MANIFESTO

To this, architect-activist Pier Vittorio Aureli claims our society needs to propose spatial and structural configurations that instead facilitate sharing, and which make impossible the return to traditional domestic settings. What is urgent for this new era of economic poverty and social instability are domestic typologies that go beyond the single-family as the main subject and embrace communities of people- providing co-owned (shared) spaces resistant to commodification through real-estate speculation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, reacting to growing affluence in the world’s most advanced cities, squatting movements gained extraordinary intensity as inequities and housing crises swelled.

In 1960s Amsterdam, a particular strain of squats emerged out of ideologies of sharing and spatial activism against post-war politics gradually commodifying urban fabrics. Seen scarcely with the same intensity in squatting movements elsewhere is the collective appropriation of buildings through spatial interventions centered on the commons. In these squats, the transformation of buildings into domestic commons for habitation were remarkable feats of collective organization and spatial agency.

As the basis of capitalist economies, land ownership has produced distorted markets in which housing shortages perpetually exacerbate- pushing the inhabitants of cities into conditions of precarity. Conversely, vacant structures litter all manner of urban environments. This housing contradiction has manifested in alternative visions of communal living and a new collective agency materializing in squatter collectives throughout Dutch urban environments. By occupying vacant properties and imagining alternative models of family and ownership, these communes have established infrastructures of domestic solidarity. Across the Netherlands, the squatting movement has produced spaces for diverse co-habitation by those who advocate collective living. The squatter communes which have organized in Amsterdam represent vital opportunities for meaningful investigation into how communities have materialized alternative housing models subverting the issues which have emerged from patriarchal domesticities and the commodification of housing. The authors of Architecture of Appropriation, Boer, Truijen, and Verzier speak to the success of Dutch squatters- “through the appropriation and maintenance of industrial, historic, empty, and abandoned structures, the squatters are at the same time activists, builders, and architects who design the architectures of new forms of belonging, and new ways of being together autonomous to speculative economies and conventional domesticity” . Put simply, there is already significant research and understanding of “what” the squatter communes have been able to accomplish but we lack an understanding of the “how”. Although existing research illustrates the vivid and dynamic life inside these squats, more critical investigations which analyze their tactics of the domestic organization (the sharing of domestic labor and reproductive burdens), the architecture of spatial appropriation, and co-ownership models present the opportunity for speculation on formal iterations in alternate settings. My research intends to rectify this critical disparity and stimulate creative iterations of formalized (LEGAL) alternative domesticities able to transform our stagnant housing models radically. The intent is NOT to propose a restructuring of our capitalist society, but rather to provide the alternative of autonomy for those who do not wish to belong in it. The intent IS to “hack” the system- provide instead commons-centric and CO-owned domestic spaces to provide a meaningful counter for those in need of collectivity.

My research will investigate the means through which this collective agency has allowed squatters to imagine autonomous urban communes resilient to political and economic instability. Simultaneously, I will study how the processes of organizing these squats through spatial activism (in the appropriation of neglected structures) undermine normative domestic practices. The aim of this research is to examine a selected series of squatter communes in Amsterdam- their models of creating welcoming, inclusive, communal housing. The research methodology will consist of studying archival drawings, photographs, and interviews, to understand the spaces, tactics, and governance models of the selected squats. I am most interested in investigating how squatters collectively negotiate spaces, how the commons have materialized in these alternative domesticities, squatter tactics of spatial intervention (how they appropriate buildings and create architecture), their means of self-organization, and their re-imagining of domestic and reproductive labor. This research seeks to stimulate creative co-living typologies in the US, where capitalism has produced and reproduced antiquated domestic models unable to address a new era of an increasingly precarious population plagued by destitution, social instability, and technological primacy. Through investigation into these squats, my research seeks to imagine how city inhabitants may become effective city builders themselves, without waiting for reform of an inert building bureaucracy and apathetic socio-economic structures.