Photographs brought to life The legacy of Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt

On the way from Nieuwmarkt to Waterlooplein, an exhibition has been running since March 28th on Sint Antoniesbreestraat, displaying photos by Pieter Boersma of the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood in the seventies. Some of the photos are colourful, some are black and white, but all of them reflect the warm and radiant feel of the place, which was, at the time, kept alive by the squatting movement.  

Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt was an action group in the sixties and seventies that mobilized mainly by squatting buildings, with the purpose of stopping the construction of a highway and metro line that would cut through the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood, and would have transformed the city centre into modernist concrete urban blocks with a clear delimitation between work, living, recreation, and all other facets of life. The neighbourhood fought to preserve Amsterdam as a historical and liveable city, one built with its people in mind. In the end, while the metro line was ultimately built by the time “The battle of Nieuwmarkt” was over, the squatting group managed to prevent the construction of the highway. Today, the point where the construction stopped, at the end of Jodenbreestraat, a building is marked with a monument that bears the words of the poet Jacob Israël de Haan on one side, and on the other side, the story of the squatting actions and the transformations the city went through. 

One street over, on Zwanenburgwal, the legacy of Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt is being kept alive. A new building was squatted after being empty for a year and a half, in protest of how housing corporation Ymere treats the people they provide social housing for. Raoul and Rots, two of the people who squatted the new building, talked to me about the state in which Ymere keeps the social housing buildings. Their current neighbour had been complaining about the constant moisture and leakages in the building for decades. “He showed us a video where he took of the insulation material off the ground (…) and he squeezed it out and you could fill a glass of water,” they told me, relaying what a construction worker had shown them while working on the building.

They are protesting against gentrification, as they have told me, because when a neighbourhood goes through a gentrifying process, people living in social housing tend to simply get forced out by neglect: by having no options for home renovations, whereby homes degrade to the point where they either becomes unliveable, or the lack of insulation in the winter drives the heating prices past what anyone can reasonably afford, leaving the people to choose between paying for heating or paying for food. “We want to help this house be on the social market again,” Rots tells me, “but it’s not. And we do this as a protest actually so they go fix the house, not just for us, but for the neighbours.” Raoul adds, “They keep replicating this quick fix thing, because it’s cheap, and then not (actually properly) fixing anything.” The list of Ymere’s issues goes on, from keeping the houses empty on purpose, ignoring structural problems, to refusing to fix said structural problems because of bureaucratic reasons. 

The current Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt is strongly backed by the people in the neighbourhood, as well as the people who were involved in the squatting movement in the past, having forged a community willing to help and to stand up for each other with them. They look after each other and try to build a sustainable, flourishing collective, from big actions such as organizing the exhibit and building flower gardens, to smaller ones, such as taking care of bird nests in the area.

But the squatting of the building was not without troubles. On the March 17th, the second day of the squatting, the often-antagonistic entertainment news organization PowNews tried to enter the building without permission, disrespecting the wishes of both the people living in the building itself as well as their neighbours, and were involved in an altercation which ended with police intervention. The community of Nieuwmarkt is supportive of the squatting group’s actions though, one of their neighbours even going as far as being their spokesperson. They described the main interaction with PowNews as being when they barged in, at which point there was an attempt to prevent them from filming people without their consent. PowNews was later publicly criticised for a biased and unfair portrayal of squatters in an exclusively negative light by the newspaper Het Parool. 

For the future, the people in Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt want to maintain the building a free space, making it easy and accessible for people to come over, while also trying to get Ymere to fix the issues the building already has. They want to bring attention to the problems people who live in social houses face, in order to try to solve them. They are using the fact that they are squatting the building as an ace in their hand, making it impossible for them to be ignored as the rest of their neighbours have been all of this time.
“We are gonna play the same game that Ymere plays with the renters, but now we have the structural advantage that we are taking something from them,” says the collective.

Nieuwmarkt is not alone in their fight against gentrification, nor is Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt. There are countless other initiatives and squatting groups, most of them without name, who are putting all their efforts into protecting their neighbourhood and their community, so that people will not be forcefully displaced yet again, as neighbourhoods such as Amsterdam West, Amsterdam Nieuw-West, and the peripheral areas of the city centre have been facing these problems continuously over the past years. 

Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt does all of this for the people living in a similar situation to them, and therefore, they would like to ask people who would like to contact them about issues experienced with Ymere to do so at: aktiegroepnieuwmarkt(at)pm.me.