the once radical and visionary housing
projects that the city seemed able to realise.
Long under fierce real estate speculation,
the majority of its population now struggle to find
affordable housing options, notwithstanding
the initiatives of cooperatives and some
public agencies. In this uninspiring context,
the architectures of the squatting movement
still unleash strategies of subversion against
the market-oriented housing models and
policies that overwhelmingly lead the
development of cities. The spatial and legal
strategies used by squatters to appropriate
the urban fabric are a reminder that other
urban and domestic arrangements, and non-
commercial forms of communal living are
still possible and viable. And the squatters’
argument that the people’s right to housing
supersedes the right to own property seems
particularly pressing today.
Regrettably, discussions among urban
planners, scholars and policy-makers around
affordable housing and the growing barriers
for equal access to housing in cities too often
abstain from re-examining vacancy and
questioning notions of property. Meanwhile,
sharing unoccupied domestic spaces has
become a synonym of corporate
monetary exchange instead of a form
of solidarity, and co-working/living are
mantras for flagship high-end developments.
Increasingly appropriated by designers,
developers and anti-squat companies, the
architectural typologies and strategies
of temporary occupation of uninhabited
spaces, and the reuse of materials and
aesthetics instigated by the squatting movement,
are now marketed devoid of their original
ideals today.
The architecture of the home and housing
is, rather than a people’s right, a preferred
form of investment and repository of capital.
The object of speculative operations and
completely imbricated in the neoliberal policies
of urban development, a majority of contemporary
housing projects and policies follow the logic
of the market and render evident forms of
precarity and processes of unequal access
and accumulation of capital among the population.
Inequalities that perpetuate centuries of
targeted violence towards the excluded
and oppressed through master plans and
design strategies, in which the architectural
community is also complicit.
Previous spread (left)and
following pages: views of the
ADM area, with exteriors and
interiors of the community’s
spontaneous architectures
Previous spread (right):
axonometric projections of the
self-built structures
Pages 80 and 81 (top left): some
moments from the final eviction
of the squatter settlement,
which occurred between late
December 2018 and early 2019By collectively inhabiting vacant premises,
and imagining other models of family and
ownership, the squatter movement has set up
infrastructures of domestic solidarity. Across
the country, squatters have opened spaces
for multigenerational and diverse habitation
for those who champion collective living, who
don’t have access to a home, or even to legal
residency status. Through the appropriation and
maintenance of structures, these communities
have designed models for welcoming, inclusive,
affordable architecture with a cultural value,
and even sites for multispecies coexistence.
Despite the ban, and unfortunately unlike
the case of ADM, a number of squatted spaces
in the Netherlands have acquired legal