"This feels like a restorative take on social housing - a new Amsterdam School"

Cody Hochstenbach, an academic at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Urban Studies, believes this should be "viewed as part of a longer project of neo-liberalisation in Dutch government." He explains: ’"The ownership by private entities (housing associations) and the relatively broad access to social rental housing have arguably led to a strong institutional embeddedness of, and social support for, social housing in the Netherlands, and have arguably been obstacles to structural reforms. Yet a gradual demise of this social housing tradition is under way. The 2015 Housing Act codified a set of new rules, introduced after the crises, with regard to housing association investments and access to social housing." 

It was also during the nineties that state funds for large-scale renewal projects were made available as part of selective urban policies that targeted deprived neighbourhoods. Priority in urban policy shifted from improving housing conditions to addressing changing social conditions. Tenure evolved to alter the social mix. 

Typically, the social housing stock diminished in favour of owner-occupied housing to accommodate higher-income groups in disadvantaged areas. This was all part of a concerted effort to break a perceived spiral of decline. 

Hochstenbach continues: "In the last 30 years, there has been the ideology of home ownership, encouraging us all to buy as strategic, calculating mini-capitalists. The Netherlands had a rich tradition of social housing; it was an international example of affordable housing managed by housing corporations. But, especially in the last decade, politicians have decimated housing corporations." 

Last year, in order to tackle these growing issues, the Amsterdam municipality pledged to build more homes - 52,500 houses by the end of 2025 -including social housing, which will account for around 2,500 of these new homes. Its new initiative - The Amsterdam Approach to Public Housing (AAV) is a joint initiative by the city’s municipal government, housing corporations and the citizens of Amsterdam.

Whether its objective is possible remains to be seen. Only once in the last 24 years have more than 7,500 homes been built in Amsterdam in a single year. Alongside this ambition have come a number of new policies. The circular economy became one of the foundations of the Amsterdam’s housing policy in 2020, making it the first city to commit to building a circular economy. 

It aims to halve the use of new raw materials by 2030 and be fully circular by 2050. Construction and the built environment form a major strand of this radical new policy. Based on Kate Raworth’s principles of "doughnut economics”, principles of "doughnut economics", it recognises the need to find a balance between the basic needs of the citizen and the ecological limit of the planet. 

Every policy decision made must now consider what the impact would be for humanity and the planet in general. In the case of building housing, it is about placing its construction in the wider context of a climate emergency and considering its impact not just now but also to future generations. 

We are just seeing the start of some of these projects coming through but the main move has been to make the reuse of building materials standard practice, providing a city-wide digital inventory of available materials for architects and others working in the built environment to consult In 2022 the city’s work in developing its policy around the circular economy made it a finalist in the Earthshot Prize, a global environmental award. 

A recent project that has been heralded as an example of Amsterdam housing helping to address these issues is the Spaamdammerhart - a collaborative design between the architectural offices of Korth Tielens Architecten and Marcel Lok_Architect, artist Martjin Sandberg and landscape architect DS Landschapsarchitecten. The result of a competition run by the local municipality, the 80-home development is a mix of apartments, duplexes, courtyard dwellings, and town houses arranged around a central courtyard space. 

Half of the development is free-market housing, which has been used to help fund the 30 per cent of the development that is social housing and 20 per cent middle rent. Middle rent is a typology quite specific: to Amsterdam’s new housing policy but compares to "affordable housing" in the UK. It is aimed at tackling the worsening position of middle-income households - a focal point in Dutch political debates around housing. Middle rent has a monthly cap of between €700 and €1,000. 

The new development is surrounded by iconic housing complexes built in the last century: Herman Walenkamp’s Zaanhof, Karel de Bazel’s Zaandammerplein, and Michel de Klerk’s Het Schip. Spaarndammerhart acts as an infill project, repairing the urban grain and acting as a modern-day reference to these social housing developments from the historic Amsterdam School. 

The homes are accessed through two arched gateways which are accentuated by curved balconies that bulge out from the brickwork above. This anchors the development within the neighbourhood of typically brick Amsterdam School architecture. The evolution of the style is also evoked through Sandjberg’s brick text in these arched gateways which reads: ’’Anno 1917", ’’Anno 2020" and the future of "Anno 3025". Also depicted in the brick floor of the courtyard is the text: "The old way to the new times/The new way to the old times.” There is an air of looking back to look forward and vice versa. 

The courtyard becomes a key space for conviviality - a large open-air room at the heart of the development. As you enter, the green glazed bricks sparkle, adding almost a feeling of-fun. The Tellytubby-like mound of grass in the middle obscures the houses to the back from a complete view of the street through the brick archways. 

Children play on scooters and bikes, doing laps around this mound. The front doors of the houses face on to this courtyard and there is an interstitial space between it and their front doorstep. There are similar motifs around the idea of the stoop that can be found in Peter Barber’s architecture in the UK. The space is publicly accessible - I wander in to take photographs and, as a grandmother watches, her grandchildren play and another couple chat nearby. 

It is clear that this space is the domain of the residents and I am a visitor here, being carefully watched. "There is a real sense of community within the project; says architect Marcel Lok. "We have a lot of contact with the residents who have moved in, and they all say this. They are very happy. There is a real connection with the street." 

The area itself had developed from the first Housing Act of 1901, when the Netherlands national government set initial rules for housing and urban planning which would begin to determine the area as we see it today. At the time, state subsidies for social housing were only handed out to "eligible institutions", which meant that much of the housing built around that time the street" or founded by industry. 

This was further enforced by the so-called Pacification of 1917. At this point the pillars of Dutch society - Catholic, Protestant, Liberal and Socialist - saw the importance of social housing as a social glue. It was in the Spaandammerburt neighbourhood that these ideologies could be proven and there was a strong preference for building courtyard housing schemes by the area’s Protestant and social-democratic housing associations but also by the railway company, which was building housing for its workers in the area. 

In the 1970s the area underwent urban renewal. A school was built on the site of the Spaarndammerhart, which cut through two blocks and closed off the street, radically changing the neighbourhood. The demolition of the school in order to build this housing project has provided the chance to rebuild along the street line and repair the urban grain. 

As architectural historian Hans Iberlings writes: "Urban renewal was usually meant to be a wind of change; city repair offers a more restrained and less disruptive form of transformation. Urban renewal is a make­over of the city; city repair rebuilds." He adds: "Spaarndammerhart is an example of such ’rebuilding’. The complex has erased the scar that the schools had left undoubtably with the best intentions - by cutting up the pattern of blocks and streets. Spaarndammerhart is a return to what street and block used to be, albeit not in the same form that they once had.”

Looking at the housing in this area reveals the success of Amsterdam’s various housing schemes throughout history. The project is about repairing the city, but also about repairing the city population’s view of housing in Amsterdam in a crisis. There are the obvious signs of gentrification - a co-working space, nice places to buy a coffee - but there is also a mix here. 

Spaarndammerhart, with its curvy brick walls, feels interwoven into the neighbourhood and at home here. This feels like the beginnings of a restorative take on Dutch housing - a new Amsterdam School that prioritises community, mixed tenure and climate mitigation. 

 Laura Mark is an architecture critic, curator and filmmaker and co-lead of the first year undergraduate course at Sheffield School of Architecture