Housing Futures: spatial strategies for alternative forms of living
Date and time
Housing Futures is two days of conversations on spatial strategies for housing alternatives and non-normative forms of living.
About this event
As the housing movement gains new momentum, Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Independent School for the City host two days of conversations about spatial strategies for housing alternatives and non-normative forms of living. Housing Futures will provide a platform to discuss everything from the future of squatting to the rise of new models for cooperative housing, while at the same time rethinking how to document and preserve these spatial, social and political strategies for future generations. Housing Futures aims to contribute to the growing housing movement with new ideas, fresh connections and practical solutions.
Across the globe, cities have been taken hostage by neoliberal urban policies that are putting the fundamental right to housing under pressure. Rotterdam is one of them, along with many other cities in the Netherlands. Once known for its social, alternative and affordable housing models, the country is now the site of a rising number of homeless people, evictions, and expulsions of marginalised groups from its city centres, including groups that previously had fewer issues finding a suitable home. In this context, it is fundamental to again pose the question: what opportunities arise when the right to housing, rather than the right to property, takes precedence in the transformation of the city?
Since the 1960s, squatters have practiced this philosophy as a form of urban living, reshaping both the city itself and how it has been perceived and theorised. Using subversive spatial tactics instead of master plans and top-down design strategies, squatters appropriate the city and change it from within. Next to the tactics of collective resistance practiced by squatting communities over decades, diverse groups and collectives are keeping up the fight for affordable housing by pushing for changes in housing policies and by proposing alternative models for non-normative ways of living.
The quest for recognition of these collectives, their spatial, legal, digital and artistic practices, and their role in the design of the urban fabric, opens up questions of the power relations involved when the self-organised meet the institutional, and living practices meet the archive, the court and the municipal office. This necessarily brings in questions of institutional and non-institutional cooperation and systemic institutional violence. The organisers of these sessions, both institutionally affiliated and independent practitioners, seek specifically to amplify generative approaches, connect initiatives and explore infrastructures for self-organisation that could have a transformative effect on existing and emergent institutions.
Architecture of Appropriation
The weekend follows on from the research project Architecture of Appropriation which collaborated with six squatting communities in the Netherlands to document their spaces through architectural drawings, interviews, and archival material. Bringing together the expertise of the squatting movement, architects, archivists, scholars and lawyers, the project discussed approaches to the research, archival practices and representation of precarious, non-author-based, and often criminalised spatial practices in the institutional framework of an archive and museum. The project has manifested in different public programmes, exhibitions and publications, and is also currently presented as part of the exhibition Appropriation as Collective Resistance (on show in Designing the Social at Het Nieuwe Instituut).
Independent School for the City
The Independent School for the City is a postgraduate educational platform based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The school is an initiative of Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles) and is rooted in their practice of combining a critical and activist approach to the city with effecting real change through architectural and planning projects. Previously, the School organised the Summer School Let’s Be R€al: New Strategies for Collective Affordable Housing, and Taking Back Housing! in collaboration with the International New Town Institute.
