The Politics of Urban Water

Changing Waterscapes in Amsterdam

Kimberley Kinder

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780820347950, 9780820347943
• eBook ISBN: 9780820348360
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Fifty years ago, urban waterfronts were industrial, polluted, and diseased. Today, luxury homes and shops line riverbanks, harbors, and lakes across Europe and North America. The visual drama of physical reconstruction makes this transition look swift and decisive, but reimaging water is a slow process, punctuated by small cultural shifts and informal spatial seizures that change the meaning of wet urban spaces. In The Politics of Urban Water, Kimberley Kinder explores how active residents in Amsterdam deployed their cityscape when rallying around these concerns, turning space into a vehicle for social reform.

While market dynamics certainly contributed to the transformation of Amsterdam's shorelines, squatters, partiers, artists, historians, environmentalists, tourists, reporters, and government officials also played crucial roles in bringing waterscapes to life. Their interventions pulled water in new directions, connecting it to political discussions about affordable housing, cultural tolerance, climate change, and national identity. Over time, these political valences have become embedded in laws, norms, symbols, markets, and landscapes, bringing rich undercurrents of friction to urban shores. Amsterdam's development serves as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for cities across Europe and North America where rapid new growth creates similar pressures and anxieties.

CHAPTER ONE

Hippies on Houseboats

During the mid-twentieth century, industrial restructuring in European and North American cities fundamentally transformed the economic functionality of waterfronts. Ports consolidated, manufacturers outsourced factory work, and air and highway travel expanded. In Amsterdam, these changes meant that the city’s smaller harbors and inland canals—along with their warehouses, workshops, and barges—entered a marked phase of economic devaluation. Over the following fifty years, a wide range of cultural and economic groups would make use of those shorelines, reconfiguring them to once again become a central territory of profit, this time in Amsterdam’s emerging real estate and service economy. This transformation, far from following a simple rent-gap development model of disinvestment and reconstruction, emerged through the tangled nexus of social movements, regulatory restructuring, and market cooptation beginning in the 1960s and 1970s with squatting skippers and houseboat hippies.

The history of houseboats in Amsterdam constituted an early phase in this multipronged, multiphased, and multisited process of water’s metamorphosis. At a time when city planners hoped to replace canals and canal-fronting workshops with plazas and office buildings, new social groups actively appropriated those spaces for alternative purposes—for instance, by squatting in warehouses and converting derelict barges into informal floating homes. Although squatters lost their hold on most central city buildings in the mid-1980s, long-standing policy frames that treated water as though it were distinct from the streets and housing around it unexpectedly protected squatting skippers and houseboat hippies from municipal crackdowns, at least for a few decades. The persistence of informal houseboats domesticated the waterways and articulated a new type of romance with water-based lifestyles, both of which influenced public perception about the identity, value, and architectural character of Amsterdam water.

The emergence of houseboat politics in the 1960s and 1970s involved the material construction of new floating objects and, even more importantly, a shift in the social practices bringing water to life. Squatting skippers and houseboat hippies renovated barges, challenged lifestyle norms, and exploited regulatory loopholes, giving the waterscape assemblage a new political thrust. These processes loosened the canals from their industrial transportation associations, and they strengthened notions that water could instead become a self-expressive living space. This loosening effect, while lasting several decades, was temporary. Efforts to assimilate houseboats into the regulated and com-modified cityscape since the 1990s pushed the Amsterdam public to reinterpret houseboat politics yet again, this time by aesthetically distancing houseboats from their anarchist roots and financially connecting them with market-based measures of value.

Houseboaters’ mobilizations of water as a countercultural living space demonstrated the importance of embodied action and social regulations in defining the public identity of water. Physical infrastructure and small retrofits to boats and mooring spaces were crucial to the development of houseboat living. Even so, living on boats demonstrated the versatility of water as a political entity. It inscribed water with new functions and meanings in an incremental way that did not require a full physical redevelopment of the landscape. The mechanism of hippy houseboats transformed the central city canals from an industrial space into a romanticized countercultural zone and, tentatively by 2010, into an emerging territory of profit. This metamorphosis and the political debates it prompted subsequently inflected the public perception of water in other locations citywide.

The history of Amsterdam houseboats and their domestication of Amsterdam water was preserved in written newspaper, government, and civil society archives. Local and national newspaper coverage of the changing financial and legal face of houseboat living during the past twenty years included extensive personal commentaries from houseboaters, their supporters, and their detractors about the nature and purpose of houseboat living. Even more revealing were the self-published manuscripts from leading houseboat advocacy groups, such as the National Houseboat Organization (Landelijke Woonboten Organisatie) and the Amsterdam Boat Committee (Amsterdams Boten Comité), as well as from their opponents with groups like the Friends of the Amsterdam Inner City (De Vereniging Vrienden van de Amsterdamse Binnenstad). Secondary sources describing Amsterdam’s economic history and new social movements put these sources in a historical context, and municipal reports from the Amsterdam City Council illustrate the more recent market and policy changes giving houseboat living a new role in city life in the 2000s.

Using these sources, this chapter traces the emergence of houseboat living in the 1960s and the 1970s beginning with a general overview of central city activism and a description of the methods that new social movement activists used to make the transition from buildings to houseboats. In this history, the evolving policy frames governing water were crucial in explaining the persistence of provisional domestic uses of water over time. The proliferation of houseboats led to the creation of an official zone of exemption where informal houseboaters could build their own homes in an affordable, expressive form. This regulatory borderland was not permanent, as evidenced by legal changes and gentrification processes during the 1990s and 2000s. Even so, these activities imbued water with a residential identity and, tentatively, suggested new ways to invest in real estate along shorelines.

New Social Movements on the Amsterdam Canals

Geert Mak, a popular Dutch historian, described the new social movements occurring in Amsterdam between 1964 and 1985 as “The Twenty Year Civil War.”¹ Similar protests on a larger and more violent scale occurred in Paris, London, Rome, and West Berlin during this same period. In Amsterdam, secondary history sources chronicle a period of sustained political activism on a constellation of issues, such as market consumerism, nuclear weapons, land speculation, factory closures, environmental degradation, and gender inequity.² Concomitant with these new social movements, several shifts in Amsterdam’s political economy simultaneously reconfigured the functionality of water. One set of factors stemmed from decolonization and industrial restructuring. A second set centered on municipal housing and urban renewal policies. These social movements and economic factors collided on many fronts, giving rise to Amsterdam’s potent and internationally renowned squatting movement, including one splinter group of activists who used boats to squat on water.

Amsterdam residents after World War II faced a significant housing shortage. Wartime damage contributed to the problem, but social transformations perpetuated it in the long term. Extended kinship living arrangements were becoming less popular, especially among young people who were marrying later, having children later, and enjoying the privilege of independent living. Simultaneously, agricultural mechanization pushed many people into the cities in search of employment and educational opportunities. These social trends meant that Amsterdam’s housing shortage persisted for several decades despite the rapid construction of new housing high-rises and suburbs.³ This housing shortage, when combined with the political economic transformations occurring in the 1970s, became a central rallying point for new social movement activists of many stripes.

During this same postwar period, Amsterdam’s economic base narrowed considerably, beginning with the collapse of long-standing colonial trading institutions. Amsterdam’s port was not large, especially compared to the Port of Rotterdam, which surpassed Amsterdam in size in the late nineteenth century and which has been the largest European port since 1962. However, while Rotterdam specialized in bulk river trade with Germany, Amsterdam specialized in the long-distance sea trade of high-value specialty items from the Dutch East Indies. The formal independence process, which began for present-day Indonesia in 1949, had little economic impact on the Netherlands overall, but it significantly affected Amsterdam and greatly reduced the quantity of goods and money circulating through its waterways.⁴

Concurrent with decolonization, the Dutch government invested heavily in infrastructure expansion nationwide, which enhanced the Netherlands’ overall competitiveness at the expense of the small-scale industries connected with Amsterdam’s waterways. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Port of Rotterdam was enlarged, and major industrial-scale canals opened that allowed large ships to pass directly from the North Sea into Europe’s major river valleys without requiring transshipment in Amsterdam. Simultaneously, regional and national governments invested heavily in freeways, tunnels, and airports. With fewer ships and commodities passing through Amsterdam, the city’s internal waterways experienced significant reductions in cargo traffic, which undermined the warehouse and business activities that the cargo industry once sustained.⁵

These shipping-related reconfigurations occurred alongside industrial restructuring at the global scale. For a time, postwar rebuilding in Europe fueled industrial activity in Amsterdam, a boom that helped explain the city’s low unemployment rate of 5 percent in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, with the effects of decolonization and infrastructure consolidation, combined with the rise of industrialization in Southeast Asia and the onset of the 1973 international economic recession, Amsterdam’s industrial base contracted sharply. The whole country was affected, but Amsterdam was especially hard hit, with unemployment rising to 25 percent between 1979 and 1983 and lingering for several years after the rest of the Netherlands had begun to recover.⁶

The municipal government responded with an urban renewal agenda that, no matter the good intentions, sparked widespread opposition. Under mayoral guidance, the Amsterdam Physical Planning Department had been building large roads and high-rise apartment complexes in outlying areas since the 1950s to alleviate the city’s postwar housing shortage. In the early 1960s, planners turned their attention from these fringe locations to the central city, unveiling plans to demolish underused warehouses—and the low-value, working-class housing around them—to consolidate land for new office construction.⁷ This apparent betrayal of local housing interests in the context of major economic restructuring and rising blue-collar unemployment collided with Amsterdam’s already burgeoning new social movements. Urban renewal became a central rallying point uniting several strands of these anticapitalist and anti-authoritarian opposition groups into a loose yet politically potent coalition of squatting protestors.

Amsterdam’s formidable squatting movement played a leading role in the city’s physical and social transformation between 1964 and 1985. Protestors, students, and struggling families seized abandoned factories and boarded apartment buildings on the grounds that it was unethical for private owners and speculators to let their buildings stand empty when so many people needed a place to live. Squatting activity was especially prolific in the formerly light-industrial areas of the canal belt, the same area where municipal officials hoped to demolish several city blocks in their quest to replace so-called working-class slums with international office towers. Popular resistance to urban renewal, which peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, involved several high-profile confrontations between squatters and the hired thugs and riot police sent to harass and evict them.⁸ These confrontations eventually rallied public support to stop demolition and to expand the city’s already extensive social housing infrastructure. In the meantime, the squatting movement also generated a splinter group of activists who shifted their focus from buildings to canals and began to squat directly on the water.

Squatting Skippers and the Canal Regulations That Protected Them

Jan was one such squatter-turned-houseboater whose personal memoir of the experience was preserved alongside other similar accounts in the archived diaries and self-published treatises connected with local and national houseboat advocacy groups (such as Amsterdams Boten Comité and Landelijke Woonboten Organisatie). In Jan’s account, he vividly described how desperate he felt in 1967 searching for housing in Amsterdam. “We were suffocated, couldn’t find any housing. Yeah, a cellar room without windows for an outrageous price. [. . .] Acquisition costs, sinister housing agencies, it made you sick.” To paraphrase from his account, for a time Jan lived in the cramped linen closet of a collectively squatted central city building with a roommate whose own home had recently been demolished. A friend then introduced Jan to an anarchist boater who helped him buy an old coal barge. Jan gutted and rebuilt the barge by hand, carting away the debris on his bicycle and using scrounged materials to make a home. Looking back, he described the project as a natural extension of his earlier squatting convictions. “Houses were squatted, and we squatted on water. And we felt strong as house-skippers.”⁹

Among the subset of squatters making similar moves from land to water, most people, like Jan, mobilized the spaces and objects associated with the declining shipping industry. Their innovation was to apply squatting mentalities to decommissioned cargo vessels and empty mooring spaces. Harbor mechanization, cargo containerization, and the general decline of canal-based industry made smaller skiffs redundant. People with limited resources could buy these skiffs cheaply, anchor them in desirable neighborhoods, build a shell on top, and then sleep aboard the boat.¹⁰ This process stretched the limits of permissible stay, turning long-term parking into short-term housing.

Amsterdam was unique among its peer cities in Europe and North America in that, in the mid-twentieth century, surface water channels continued to weave through many neighborhoods, including the mixed industrial and residential areas slated for urban renewal. This physical accessibility, combined with the loosening of the shipping industry’s hold on canal functionality, enabled the squatters’ reappropriation of this landscape form.

Physical accessibility and industrial disuse did not imply that the canals were an unfettered space free for the taking. Instead, as the memories and memoirs of these early houseboaters demonstrated, surface water existed within a regulatory framework that stipulated its legal conditions of use. In Jan’s words, “Everyone was a little fearful of the harbormaster’s talk.”¹¹ Although the nautical fairways were not intended as living spaces, and despite ongoing threats that the harbormaster would impound the boats, the preexisting policy frames that differentiated water from land quickly emerged as the most important factor enabling the proliferation and persistence of low-cost informal houseboating during this period.

In Amsterdam, as in most western cities, a bureaucratic divide separated the governing entities with authority on land and those controlling activity on water. On land, the Physical Planning Department (Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening) was the strong arm of the municipal government with considerable top-down authority over land use and public space. This agency established development agendas and wrote building codes. It held a near monopoly over new home construction during this period, acting as the primary landowner, financier, and contractor for most urban development projects.¹² The planning department also maintained the city’s public open spaces—its parks, streets, and squares—and regulated the types of social behaviors permitted in those spaces.

Despite the extensive, centralized authority of the Physical Planning Department, its authority did not extend to water. Instead, the Port of Amsterdam (Gemeentelijk Havenbedrijf Amsterdam) had authority over the industrial-scale waterways connecting the port with the North Sea and the German river valleys. Authority over the smaller interior canals threading through the rest of the city resided initially with the Department of Locks, Bridges, and Harbor Dues (Sluis Brug en Havengelddienst) and then, from the 1990s until the early 2010s, with the Department of Inland Waterway Management (Dienst Binnenwaterbeheer). These regulatory entities coordinated shipping, allocated permits, collected fees, and established rules about boat sizes, speeds, and mooring arrangements. These agencies’ missions were to maintain shipping infrastructure and coordinate nautical transportation. Their regulations contained no direct ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Politics of Urban Water
• Chapter One Hippies on Houseboats
• Chapter Two Queers on Parade
• Chapter Three Heritage Buffs on Canals
• Chapter Four Planners on Harbors
• Chapter Five Ecologists on Islands
• Chapter Six Investors on Floodplains
• Conclusion The Everyday Politics of Urban Water
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index