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Abstract
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.
Notes
Justus Uitermark is in the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Kloreniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E‐mail: [email protected]. This paper was written while the author was working at the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Nijmegen. The author wishes to thank the department, and especially Henk van Houtum, for support during his stay there. Thanks also go to Jan Willem Duyvendak (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam) for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
The most comprehensive review of the movement is provided by Van Duivenvoorden (Citation2000). Other extensive analyses are provided by Dijst (Citation1986) and Mamadouh (Citation1992). A good reflection that was not extensively used here but deserves mentioning is the only book‐length text on squatting in Amsterdam in English: Bilwet (Citation1990). Finally, I want to mention two articles in the Interntionaal Journal of Urban and Regional Research which give a broad impression of the movement to an international academic audience (CitationDraaisma and van Hoogstraten, 1983; and CitationPruijt, 2003).
Citations from the interviews that were published in Snotneus (Citation1998) are marked with the name of the interviewee and the page number. Citations that are not marked with page numbers and names are taken from interviews that I conducted myself.
In the remainder of this paper, I frequently talk about ‘the’ Staatsliedenbuurt squatters. This is simply shorthand to denote a heterogeneous group that did have its centre of gravity in the Staatsliedenbuurt but also had supporters in other neighbourhoods. Moreover, many squatters had ambiguous feelings about their agenda and thus only incidentally supported it.
As one my more experienced informants said “I do want to say something about this opportunism. Squatters always deal only with individual squats. When they squat a vacant hotel, they turn it into a protest against the municipality's hotel policy. When they squat a monument, they talk about the historical value of the building. And so on. There should be other ways to do this”.