The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Edward W. Soja
story tells a vertical story of subtle and creative city-building processes. It
was almost surely a squatter-occupied house in the past and is probably one
now, for Spuistraat has long been an active scene of the squatter movement.
On the ground floor is an extension of the garage offices next door. There is
a small “No Parking” sign on the window, but nearly always a car or two is
parked in front. Our ground floor, in contrast, is a used book shop, one of
the many dozens densely packed in this most literate of Centrums, the place
where Enlightenment scholars from Descartes to Voltaire, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau first found the freedom to have their works published and
publicized without censorship.
One cannot avoid noticing that the automobile is an intruder in the
Centrum. Spuistraat, like so many others, is a street designed and redesigned
primarily for pedestrians and cyclists. Alongside the busy bike
path there is a narrow one-way car lane and some newly indented parking
spaces, but this accommodation to the automobile is tension-filled and wittily
punctuated. The police are always ready to arrive with those great metal
wheel clamps and the spectacle of their attachment usually draws appreciative,
occasionally cheering and laughing, crowds of onlookers. Traffic is
nearly always jammed, yet (most of the time) the Dutch drivers wait patiently,
almost meekly, for they know they are guilty of intrusion and wish
to avoid the steel jaws of public sanction. I was told that the city planners
have accepted the need to construct several large underground parking
garages in the gridlocked Centrum, but only with the provision that for
every space constructed below ground, one space above is taken away.
On the first floor of the house across the way were the most obviously
elegant living quarters, occupied by a woman who had probably
squatted there as a student but had by now comfortably entered the job market.
She spent a great deal of time in the front room, frequently had guests
in for candlelit dinners, and would occasionally wave to us across the street,
for my wife, Maureen, and I too had our most comfortable living space just
by the front windows. On the floor above there was a young couple. They
were probably still students and still poor, although the young man may
have been working at least part-time, for he was rarely seen, except in the
morning and late at night. The woman was obviously pregnant and spent
most of her time at home. Except when the sun was bright and warm, they
tended to remain away from the front window and never acknowledged anyone
outside, for their orientation was decidedly inward. The small top floor,
little more than an attic, still had plastic sheeting covering the roof. A single
male student lived there and nearly always ate his lunch leaning out the
front window alone. His space made one wonder whether the whole building
was still a “squat,” for if he was paying a nominal rent, one would have