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coöp cafe | Room to Move – A conversation on housing and creative autonomy

The struggle for housing has become harsher for everyone, including cultural workers. When people can no longer afford to stay, the conditions for collective, autonomous cultural life collapse. But it doesn’t have to be like this and hasn’t always been. When housing was more secure, when inner city space was squatted, held in common, or cheap enough to inhabit without a full-time job or inherited wealth, something else was possible: an urban culture that could thrive without needing to justify itself to the state, galleries or museums, art existing outside the logic of the market.

What did it take to build these conditions? This is discussed at Coöp Café, hosted by In Eigen Handen, a fledgling housing cooperative of cultural workers, teachers and researchers working to secure a home and site for a more autonomous creative life. Two members, Marian van Bodegraven and Charlie Clemoes, join historian and journalist Tayfun Balçik, a lifelong Amsterdam resident and one of the initiator of De Bundel, an housing cooperative focused on Amsterdam Nieuw West and soon to be housed at August Allebeplein.

Three presentations will draw connections from some of the places that the three speakers are most familiar with:
Tayfun Balçik brings his personal point of view on the housing struggle. A story, between drama and rap, of a gentrified citizen born and raised in Amsterdam.
Marian brings perspectives from São Paulo’s social housing movements, Brazil’s mass housing programs, and modernist social housing in São Paulo and Rio.
Charlie speaks about London and Manchester, looking at Hulme Crescent and the Aylesbury Estate cultural scenes in the 1980s and 1990s.

Free entry. Wheelchair accessible. Gender-neutral accessible toilet on site. Next to Amsterdam Science Park station, Kruislaan 259A, Amsterdam