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---> SQUATTING | |
| -> Framing Urban Injustices: The Case of the Amsterdam Squatter Movement (Justus Uitermark) |
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| Every social movement is engaged in an on-going process of ‘framing’ to determine what goals are just and what means are legitimate. This paper provides an analysis of several frames that have been developed by the squatter movement in Amsterdam. This movement emerged in the 1970s as a major force that was able to put the shortage of affordable housing on the political agenda. The paper also gives attention to the contemporary squatter movement and asks to what extent a movement that has lost much of its former momentum is still able to address injustices. It is argued that the infrastructure that has been built up by previous generations of squatters provides contemporary participants with the opportunity to address certain issues quite effectively; there are now only a few activist squatters, but their actions are relatively effective due to the facilitating and catalysing role of the movement’s infrastructure. The paper stresses that the squatter movement is extremely heterogeneous. Changes in the local political opportunity structure that have taken place in the past couple of years have had a differentiated impact on the different segments of the movement. Specifically, segments of the movement which argue that they help to promote Amsterdam’s profile as a vibrant cultural city have recently gained a strong position in Amsterdam’s polity. |
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| Extra. Is the institutionalization of urban movements inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and Amsterdam (Pruijt)
In this article the opportunity structures of New York City and Amsterdam for organized squatting are compared. New York City knew two distinct squatting waves, with an intermission of several years. The literature on US urban movements predicts transformation through cooptation and repression. Only the first wave, in which housing activists used squatting as a tactic, fits this prediction. The second wave of squatting in New York City, and squatting in Amsterdam in general, escaped cooptation because they involved a squatters' movement proper, in which squatting was not only a tactic but also central to its existence. Compared to Amsterdam, squatting in New York was hampered by technical difficulties and political isolation. Stricter protection of private property made New York squatters restrict themselves to publicly-owned abandoned buildings. Turf conflicts tended to develop on the neighbourhood level when these buildings were later claimed for the development of low-income housing. In Amsterdam this type of conflict was rare because of the broad support for low-income (re)development. Instead, Amsterdam saw citywide protest directed at the real estate sector and municipal authorities. |
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| Space and Polity, Vol. 8, No. 2, 227–244, August 2004 please download pdf |
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| -> DEBATES AND DEVELOPMENTS: The co-optation of squatters in Amsterdam and the emergence of a movement meritocracy: a critical reply to Pruijt (Uitermark) |
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| This article explains how and why the relationship between the Amsterdam squatter movement and the local government has changed over the last decade. Besides reassessing Pruijt's analysis of the Amsterdam squatter movement in a recent issue of this journal, the article also engages with the post-Fordist literature on social movements. This literature is largely based on the assumption that a subversive identity is incompatible with co-optation. However, as such ‘soft factors’ as culture gain more importance in urban growth strategies, it is likely that some segments of urban movements may become co-opted while retaining their subversive identity. It is hypothesized that we are witnessing the emergence of a movement meritocracy: with the rise of soft neoliberal urban policies, the way in which the local polity delivers incentives follows an increasingly discriminatory pattern, giving a place to those segments that contribute to the cultural vibrancy of the city whilst ignoring segments that struggle for basic provisions. These processes are probably not peculiar to Amsterdam and there is an urgent need for post-Fordist and other social movement theory to investigate what are the consequences of these shifts for government-movement interactions. |
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| please download pdf | ||