All for one or ... one for all?

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Abstract

The housing estate of Nieuw Kattenburg is a Late-Modernist housing area consisting of many system-built slab buildings. This has been offering affordable housing and was built by the municipality of Amsterdam over fifty years ago. It is situated adjacent to the Amsterdam marine terrain which is now in the process of decommissioning and will be redeveloped as a clean-tech/start-up campus. This is likely to attract many highly-educated professionals to the city, aspiring to live close to their workplace. Given the transformation of the marine terrain, and the slow-sale of housing units within the estate to the private market it is clear that any future redevelopment of the area could well result in an extensive gentrification of the site, threatening the provision of affordable housing to low-income families within the city. Through the scenario of a community land trust an alternative model of housing provision manages, through densification, to deliver an equal number of affordable dwellings onto the site as are currently present. Moreover the Land Trust model embodies mutual benefits between the existing residents and new target groups, which are manifested spatially within the design proposal.