The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Contested Streetscape in Amsterdam
talist became the obvious choice. No better symbol can be found of the continuing
impact of the twentysomethings: compromised to be sure, far from
having any absolute power, but nevertheless aging with significant virtue,
commitment, and influence.
The final renewal came with the full-scale squatter or kraken movement,
beginning in 1976. The squatters launched their famous “No Housing
No Coronation” campaign in 1980 and, for a few days, occupied a
building near Vondel Park, declaring the site “Vondel Free State.” Armed
with helmets, iron bars, and stink bombs, the Vondel Free State squatters
were eventually defeated by an army of 1,200 police, six tanks, a helicopter,
several armored cars, and a water cannon. After 1980, the movement did not
decline so much as become a more generalized radical pressure group
protesting against all forms of oppression contained within what might be
called the specific geography of capitalism, from the local to the global
scales. Squatters, for example, merged into the woman’s movement, the antinuclear
and peace movements, and the protests against apartheid (a particularly
sensitive issue for the Dutch) and environmental degradation
(keeping Amsterdam one of the world’s major centers for radical Green politics),
as well as against urban speculation, gentrification, factory closures,
tourism, and the siting of the Olympic games in Amsterdam.
The greatest local success of the squatter movement was ironically
also the cause of its apparent decline in intensity and radicalness. This was
to keep the right to accessible and affordable housing at the top of the urban
political agenda by, in Virginie Mamadouh’s words, “convincing the
local authorities of the urgency of building more housing for young
households and of prohibiting the destruction of cheap housing in the central
city for economic restructuring, gentrification, or urban renewal.” 6
Nowhere else did so much of the spirit of the 1960s penetrate so deeply into
the urban planning practices of the 1980s and 1990s.
The population of Amsterdam peaked around 1965 at over
860,000. Twenty years later the total had dropped to a little over 680,000,
but the Centrum had already begun to grow again; and, after 1985, so has
the city as a whole. Many factors affected this turnaround, but from a comparative
perspective none seems more important than that peculiar blend of
democratic spatial planning and regenerative social anarchism that has preserved
the Centrum as a magical center for youth of all ages, a stimulating
possibilities machine that is turned on by active popular participation in the
social construction of urban space. As the prospects for urban social justice
seem to be dimming almost everywhere else today, there remains in Amsterdam
a particularly valuable embarrassment of geohistorical riches.