The polycentric anticlave network of institutional housing; an asylum seekers centre in Maastricht

Abstract

Because of its fascination with safety and control, Dutch society at the end of the twentieth century became subject to fear for the unknown. Panic and terror overpowered society, and imprisoned it into a permanent state of institutional living. The proposed alternative for this development is to revalue and restate the achievement of todays society. The valuation of the panoptic and polycentric model helps to propose a positive perspective in dealing with the institutionalised living. The historical precedents of institutionalised living in Dutch society show the continuity of the issue, and help to relativize the current situation. As Schama stated, seeing what distinguished insiders from outsiders is one way of defining the limiting perimeter of the culture itself. The paper discusses this distinction in the seventeenth century Dutch city. The network of institutions that dealt with outsiders proofed to be a humane and relatively peaceful way to bridge the gap between insiders and outsiders. By looking at the asylum seekers centre, which is a result of the way the Dutch deal with outsiders nowadays, the perimeters of contemporary Dutch culture are explored to a certain degree. The establishment of asylum seekers centres as alien and unwanted centralised institutions in the outskirts of the Dutch landscape has mostly been defined by fear for the unknown. This has partly contributed to an increasing polarisation of insiders and outsiders in Dutch society.Architecture, as an object that manifests the type of distinction between insiders and outsiders, and the models and processes underlying the realization of architecture, play an important role in the manifestation of this polarisation. In the reflexive period of a temporary declining pressure on the asylum seekers centres, by a declining number of admitted refugees, other ways of dealing with outsiders should be considered. The architectural design project is an alternative proposal for an asylum seekers centre, as a polycentric, anticlave network of institutionalised housing. The project tries to normalise the dwelling situation of asylum seekers as much as possible. It does so by dividing the common asylum seekers centre into many small parts that interweave in an existing urban fabric. History has taught us that outsiders are relatively well integrated in a polycentric network of institutions. Today the polycentric network could again serve as a model in order to deal with the housing of asylum seekers. The limiting perimeters of the Dutch culture are in this project redefined, restated, and extended.