‘We want to create something new,’ Ivo Schmetz tells me from Amsterdam’s old west district. He’s talking about Vrij Beton (‘free concrete’), a collective ownership project born from the Dutch capital’s anticapitalist squatting scene. Ivo is mellow, confident, positive, and hugely dedicated to the counter-cultural ecosystem that nurtured him upon his arrival to the city in 1997.

Vrij Beton was launched this spring with an intriguing advertising campaign. It’s the latest initiative to come out of a collective of legalised squats that operate under the banner of Amsterdam Alternative (AA). Founded in 2015 as a way for activists and organisers to share expertise, AA quickly began publishing a freely distributed newspaper bimonthly, and has since hosted round tables, lectures, and club nights.

All the AA venues have a publicly accessible programme of events, living spaces, and are non-profit. With Vrij Beton, the aim is to work as a structure through which new ‘vrij‘ (free) spaces can be secured for the benefit of future generations. Membership to AA is now open to all who want to participate.

The main differences between collective ownership and squatting are that money is involved and it’s legal. But it’s also different from the cooperative model. While the cooperative model as formulated around the Rochdale Principle’s attempts to bring egalitarian ethics into capitalism, collective ownership is more about using legal capacities within capitalism to bring property out of the market.

As Judith Vey has written, collective ownership of this type demonstrates that ‘capitalism never works in a totalising way.’ There are ways to fracture what seems like impenetrable historical trends. Vrij Beton is the latest iteration of attempts from the underground to use capitalism’s mechanics against it, and to ensure that in the twenty-first century post-industrial city there is the space to experiment in what Colin Ward once described as ‘alternative forms of tenure.’

It’s similar to an already running programme in the Netherlands called VrijCoop. Both are inspired by the Mietshäuser Syndikat. Started in the 1980s in Freiburg, Germany, the Syndikat currently has 166 projects incorporating 5,000 members and around 160,000m² of living space.

Howard Weiner from the Syndikat explains that projects get funding from an ethically-minded bank and low interest direct loans. The Syndikat itself owns nothing. Each project within it is an autonomous LLC, membership to which is open to those who ‘contribute whatever skills they might have and to work within the project to keep it going.’ The Syndikat is a partner in each LLC, and has only one function: to veto any attempt by the housing association or the residents to sell the property. ‘Thus, there is no possibility for individuals to monetise the property for their own profit.’

Ivo was part of the group that squatted the OT301—a multistorey, multipurpose cultural venue located on Amsterdam’s Overtoom—in the early 2000s, and subsequently purchased it with government assistance in 2006. ‘I would find it a pity if my kids cannot experience the sort of things that I did when I first arrived,’ he says. ‘There were squats in nearly every street, and so many great buildings and exhibitions and parties. It changed my life and how I think about things.’ While undoubtedly still vibrant, the moment he arrived was a time when Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole was in the throes of a major ideological shift.

To put that shift in perspective, it’s worth looking at squatting and housing in the postwar period more generally. Laws prohibiting squatting and criminalising trespassing introduced across Europe in recent decades have demonised the practice and its practitioners, but it wasn’t always that way.

In the late 1970s, there were 50,000 squatters across the UK, and there were 8,000 in Amsterdam alone. Scholarship from the period notes that the ‘common bond’ of most squatters is the ‘shared experience of housing stress,’ and that squatters included professionals, students, and working-class people. City governments across the continent saw squatting as economically useful. Buildings which would otherwise deteriorate were kept in working condition, while stresses upon social housing stock and issues arising from rough sleeping and homelessness decreased.

Amsterdam wouldn’t be a tourist destination if it weren’t for squatting. In the immediate postwar years, the city government became convinced that the historical city centre was good for nothing, and that high-rises, highways, and suburbs were the future. Residents disagreed, and squatters occupied buildings around the Nieuwmarkt and Dam Square, saving them from demolition.

Local historian and housing activist Jaap Draaisma started squatting in the mid 1970s. At this time, counter-cultural scenes were popping up throughout Amsterdam, including the legendary anarchist Provo movement. Jaap says Provo was ‘the first resistance against state-led redevelopment’. Due to inflation and various economic crises, the middle classes couldn’t afford property, and so a huge portion of society was reliant on social housing (by the mid 1980s, 70% of housing in Amsterdam was social, compared to just 40% today).

1985 was the first year since 1965 that the city’s population started to grow, and it hasn’t stopped growing since. This also marked a turning point with squatting and Dutch politics. Jaap explains that ‘the success of social housing reinvigorated the city, and then private money took over.’

Following decades of the Christian Democrats being the main party of government,  third way politics became hegemonic when Wim Kok became Prime Minister in 1994. Foreshadowing Blairism in the UK and Gerhard Schröder’s tenure as the German Chancellor, Kok’s Labour Party made a coalition with the liberals, and embraced neoliberalism. As inflation went down during the ’90s, the middle classes got richer, and for the first time in decades they could afford property. In Amsterdam, this was partnered with a city policy that annually put 1% of social housing on the market. Jaap calls this ”sniper politics’, because you never see it. And very slowly, people are dispersed from the city.’

As the accumulation of money became society’s primary driver, squatting became an antagonist rather than a collaborator of the political class. Ivo points out that ‘vrij spaces are non-profit because they’re never about making money. They’re about making time to live together and work together and listen to each other.’ Recalling his time in a large squat in the 1980s, Jaap tells me that: ‘You could nearly live outside of monetary culture. If you live in a collective, you can live very cheaply.’ But this isn’t the sort of social organisation that neoliberalism, wherein high individualism reigns supreme and profit drives everything, could ever make room for voluntarily.

From 1994 onwards, successive governments saw squats as something to rail against in order to satisfy the right wing, and by 2010 the practice was outlawed altogether. What remains are those that were legalised with local, city government support.

Even though squatting is barely noticeable in the Netherlands these days, at the start of 2021, Mark Rutte’s government transformed squatting from a civil law issue to a criminal one. Rutte has been the Prime Minister since 2010; keen on austerity politics, one of the big impacts his premiership has made upon the country is the de-universalisation of the welfare state, a typical divide and rule tactic which is already proving to have sown seeds of discontent.

Alarmingly, 2015 saw the closure of the Ministry of Housing, while government representatives attended real estate congresses in Munich, Singapore, and other cities, where they pitched Amsterdam as a place for the global elite to invest in. One predictable side effect of these activities is that the city is now once again too expensive for the middle classes, who are leaving to nearby cities and new suburbs. That leaves those who remain fighting to survive in a city centre increasingly dominated by finance capital.

In 2015, 11.3% of people in the EU-28 lived in a household where 40% or more of its disposable income went on housing costs. The problem of overly expensive living, especially for renters, is exacerbated the poorer one gets. The results are striking. Between 2009 and 2018, the rate of homelessness in the Netherlands for 18 to 65 year-olds more than doubled. Affordable housing schemes don’t solve this issue because they fix housing costs to a market which doesn’t align with actual income, but the fancies of global capital.

Questions of freedom often revolve around lofty ideals regarding the individual’s relationship to the state and the metaphysics of choice. But Vrij Beton and collective ownership projects like it tie the notion to something much more concrete. Indeed, it ties it to concrete itself. It is about the environment one is in cultivating autonomy and agency, and allowing those who reside in a place to have democratic control over what takes place there and how things are run. This is freedom not from others, but with and through others.

Jaap is frustrated that while the struggle for housing since the 1990s has resulted in some additional support for socialist provisions, it has not produced a strong anticapitalist or counter-cultural movement. He thinks that fighting for residential space alone isn’t enough, but that the struggle should be for heterogeneous spaces that combine living, art, and social activity.

This is something Vrij Beton is dedicated to. Ivo tells me that ‘it is about building a big collective of people, people that believe in the fact that vrij spaces are good for a city. For the arts, affordable housing and workspaces, space to experiment with new ideas and projects, without the pressure of the market.’

He continues, ‘it is an ambitious project that will only succeed if we build a collective force that makes it possible to actually have influence on what happens in Amsterdam and for who.’