The battle for the city

Extensive regeneration and urban renewal are on the agenda but, apart from the Wibautstraat and the Weesperstraat—Amsterdam’s own Stalin Allee—very little has materialized by the late sixties. First, new residential developments need to be built in the expansion areas of Buikslotermeer and Molenwijk in North Amsterdam, and in Geuzenveld and Osdorp to the west, not to mention the Bijlmermeer, where apartment buildings are shooting up at an alarming rate by the end of sixties. Here lies the future for most Amsterdammers who are forced to move out of their former homes and abandon the old city to the wiles of unscrupulous urban planners.

Ban the bank 

The first major conflict concerning the inner city’s future erupts in late 1966. The Algemene Bank Nederland (ABN) is about to build a gigantic head office on the Vijzelstraat, and the plans have been approved. Many believe the project is ill-conceived, partly because the building, designed by Marius Duintjer, towers over the surrounding, smaller-scale historic architecture, and also because it is the latest of many urban redevelopment projects to be foisted upon the city. Led by architectural heritage conservationists, opponents of the ABN project bare their teeth for the first time, chanting “Ban the bank!” in their war to block construction. Their efforts are fruitless. The municipality stands its ground, and the ABN colossus is shoved down Amsterdam’s throat (fig. 1).

For the moment, opponents do nothing but bark—they haven’t yet decided to bite back. Towards the end of the sixties, however, this starts to change. Adding their voices to the storm of protest against the gigantic ABN building, youthful activists demonstrate just how much they care about what happens to Amsterdam. With the slogan “Keep your City Livable,” the Provos and the Socialist Youth party organize a demonstration and a teach-in against the ABN project. As the group worst hit by the housing shortage, which has been unremitting since the end of the war, young people have a stake in this, too. Throughout the sixties, these young postwar baby boomers sign up en masse for homes that simply do not exist. 

Some months earlier, the Provos presented the “White House Plan”. (fig. 2) However, the plan amounted to little more than a call to occupy the city’s innumerable empty buildings. At this stage, no concrete steps are taken in that direction. Young activists are content to team up with the venerable members of architectural preservation societies such as the Bond Heemschut and Hendrick de Keijser, and (in the background) the distinguished club De Amsterdamse Kring. All are respectable organizations that, due to the “steady destruction of unique urban beauty” and “attacks on our most important cultural heritage” in the late sixties, are campaigning ever more forcefully to save Amsterdam’s historic city center from ruin. Remarkably, the collaboration leads to a sizeable coalition of incipient activists and representatives of the traditional societies founded—and still led—by the very same Amsterdam patriarchs against whom the new generation are rebelling on other fronts.

Woningburo de kraker – doet het steeds vaker

At the end of 1968, Geurt Brinkgreve, who had established the Diogenes Foundation to restore and lease historic buildings to artists, gives a group of young activists access to a cellar at Koestraat 7, between the Oudezijds Achterburgwal and the Kloveniersburgwal. Here they start a small printing press and focus their efforts on such projects as saving the Bethaniënbuurt, which is threatened with losing much of its historic character if the municipality proceeds with plans for the area’s urban renewal. As long as the young radicals concentrate their efforts on the inner city, they can count on the support of architectural conservationists. The activists spearhead unexpected, experimental protests and occupations, and publish Amsterdam’s first independent neighborhood newspaper (Geïllustreerd Bethaniënnieuws, or Illustrated Bethaniën News), leaving the moderate community and conservation groups to attempt to curb any further demolition of the old city at the negotiating table. But before long it becomes clear that the architectural heritage groups have their own agenda in this distribution of tasks. Their priority is to prevent the demolition of old buildings, such as the De Pinto House. The preservation of housing elsewhere in the city—and in the nineteenth-century belt in particular—is of little interest to them. In fact, as far as they are concerned, there is no reason to preserve this district as a “primarily residential area”; for all they care, the entire mess can be razed to the ground. The heritage conservationists consider the working-class neighborhoods as “potential urban areas” that could be redeveloped as office complexes and parking facilities that would otherwise be an eyesore in Amsterdam’s historic center. Areas they deemed especially suitable for this purpose are De Pijp, the Dapperbuurt, the Kinkerbuurt and the strip between the Amstel and the Wibautstraat.

With the end of the sixties in sight, hot-button redevelopment topics included not only slum clearance, but the future site of the University of Amsterdam, and the A-faculties in particular. As student numbers exploded, pressure to expand the city’s dwindling housing stock mounted. The university was in favor of eventually relocating the entire institute to Flevoland, or to a polder between Muiden and Weesp. But the city council was determined to keep the university in the city. In the end, precisely for this purpose, the municipality had set aside the old islands of Uilenburg and Marken (Valkenburg) for years, as well as the area around the Oudemanhuispoort and the Binnengasthuis. They considered the Dapperbuurt as well. As a result, the houses there, which are standing on land intended for the prospective new metro line, fall into decay. Even though there are no concrete development plans at this stage, the council decides to demolish the first housing blocks in the Dapperbuurt.

A group of activists who had once worked with the architectural preservationists in the Nieuwmarkt and the Bethaniënbuurt takes a very different view. In the basement of the restored building in the Koestraat, they put their heads together, come up with a plan, and create a new brand of activism. One of the activists, former Provo member Rob Stolk, has recently completed a pending prison sentence dating from his Provo period, based on an alleged inflammatory “subversive letter” opposing the council’s demolition policy. While imprisoned, he struck on the idea of applying the term kraken (which literally means “to crack,” and soon became synonymous with squatting) to breaking into and occupying premises. The term was normally associated with the activities of thieves and bank robbers. “Woningburo de Kraker (doet het steeds vaker)” (The Squatter’s Housing Agency) is established to protest the housing shortage in general, and the vacant properties due for demolition in the Dapperbuurt in particular. (fig. 4)