutionary. Why this experiment and how is it organized? Volume sat down with the municipality’s project manager for this area, Jacqueline Tellinga, who was involved right from the start.
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Arjen Oosterman Why Homeruskwartier? Jacqueline Tellinga Post-war housing production in the Netherlands and in other countries focused on quantity and production became standardized. The vast majority of homes were built by housing associations and municipal authorities. Deregulation and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s meant that, even if municipalities remained in control of planning, housing production was left to the market. The idea was that a market driven city develop ment would create the type homes that buyers really wanted. The irony is that in the 1990s – a period of great riches – we were still building the same standard housing product that we had been building during the (poorer) decades before. Sure, there were certain improvements, but the ‘new wealth’ was in no way reflected in a ‘quality boost’ of the housing production as a whole. At the end of the 90s, MP Adri Duivesteijn submitted an amendment to the new law on physical planning, demanding that one third of homes be built by the people themselves. His main argument was that people were emancipated enough to make their own decisions. That was 1998 and for a long time – apart from a lot of political debating – nothing happened. All that changed in 2007 when the self-building program kicked off in the city of Almere. Apparently, such a program could not be enforced at a national level and the municipal authorities needed to take the lead. One of the most important conditions for any city government that wants to have people build their own homes, is that they can sell land to the citizens directly. For that reason the land must be owned by the city. In the Netherlands a lot of (future) building land was (and still is) bought by developers who have little or no interest in selling their land to ‘self-builders’. Their economic in terest compels them to sell land with ready-made homes. Our program took place in a context of a process of ‘scaling up’ amongst commercial developers and contrac tors, which created a situation without real competition, leaving only a limited choice between standardized housing types. The idea that privatization would serve the buyers better hardly proved a reality. This failure of the market to offer a wide variety of choice coincided with Duivesteijn’s amendment, which reflects the polit ical ideal that people should be able to take matters into their own hands. AO So that’s why Duivesteijn’s intentions didn’t translate into reality for a while. It really took an engaged municipality to get it started. JT One of the reasons why Duivesteijn decided to relocate to Almere was that the city owned a lot of land, which it could sell to prospective self-builders. One has to understand that if our city governments are not cre ating the conditions for self-builders, it does not come into being by itself. There are never a thousand people knocking at the door asking “can we take initiative?”. Not even ten. Not here anyway. AO Almere was the ideal spot. So Adri arrives
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and convinces the council to start this district for a self-building experiment. But why did he pick Almere Poort? There was more land available.
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JT It was not really necessary to convince the council, as there had long been an outspoken political wish expressed to the make the shift to more self-building. However, in order to make this happen, the Department of Urban Development in particular had to invent a new way of city planning. Most of the land was under nego tiation with consortia, which was the normal thing to do
for any developing city at that time. To make the shift to self-building happen, the only part of Almere Poort without formalized contracts with consortia was chosen. In this sense the choice of Homeruskwartier was a coincidence. AO Then you had to produce a design for the area. What to do? Go the American way, subdivide and sell, or what? How did the story go after the location was decided upon?
We put a halt to the Development Plan of Homerus kwartier as it stood and started anew. This was quite an unusual thing to do as it had already received planning permission from the city council. We needed to create a new plan for a phenomenon for which there was no blue print and which essentially was an unproven idea. I had been asked to join because of my books, publications and exhibitions on the political and ideological dimension of this phenomenon. The first step we took was to look for a new external urban planner. We interviewed three urban planning offices and Floris Alkemade of OMA was chosen to make the new plan. The new plan needed to have a wide variety of plot sizes to suit a wide variety of people from different social and economic backgrounds. We made a sample sheet of how to accommodate a variety of choices and conditions from which people dreaming of building their own home could choose. AO These were the first steps. But then you also JT
had to decide how much regulation you needed and how much design to create a city district that is more than the sum total of 1,000 individual dreams. JT We decided that it should not be an urban design based on aesthetics; it should be about giving people freedom of choice. Just let it erupt (if you could put it like that) and see what comes out. So in that sense, we more or less forgot about urban and architectural aesthetics on purpose. It was not an easy request for an urban de signer to embrace, as they are generally trained to create and control aesthetics. In fact, this is one of the reasons why in the field of architecture and urbanism people were initially quite cynical about our approach. After the first homes had been built, the cynics felt confirmed in their criticism of the neighbourhood’s mediocre appear ance. Currently however, as the development continues, one sees a large and interesting variety of homes emerge, including a number of architectural highlights. All of this in the context of a new town mostly known for its standardized housing. AO Were there any regulations that stimulated mixed use?
There are a few keys to understand the outcome, which you see today. The first is plot size, which can vary in terms of width and depth. The second is height. The third is aesthetics. We left the last one out as we didn’t want to interfere there. We deliberately did not involve a buildings aesthetics committee (Welstand). In some spots we do prescribe certain aesthetic criteria, for example along and nearby the park where thatched roofs are oblig atory and the construction material must be wood, but that’s about it. The fourth key is the function. Is it housing or something else? On this front we broadly kept the existing land-use plan in place, which indicates the possi bility to use 50% of your floor space for working at home. So it is not possible to buy a plot and just build an office. In the second phase we introduced plots in which you could make the choice for 100% office or housing. The fifth key is of course the price, and the sixth is time. Will you build it within three years? Can you take ten years? JT
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Alongside luxury developments and public displays of wealth, over half of Cairo’s urban population, a megacity of over 17 million, live in unplanned and self-built com munities. Massive population shifts and a lack of govern mental oversight fostered a culture of collaborative urbanism, incremental architecture and entrepreneurialism. Due to the explosive growth created in the power vacuum after the 2011 revolution, the government has formally recognized this informality and services have started being provided. How will these highly nuanced building prac tices be brought under the remit of planning policy and urban governance? Will they change in the process to produce new forms of urbanism, or will they be accepted and become the new official standard?
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With the completion of Cairo’s ring road, the city’s inhab itants were suddenly more often confronted with a phe nomenon that had remained largely hidden until then. In particular the elite, increasingly driving luxury cars to outlying gated communities, shopping malls and private universities, had to become accustomed to Cairo’s new appearance. Large parts of the city, it had dawned on many, were turning into an endless urban landscape of concrete frameworks, entirely filled with red bricks. Some halfway to completion, others already partly inhabited, but all of them crammed around narrow streets. As the government had largely ignored the phenomenon over the last few decades, it allowed these unplanned, selfdeveloped neighborhoods to proliferate to an extraordinary scale. Conservative studies estimate that these so-called ashwaiat now house at least 63% of the megacity’s popu lation, which amounts to more than 11 million people.1 Immense and constantly expanding, Cairo’s un planned neighborhoods have come into existence through a variety of ‘bottom-up’ practices and strategies. As these processes have not been researched thoroughly so far, much remains unclear. It is known, however, that most of the unplanned areas grew out of small agricultural villages surrounding Cairo’s ‘formal’ core. Initially, no building permits were required in these rural areas, which made it possible to develop land without having to go through lengthy planning processes. Besides, farmers were often easily convinced to subdivide and sell their small privately owned plots, which they sometimes devel oped as well. From the 1960s onwards, many of the villages started to expand rapidly, especially as migrants started to arrive in large numbers from all over Egypt. Those without sufficient funds to buy land would some times occupy state-owned desert land. This was tech nically illegal, unlike the arguably more problematic, largescale urbanization of agricultural land, but in practice the authorities largely ignored both phenomena. In the early 1970s, when the construction of afford able housing by the state ended since most resources were diverted to the army, the planned parts of the city were soon unable to absorb any more people. At the same time, the first remittances from Egyptians working abroad were flowing into Egypt, allowing families to save and invest. Many of them started to construct their own buildings in the informal areas, overseeing the entire project themselves. As they selected the land, consulted with engineers and hired workers, many became ‘informal’ developers. They often realized one or two floors first, making improvements or adding floors when the financial situation would allow it. Many families would become proud owners of multi-story apartment buildings over time, renting out surplus space to other families. Recently, it has been observed that collaborating groups now also construct larger, seven-to-twelve-story apartment blocks at one time. As the buildings are often inhabited by the owners-developers themselves, and as they are considered investments for life, a lot of attention is given to construction standards. Therefore, the ashwaiat resemble in no way African bidonvilles or South American favelas. In fact, the social composition of Cairo’s un planned areas is rather diverse, as they house everything from building owners and scrap collectors to local shop keepers and public sector workers. Despite efforts by the government to construct new towns in the desert, most people prefer informal areas because of their affordability and proximity to the center. As people keep moving in and as there are still no urban
plans to guide the development of the ashwaiat, these areas continue to expand organically. Buildings typically occupy the entire original plot, resulting in an urban land scape that reflects the historical agricultural patterns. A necessary minimum of narrow streets is realized through informal negotiations between local owners, resulting in dense neighborhoods with limited open space, air circu lation or natural light. These mechanisms are largely the same in the various neighborhoods, and their biggest dif ferences are mostly the result of their age. In the newest neighborhoods, logically on the edges of the city, there are still often a lot of vacant plots. Most buildings are un finished and the area is sparsely populated. Many devel opers speculate on future developments, and keep their buildings empty on purpose. Older areas, closer to the center, have matured over time and have densified, ex panded vertically, and developed a vibrant commercial life and strong social cohesion. It is only a matter of time, however, before the newest neighborhoods will also reach this stage. Not only have the authorities never developed any plan for the growing informal areas, they have also never really attempted to curb the phenomenon. Although some laws aimed at stopping future growth in the ashwaiat were passed in the 70s, it was not until 1983 that all con struction on agricultural land was formally criminalized. In practice, however, the laws were almost never enforced and, instead, initiated a culture of corruption among officials, who took bribes to look the other way. A 1996 military law with similar aims (but featuring severe pen alties) proved effective for a while, as it slowed down construction for a few years, though it was later repealed. The scale of developments and the ongoing reluctance of the authorities to seriously intervene has made many owner-developers confident about their security of tenure, despite many buildings defying all existing building regu lations. In fact, the government has even provided basic utilities such as sewage and water connections over time, after sustained pressure from international organizations and the local population. Although installation has often been slow, practically all areas are now served. Since the 2011 revolution, Egypt has gone through a volatile period in which power formations were con stantly contested and restructured. This has often resulted into a de facto power vacuum and a lack of government control on the ground, in particular in popular neighbor hoods. Throughout the city, building owners … quickly adding floors or extending shops or cafés onto the pave ment. Construction activities in informal areas have since doubled or even tripled compared to pre-revolution levels, according to some estimates.2 However, a recently drafted constitution suddenly acknowledged the exis tence of the ashwaiat for the first time, urging the govern ment to make improvements where necessary. It remains to be seen if the current status quo, in which informal development by the population and reluctant acceptance by the authorities are in balance, will change anytime soon. And while the post-revolutionary political process stumbles on, life in ashwaiat, from Imbaba to Bulaq, continues as it has done for decades.
1 David Sims, Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City out of Control (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 2012). 2 David Sims, ‘The Arab Housing Paradox’, Cairo Review of Global Affairs (November 24, 2013).
Photos: RenĂŠ Boer
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Housing in the Ard El Lewa district in the western part of Cairo.
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If there is a moment to test a community’s resilience, it is after disaster has struck. Such situations often show a community pulling together in a shared feel ing that ‘things’ have to be done, but also ambition to be involved and participate on an individual level. Christchurch, New Zealand was no exception when the city was ruined by a series of earthquakes. Yet, it may have come as a surprise for most to see how many people felt engaged and how many (temporary) projects were being proposed and executed. Maybe less surprising was the tendency among existing struc tures and powers to just carry on. The self-building city was welcomed at first, or maybe just tolerated by the powers that be, provided it wasn’t in the way of business as usual. So, how fundamental a change did we actually see?
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Photo: Gap Filler
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Gap Golf is a six-hole mini-golf course by Gap Filler, which has been built and designed by locals with recycled materials. The course is spread over the city, which encourages the movement of participants across the Central Business District. The dispersed course has also required negotiation with many land-owners to be involved in this transitional projects. While the golf course is free to play, putters, balls and scorecards may be borrowed for a deposit - or if you are lucky, nearby businesses may have placed putters and balls out on the turf.
consensual, some are unconsensual, while other projects are uninvited. The work is produced by a variety of actors from the council, community groups, artist collectives and small businesses to the result of anonymous interventions. One small project that brought people together was the Dance-O-Mat, facilitated by citizen-led organization Gap Filler. It is a coin-operated dancefloor where music is generated once someone plugs their smartphone into a headphone jack and drops a NZ$ 2 coin in the slot. Once amplified, the empty space becomes a place where local instructors hold classes, performers dance, and teenagers enjoy programming their own music at night under bright lights in the midst of hundreds of darkened buildings waiting quietly for demolition. In November 2012 fierce architectural critic and British royal Prince Charles gave his approval to Dance-O-Mat with a nimble dance to swing jazz while his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, shimmied about. Another project facilitated by Gap Filler was the Lyttelton Petanque Club located on a vacant corner site in the port town of Lyttelton, which sits over the epi center of the largest quake. The project was built over two weeks by 35 locals to create a multi-purpose community space with a petanque pitch, garden, performance space, and outdoor furniture; it was further adapted by residents over the following months without consultation. (Its unfinished quality suggested to residents that they could continue adapting the site.) Due to the success of the initiative, the CCC bought the land in mid-2012 and prov ided funding for citizens to test out ideas for a future square on the site. In 2014 the CCC built a NZ$ 2.8 million dollar (US$ 2.11 million) square on the site, which included incorporating some of the transitional projects and art works created on site during the interim. Transitional projects may not appear radical in their architectural form or programmatic content to architects and urbanists. In fact, their operation is very familiar in architectural discourses, often framed as tactical, adap tive, ameliorative, makeshift, bottom-up, opportunistic or user-generated urbanism. The architecture is often cheap, fast, ad-hoc, and unglamorous with recycled ma terials, volunteer labor, participatory design processes, and low budgets. The program is usually defined as social spaces: bars, performance venues, play areas, small parks or hang-out zones. Despite this professional familiarity, transitional projects are new to the general populace of Christchurch, who have not been faced with the challenge of building a city before. In this unique context, transitional projects fulfill the urgent brief of addressing the need of providing agency to citizens to engage with a broken city, one that they have been excommunicated from for over two years. These projects are small, affordable and low-risk actions, often in response to relatively simple concerns such as the need for a place to dance, or a place to gather, celebrate, and mourn. In Christchurch the scale and speed of transitional projects has become a way to prototype ideas in space and open up the discussion and formation of the built environment to a wider group of people. It cuts straight to the goal of activating the city rather than working through many different scales and networks to achieve something abstract that may appear in master plan visioning documents like a ‘healthy urban environment’, or a ‘green’, ‘smart’, and ‘intelligent’ city. The immediate concern of transitional projects has been social production. However, they have also become
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It happened again. At 12.51 pm on 22 February 2011, a large earthquake shook Christchurch, the second-largest city of New Zealand. Between September 2010 and the end of 2012, over 13,000 earthquakes jolted the city of 342,000 people, but the February 2011 quake was diff er ent. The city was devastated. Buildings and infrastructure were damaged; 185 people were killed.1 A national state of emergency was declared the following day: the core of the city was shut down and cordoned off as a public exclusion zone. It would be over two years before citizens could return freely to the shattered city center. Four years on, over 70 percent of the central busi ness district has been demolished, 10,000 houses in the surrounding suburbs have been razed while almost another 15,000 stand empty, and the long task of repairing the extensive damage to water, sewerage, and transport infra structure continues. In July 2012, fourteen months after the February quake, the New Zealand government announced a blueprint for rebuilding the central city. This intensive plan focuses on the construction of major projects, including a convention center, sports stadium, performing arts center, and an innovation and health precinct. At the end of 2014, only one of the eighteen projects had been finished. Many projects are behind schedule, with some like the new stadium still possibly ten years away from completion.2 There is also a lack of international private investors willing to risk their money. For many local residents there is a dissonance between the government’s plans for the city and their everyday concerns, which continue to be burdened with various hardships and stresses. The blueprint and its implementation remain controversial. In 2.5 years during the design of eighteen projects, there has only been four moments of public engagement.3 Apart from these few moments there is a complete absence of public engage ment: a NZ$ 500-million-dollar (US$ 376 million) con vention center (with NZ$ 284 million [US$ 214 million] of public money), a NZ$ 100-million-dollar (US$ 75 million) river park, a major bus station, an innovation precinct, housing for 5,000 people, major commercial develop ment, and public squares being led by a publicly owned Development Unit with no public consultation. In the interim period, during the slow and calculated planning, construction and completion of the blueprint, residents and community organizations have not been passive. Citizens, businesses, NGOs, and artist and com munity groups have initiated and implemented hundreds of transitional projects that begin re-imagining and rebuilding the city. The term transitional was first used in the context of Christchurch within the Christchurch City Council (CCC) Central City Plan, which responded to the first big earthquake in 2011 (which was later superseded by the central government’s 2012 blueprint). Transitional is pre ferred by the CCC planning department over temporary, as it suggests that small projects contribute to a larger purpose of rebuilding the city rather than being a momen tary placeholder. Transitional projects in Christchurch have been made by a diversity of people from varied dis ciplines in order to create places and programs to meet, learn, work, debate, shop, broadcast, play, among many other verbs required to navigate daily life. They provide space for a large variety of types of social production: temporary cinemas, street festivals, urban sculptures, temporary venues for music and theater, street furniture, street art, markets, bike workshops, urban farming, sports and commercial spaces. Some of it is legal and
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Source: Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)
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Abundant vacant lots in the city’s center, mostly used as temporary parking, indicate the scale of demolition that took place as a consequence of the earthquake. The Pallet Pavilion as shown on the next page can be identified in the lower part of the aerial photograph.
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d an ars Te Every now and then, an economic downturn disturbs the modus operandi municipalities deploy in city develop足 ment. When money runs out, people are often invited to do themselves what public authorities can no longer provide. They call it emancipation. However, when things get back to normal, municipalities ask back for the driv足 ing seat. This time, they call it democratic legitimacy. This is the story of SAAL, a municipal program created in Portugal after the 1974 revolution. Within only two years, the initial enthusiasm of creating a social utopia turned into fear of losing power. It is a valuable lesson which could give us a clue about the fate of the current self-building policies in Western Europe.
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Poster announcing the protests against the dismantling of SAAL in 1976.
Volume 43 Source: Archive of Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril (Collection A. Alves Costa) – University of Coimbra
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Demonstration in Porto, 17 May 1975.
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Source: Archive of Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril (Collection A. Alves Costa) – University of Coimbra
In the early 1960s, the housing crisis in Portugal was critical. In a country with fewer than two million house holds, an estimation published in 1963 concluded that 466,000 dwelling units were required to meet the needs of the ill-housed population. With the government’s finances depleted by the anachronistic effort to preserve the country’s colonial empire in Africa, and with the consequences to the global economy created by the 1973 oil crisis, the housing shortage in Portugal became further aggravated in the early 1970s. The dictatorship’s social basis of support waned swiftly. Indeed, these combined circumstances would lead to the military putsch that on 25 April 1974 overthrew the dictatorial regime that ruled the country since 1926. These events would produce a noticeable transfor mation in governmental housing policies. Struggling to contain the social unrest that emerged immediately after the coup, the first provisional governments launched a new strategy to cope with the housing crisis. The Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local (SAAL, Service for Local Mobile Support) was a vital component of this strategy and arguably the most innovative attempt to articulate technical expertise, political institutions, and the illhoused population. Indeed, the SAAL program eventually became instrumental to cope with the country’s housing shortage, which had triggered widespread squatting movements, and public demonstrations in protest against a situation where there were so many people without houses and so many houses without people.
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SAAL: Power to the people
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One of the fundamental characteristics of the SAAL program was a strategy to pursue alternative forms of spatial agency, namely through citizens’ participation in the design process, and exploring the latent resources of the ill-housed population in developing their own communities. In other words, the new housing policies suggested that people should contribute with sweat equity to develop their own dwellings, partially liberating the government from the financial burden of funding the planning and construction of houses for a great deal of the insolvent proletariat. Nuno Portas, an architect and arguably one of the most prominent Portuguese specialists in social housing, was nominated Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Development in the first provisional government. Together with another housing expert, Nuno Teotónio Pereira, Portas devised SAAL as a housing program that contrasted with the rationale of the housing policies pursued by the dictatorial regime. While the latter was chiefly based on the promotion of home ownership, Portas and Teotónio advocated for SAAL a social organization of the demand. Further, they attempted to rearticulate the public housing policies to cater for all income sections of the society. Hence, considering that a great deal of the urban proletariat living in substandard conditions were not financially solvent, they suggested using aided self-help solutions as a strategy to adopt the popu lation’s sweat equity as one of the components in the funding scheme for the SAAL program. The SAAL program emphasized the socialization of the housing process, shunning individual endeavors and encouraging collective undertakings. To secure this, the program established that the residents should be organized in housing co-operatives or dwellers’ associa tions to take part in the process and activate the funding scheme to finance the development of the operation.
Each co-op or association should receive from the gov ernment a non-refundable subsidy for each new dwelling unit developed, an amount equivalent to 15/20 times the minimum monthly wage in Portugal in the mid-1970s, enough to cover one-fourth of the building costs of an affordable two-bedroom house. Next to it, the co-op or association should finance the operation through a softloan granted by the government, and payable in monthly installments over a period of twenty-five years. Regard ing land tenure, the municipalities performed a central role, lending existing properties, or expropriating and tak ing possession of private land to develop the operations. Further, they were also responsible for the development and maintenance of infrastructure. The co-ops and the residents associations could thus occupy municipal land as long-term leaseholders. In this context, self-help was seen as a strategy to employ sweat equity as a complement to the govern mental subsidy, thus reducing the outstanding debt and emancipating the inhabitants from their dependence on institutional support. This strategy was indeed a reen actment of initiatives that gained momentum in South America in the 1960s, and that eventually became cur rency in the housing policies sponsored from the 1970s on by the United Nations and the World Bank. To be sure, Nuno Portas was well informed about the work of the Peruvian architect Eduardo Neira, about John Turner’s vision of squatter settlements as an architecture that works, and about the work in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas by the Brazilian urban planner and anthropologist Carlos Nelson Ferreira dos Santos, to name but a few of the most prominent supporters of self-help. Notwithstanding Portas’ good intentions in sug gesting self-help as one of the fundamental principles of the SAAL program, the use of sweat equity in the devel opment of the housing operations was far from being a consensual aspect. Sweat: The Politics of Self-help
Portas and his collaborators devised the so-called Brigadas de Construção (Construction Brigades) as an essential instrument to implement the SAAL program. They would become the mediators between the popu lation, the municipalities and the government. Moreover, they should have a great deal of institutional autonomy to allow them to perform more as interpreters of the people with the governmental agencies than the other way round. Nevertheless, the ideologues of the SAAL program highlighted that the Brigades, although support ive of the people, should not replace them or their representative organizations. The brigades should thus limit their intervention to technical aspects. This emphasis on the technocratic role of the brigades testifies to the uncertainty of the political climate that Portugal was experiencing in the post-revolutionary period. In order to avoid a political contamination of the SAAL program that could undermine its implementation and a productive relation between the main stakeholders, it was then important to stress the role of the technical brigades as nonpolitical entities. This goal failed spec tacularly, though. One needs only to read the Livro Branco do SAAL (SAAL’s White Paper), published in 1976, to acknowledge the extent to which the SAAL process was politically charged. For one thing, with regards to the implementation of self-help as part of the SAAL operations, there were different accounts, all politically motivated. In a press
space. In Lisbon, the SAAL program was integrated in the existing bureaucratic apparatus of the municipal housing agency. As a direct consequence of this admin istrative decision, the outcome of the SAAL operations in Lisbon sharply contrasts with elsewhere. Indeed, despite the recognizable quality of some of the projects developed in Lisbon, they were less disruptive of the status quo than those built in Porto or in Algarve, for example. As one architect involved in Lisbon’s SAAL operations put it, when the technicians asked the people how they wanted their houses to be, they replied: the same as yours! Their references were, of course, those of the urban middle class, who lived in apartment blocks in the city center. In fact, the main SAAL operations in Lisbon were designed as multistory housing blocks, though located on the periphery of the city. They were usually developed in cheap land expropriated next to existing slums (the bairros de lata), which were demolished to make way for a completely new housing figure, in sharp contrast to the vernacular spatial and social practices of the bairros de lata. In Porto, the disciplinary approach took a different way from that in Algarve and in Lisbon. The technical brigades were militantly engaged in giving people the right to the city. As opposed to the suburban character of Algarve’s and Lisbon’s slums, in Porto the working class lived in the city center, in proletarian islands (the so-called ilhas). The ilhas were usually built in the middle of blocks, in the courtyards of the houses of the middle class, who were actually the owners of these substandard dwellings. Secluded from direct participation with public space, the ilhas were nevertheless a housing scheme that fostered the development of well-knit social networks, strongly based on communitarian values, where small row houses shared a collective outdoor space and basic sanitary facilities. In the mid-1970s, as a consequence of the drastic increase of their land value, real estate interests threat ened the existence of the ilhas, as they were no longer important as the locus for the reproduction of labor. In this context, showing its dependence of, and subser vience to, the power of the capitalist apparatus, Porto’s municipality approved in the 1960s a slum clearance process, relocating the residents of the ilhas to social housing complexes built on the city’s periphery. However, while before the revolution the residents were forced to accept their relocation to the periphery, after 25 April 1974, the residents of the ilhas asserted their “right to the place”. The SAAL technical brigades followed suit and praised the ilhas as a model of community life. It comes as no surprise, then, that the morpho-typological qualities of the ilhas contributed significantly to create the toolbox used by the architects engaged in Porto’s SAAL operations. Despite this deliberate attempt to rehabilitate vernacular social and spatial practices, the brigades rejected self-help as a methodology to build the new settlements. They considered that it jeopardized the quality of the whole. In fact, Álvaro Siza, one of the architects involved in Porto’s SAAL operations, quoted Che Guevara, claiming that “quality is respect for the people”. Despite this rejection of self-help as a strategy to build the initial complex, many architects, including Siza himself, designed schemes that suggested (deliberately in some cases, subsumed in others) possibilities for incremental growth and change over time.
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release of the representatives of the SAAL/Norte operations, written in December 1974, they contended that “the [SAAL] answers [...] to a concern on the immediate engagement of the less solvent social strata in self-help housing solutions, which can avoid the dis location of the inhabitants far away from their traditional forms of living in the city or in the human settlement.”1 However, as the process moved along, this initial premise would be swiftly reconsidered, and rejecting self-help housing strategies eventually became a battle cry for a great deal of those involved in the process. In the manifestos, letters, posters and banners produced by the SAAL brigades, the expression ‘Casas Sim, Barracas Não’ (which roughly translates as ‘Houses Yes, Slums No’) became a mantra and a battle cry in the struggle against the governmental policies that allegedly threatened a progressive housing policy. While there was a keen interest among the people in expressing the right to the city and socializing the housing policies, there was an explicit refusal to use sweat equity. For example, in a “charter of claims” written on 15 February 1975 by the joint commission of dwellers’ associations of Lisbon’s slums, they contended that “self-help housing, which is the residents themselves building new houses, is nothing but a form of double exploitation. After a long day of work, filling the pockets of the capitalists, we would have to stay until late hours working in building the houses.”2 While the criticism on self-help methods was already growing at the beginning of 1975, after the failed counter-revolutionary coup of 11 March 1975 the political overtones of aided self-help housing became much more noticeable. This can be testified by the position of the Trotskyist party, Liga Comunista Internacionalista (LCI, Communist Internationalist League), formulated on 15 May 1975, where they declared: “No to self-help housing. Enough of using the workers’ shoulders to sup port the crisis of capitalism.”3 The nature of this state ment would swiftly permeate into, and resonate with the positions held by the SAAL brigades, namely those operating in Lisbon. In effect, one of the conclusions of the plenary meeting of the Lisbon Brigades for Local Support, held on 26 May 1975 was that “the SAAL operation shall not be committed to self-help housing”.4 The resistance to self-help housing solutions gained momentum both in Lisbon and in Porto, though there was a more lenient account of its qualities in the periphery of the political battlefield. To the south of the country, in Algarve, the brigades coordinated by José Veloso developed architectural solutions that were designed to integrate self-help in the construction process of neigh borhoods to accommodate communities of fishermen. The documentary Continuar a Viver ou Os Indíos da Meia Praia, (Life Goes On or the Meia Praia Indians), directed in 1977 by António da Cunha Teles, shows different mo ments of a SAAL operation being built on the outskirts of Lagos, by the seaside. In this film, one can observe the blurred limits between the performance of the architect as a technician, and the role of the architect as a political activist. Rather than debating the emancipatory or alienating nature of self-help housing strategies, José Veloso and the SAAL brigades operating in Algarve pursued a pragmatic approach in which sweat equity was instrumental to foster the collaborative effort of the community of fishermen in developing the operation using the limited financial and material means available. In the SAAL Algarve operations, self-help housing was used as a vehicle to socialize the production of
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Current situation of SAAL operations developed in Porto: S. Victor, designed by Álvaro Siza.
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Photo: Nelson Mota
Álvaro Siza’s restored Bouça complex in Porto from 1975, now a popular destination for architects (photo November 2014).
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Photos: Nelson Mota
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Models of the SAAL operations in Antas, Porto, designed by Pedro Ramalho (upper left); Meia-Praia, Algarve, designed by JosĂŠ Veloso (lower left); and Quinta do Bacalhau/Monte Coxo, Lisbon, designed by Manuel Vicente (this page).
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Javeria Masood
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Islamabad may have been envisioned by its planner Constantinos Doxiadis as a regimented grid appropriate to its role as the capital of Pakistan, a city more focused on parliamentary pursuits including development institu tions, commerce, trade, and the like. However, due to local institutional uncertainty, ongoing national political upheaval, and general economic insecurity, the planned evolution of the city has often taken a back seat. The last few decades have seen numerous public protests unfold within the urban territory. The most recent example began with the leader of one of the opposition parties, PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), demanding that the current Prime Minister step down due to alleged electoral rigging. They initiated a public protest in the form of an azadi (freedom) march and dharna (sit-in), with demonstrations in various parts of the country. Seeing this as an opportunity to create a place for himself in the political arena, the leader of PAT (Pakistani Awami Tehreek) – a religious political actor – also joined in. Pressured by this alliance, the government hoped to defuse the protest by blocking entry points to Islamabad and its government district (known as the Red Zone) with sand-filled shipping containers strategically placed at all major intersections and thoroughfares. The protesters managed to move these containers aside and enter the D-Chowk (node) public square in front of the Parliament. The sit-in lasted for 126 days, from August 14 to December 17, 2014. Throughout this period, other cities
of the country also supported this action by staging protests in varied locations. The dharna ended in reaction to a horrific act of terrorism at a school in Peshawar on December 16, during which over 130 children were killed. PTI wanted to put aside their political agenda and show national solidarity after the Peshawar incident. The images here give an overview of the four-month long dharna as it occurred. Mapping these patterns of moving people, spontaneous activities, and urban formation illustrates how imperative a factor this new emergent city has become, and how cities and communities have a propensity to grow, evolve, and self-articulate, giving direction to urban practices. The public domain is a significant strata of the urban environment, and the appropriation of varied elements within it can lead to profound connectivity within neigh borhoods that perpetuates a sense of ownership and belonging. A top-down approach to design and policy often lacks consideration for the end users, but these events encouraged a different direction. Occupations and similar events affirm the prominent role and strength of the citizenry in the organization of the public domain. The physical site and surrounding spaces had been off limits to the general public, but this event opened it up for everyone. Even though this was a temporary event and inevitably ended, the mere fact that it existed, retained, and accommodated a community of hundreds of families helps to advocate for bottom-up and participatory design. It has emboldened all stakeholders in their involvement with the built and socio-political environments.
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The space was organized in five segments: entrance, stage, seat足ing space (for women), and a large central area with mixed programs, including tents for housing. The stepped area to the right and left of the enclave contained housing and retail in addition to a con足 glom足eration of services such as a mosque, temporary school, day care, mobile-phone charging stations, barbers, food stops, and so on. The overall articulation was flexible, and different activities tended to merge into each other and occasionally move around. The image shows the scattered tent settlements, the shipping containers forming an enclosure, with the beautiful Margalla Hills as the backdrop.
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Adri Duivesteijn interviewed by Arjen Oosterman
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Once upon a time ‘left’ equaled ‘collective’ and ‘right’ ‘individual’. Those were the days. Today, it looks like ‘left’ adopted a rightwing agenda in its plea for individual freedom and the right to choose. In the Netherlands, social-democrat politician Adri Duivesteijn advocated a different approach in the nation’s housing program: instead of continuing with top-down provision of the housing product by commercial developers and housing associations alike, stimulate and propagate individual house building. It seemed like swearing in church when this became political in the late 90s, but upon a closer look the policy stems from a consistent analysis of the individual’s place in society. Volume sat with former alderman, currently MP, Adri Duivesteijn to learn about the difference between the right to decide and the position to do so.
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‘Self Power’
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Arjen Oosterman In 1998, as a PvdA (socialist)
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member of the Lower House, you took the initiative together with D66 (liberal-democrats), to oblige municipalities to realize 30% of the housing sector on ‘self-build’ plots. What did that entail?
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Adri Duivesteijn: The motion was the upshot of a line of thought that began during my first period as alderman (1980 – 1984) in The Hague. My colleague, alderman Van Otterloo, had initiated a competition for ‘dream houses’, in the framework of a small ‘model neighborhood’. The winners received land on which to fulfill their dream. I saw all the plans, possibly around 400 of them, in the Grote Kerk. It was fantastic, but at that stage I didn’t fully realize the inherent potential. All those different ideas from all those different households. That was a ‘eureka’ moment. I’ve always been very much in favor of the right of self-determination, that people should shape their own home and social environ ment. In those days I also denounced fake participation, in which people were allowed to have their say, but the same building plans were effectuated everywhere. Later, by then I was the director of the NAI (Nether lands Architecture Institute), I went to Lima to set up an exhibition demonstrating that a different objective existed other than glitter and glamour in architecture – so, the connection between city and community, and the signifi cant role of architecture and city planning in that con text. In the nineteen-twenties such ties were very strong. What I certainly hadn’t realized was that in Lima it wasn’t about slums, but neighborhoods with people who had moved to the city from the countryside, with per spectives, a desire to build up their lives and incredible optimism. What I found so fascinating in Lima was that people get a stamp indicating the public space, meaning the public program can be well organized. They then get on with their own houses. And in a 10-, 15-year process you see that what started as a straw-mat shack, develops into a regular dwelling. Houses that yuppies then want to buy into. It was spectacular to see the enormous diversity, but also that the houses were bigger than those we build at urban extension locations. And that people did so without any real capital. But that also applied for the municipality which was working without all that much money. Here we had proof of self power. And the fact that you can organize it like that if you just have a view about city planning. In due course, Carel Weeber came to the conclusion – partly because of our exhibition, as he told me himself – that our approach was unusual. And he was converted to what he called ‘anything-goes’ housing. Later, in Almere, it was known as ‘consumers’ choice housing’, meaning the developer could continue to play a part. An ensuing experience was a holiday trip past all ‘Vinex’* locations, at the very beginning of that develop ment. It shocked me to see that all those houses (some of which were still under construction) were all the same. The floor plans were almost identical, everywhere, with a fake exterior. Later I discovered the developer’s archi tects had been given a little A-3 book with the floor plans they had to adhere to. And the Netherlands’ best-known architectural offices were obediently following them. They opted for turnover. MVRDV’s associated project at Ypenburg is a tongue-in-cheek protest – brilliant – but nothing more. That made me think: we’ve got to break in! It resul ted in that motion, that 1998 amendment.
Since the Second World War we’ve had a very small number of people in the Netherlands who determine what happens in the building sector. That’s why D66, which was still a young party then, wanted an investigation into the structure of the construction industry, because they felt power was so concentrated in a number of com panies collaborating with the ministries that they were controlling the production market, determining prices and dictating the pace. In the Netherlands, unlike in many other countries, production is entirely controlled by a select group of people representing companies that make tacit agree ments with one another. So our motion was intended to impinge on the situa tion. It never worked, even though the motion was passed and was incorporated in the junior minister’s documents – but meanwhile private building dropped to 7%. AO But it’s also a politically interesting moment. From a relatively unexpected quarter, the social democrats, a motion is tabled which appears to be directed at private ownership. The conservative junior minister espoused it and proceeded to be torn two ways. He was practically obliged to choose between ‘big business’ and ‘small business’. AD A social democrat will always consider Spatial Planning to be important. And he will always want to put the ordinary citizen in a position in which he can func tion. The big difference between the social democrats and our conservative friends is that the latter maintain emphatically that the individual citizen is the prime focus and, for that purpose, we have a market and the market enables the citizen to choose. But the market is (also) an intermediary, a level between the citizen and govern ment. A social democrat wants to have a direct relation ship between government and citizen – to enable the latter to function. But it is indeed a frequent misunder standing that self-build is conservative policy. AO In the Netherlands, we’re coming out of a period, possibly a century, in which the govern ment provided and made available to those who are unable to secure minimal quality (housing in this case), the welfare state. And then, sometime in the nineties, you came to the conclusion that it was no longer tenable, was reaching its limits, or was no longer applicable because circumstances had changed since the ‘thirties’ or ‘fifties’. AD I’ve always opposed the dominance of parties that have taken control of the welfare state: first the housing associations, then property developers, who became welfare-oriented. “I know what you need, also you’re not capable of doing it – building a house yourself.” The insti tutes look after the people. I’ve always said: people should look after themselves. And conditions should be created to achieve that in a responsible way. The program in Almere ‘I am building my house affordably’ is a good example. There’s great skepticism about people’s ‘self power’. We have a building structure in which building is monopolized and we have an interpretation of the welfare state dominated by thinking for others. And we had a market in which everything the specialists proposed was realized and accepted. That market has changed. The housing shortage has been largely overcome, there’s only strain in part of the housing market. And that’s the result of people’s desire to have a bigger dwelling and move house, a matter of quality, not quantity in absolute terms. AO So you propose two structural alterations for the Netherlands: a change of mentality and a change
AD Yes, brutally. Only the individual citizen was left. When we embarked on it, I was pretty nervous. Weren’t we overplaying our hand by ‘throwing’ 1,000 or 1,500 plots on the market? Property developers always create short ages. I was particularly worried about the big plots. Would there be a market for them? To my surprise, they were the very first to go. People from the city proved to have an awful lot of money and, in cultural terms, a lot of ‘ethnic minority’ Dutch bought them. And another thing we hadn’t predicted was that buyers, unlike people wanting an existing house, dealt very realistically with their financial possibilities. The criterion wasn’t what it might be ideally, but – very practical – what was feasible. AO Did you also see that people erected their houses by degrees, storey by storey, the way they sometimes do in southern countries? AD People really wanted to have their homes as soon as possible. Early on, there weren’t enough builders, but that problem soon resolved itself. But remember that 60% of the plots had catalogue houses built on them. Even then, they are always bigger, cheaper and better geared to the buyers’ wishes than what the market routinely offers. That 60% represents the ‘cement’ of the neigh borhood and makes for serenity in the surroundings, while the 40% containing unique houses adds color to the neighborhood. AO In other words, people’s self-organizing ability is substantial. So what help (from the government) is still needed? AD In Almere Oosterwold, with Winy Maas of MVRDV, we radicalized that idea of self-build plots. Not preplanning, but allowing the 4,000-hectare area [almost 10,000 acres] to materialize from initiatives. There are ‘ground rules’ with which the initiatives have to comply, but people have to organize the rest themselves. Also among themselves. Organized organic growth. But government must facilitate, in more general terms. A nice example was a group that wanted to develop several plots in Homerus Quarter jointly, but wanted to adapt the concomitant layout. That’s fine, that’s what it’s all about. Citizens come up with ideas that the urban planner or I, as a government official, don’t think of. Support is what’s needed. AO If, essentially, the individual is the one to launch the initiative, how as officials, can you make sure there’s differentiation and diversity? AD In Homeruskwartier I wanted a cross section of in
come groups, of housing types, of cultures. But self-build automatically generates that. You don’t need to do much. AO So what in fact is the role of the government? AD Spatial planning. I’m also an advocate of scarcity, of not throwing the world wide open and making every thing possible. That’s why Homeruskwartier is an interesting case. We introduced a choice, but we left to chance how the neighborhood developed. AO Are we on the way to a city where public sector housing is no longer needed? Is that a perspective? AD Everything changes when there are no shortages. In 1980 or thereabouts I went to Liverpool with the city councilors of The Hague. Liverpool was having a rough time and a third of the housing stock was empty. There were some very strange effects. All the high-rises were
empty and completely run down. But in the upscale resi dential areas the boring houses were empty too. Even in James Stirling’s Runcorn, which was relatively new, the corner houses, which were clearly less popular, were boarded up. Tragic. But an eye-opener. I continued to press for scarcity later on. A city benefits from scarcity. It’s unfortunate that not everyone has the same kind of house, but that’s preferable to the effects of unoccupied dwellings. But we’re now approaching a situation in which not much more is being built. That’s already the case in large parts of the Netherlands. And then you have a slack housing market. Prices are now being kept high artificially. Rent allowance for the lower income groups has the effect of raising prices. When it is withdrawn the whole ‘rental structure’ of the housing associations has to change. But I think the situation will remain unchanged for now, and that the housing associations will continue to play their part for the lower income groups. I just hope very large portions of their housing stock will be passed on to the citizens. Not ending in the market sector, selling off individually, but in ‘housing cooperatives’. I managed in the Senate to get the housing cooper ative included in the housing act, alongside the housing association. The idea is that the existing housing stock should be transferred to the citizens and, under their own management, they can define their own individual home. I envisage people taking charge of their own housing to a greater extent. AO Incidentally, I don’t understand why the housing associations are being hit with an extra tax while having to sell off part of what they own and being reduced to purely social housing, so being allowed to embark on any profitable development to defray the costs of social housing production. Politicians are forcing them to jump through some very small hoops. AD But there’s one thing you mustn’t forget. Altogether,
the housing associations’ property is worth 285 billion euros, including € 90 billion in debts. So if today you were to sell all the associations as one company, you’d be very rich. Together they’re by far the wealthiest large-scale landowner we’ve ever had in this country. Even compared with feudal times. So I can imagine the associations being quite a bit smaller and more focused on the target group. They don’t need to own 2.4 million rental homes when the target group comprises 900,000 households. AO And that’s what we call an empowering society! AD Yes, very good. AO But is that still an inclusive society? If the individual takes charge of his own housing, the gov ernment has far less influence on where the indi vidual takes up residence. It will be interesting to see how society sets itself up – if it remains a multi colored mosaic or actually splits up into specific groups. In the Netherlands the government has always been fiercely committed to mixing the popu lation with a view to a stable society. AD In the Netherlands we’ve always been fiercely com
mitted to artificial diversity: imposed from above. But in practice, the different groups have no contact whatsoever with one another. That’s emerged from various studies. In Homeruskwartier we mixed people up too, small plots are spread over the whole area for instance, but then we left it to chance. To my mind it’s spectacular that an inclusive society actually came about there, without any molding
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of system. So Homeruskwartier in Almere Poort, where you introduced self-build plots on a large scale and wanted literally to shut property devel opers out, was intended as breaching the system.
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from us. We do have 30% social housing in the plan, selfbuild, but don’t specify how and where. You can interpret that as a criticism of Dutch post-war planning. As a gov ernment, you must facilitate things for people. The post-war neighborhoods are now a big challenge – all owned by the housing associations. I see the old reflexes cropping up: demolish a row and put up a new row in its place, with no influence for the individual. And neighborhoods like that are far more stigmatizing than what we’re now doing in Homerus Quarter. AO But is it a problem? Do you think it’s a problem when people group themselves? AD No, grouping like that is fine. But ask yourself: does
the government do it or do the people themselves? A small house next to a big house is great, it adds interest. AO But what happens when it’s the other way round – if the Homeruskwartier turns into a ghetto of the rich? AD It just doesn’t happen. AO In Amsterdam a working class neighborhood like the Jordaan or De Pijp has been ‘yuppified’. Does that matter? AD I’ve noticed that the housing associations are har
monizing rents in the extreme, so when a house is vacated, the rent is increased substantially if the property is at an attractive location. And that the housing appraisal sys tem [the criterion for subsidized rent] now includes in the appraisal location and unique attributes to a far greater extent. It means people on low incomes don’t have access to certain areas. We’re losing that. From a socialdemocratic perspective I believe it’s important to safe guard differentiation. In Amsterdam the ‘underclass’ is being driven out of the city to far beyond the beltway. Of course, that’s dreadful. AO So some form of protection will still be needed? AD In my view, yes. But I’m pessimistic. It’s becoming
increasingly ‘normal’ to accept that inequality exists. And that the market works like a sorting machine. All these processes conceal a great underlying ideological battle. The liberals and the conservatives, and the Christiandemocrats, often take part, believing the government should be as small as possible and the market as big as possible. And that affects all aspects, health care, you name it. In the past the insurance companies and the housing associations were bodies implementing govern ment objectives. Now it’s market objectives.
* National housing program, indicating in which municipalities and what areas a total of 800,000 dwellings should be realized between 1995 and 2005.
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This interview was held at Adri Duivesteijn’s house in The Hague on January 23rd, 2015.
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