Urban renewal reinforces the isolation of working-class women. This was concluded in the 1983 publication “Zoiets maak je toch niet, ik zeg altijd, dat doen mannen…”. This booklet criticizes 1980s participatory urban renewal of the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam and addresses the exclusion of women. Several inventive tools were developed in this neighbourhood to empower women to make their diverse, tacit, embodied knowledge heard and make design suggestions that better fitted their needs. As a result, new knowledge was brought into participatory urban renewal processes of which women were so often excluded; diversifying and expanding what was commonly perceived as the concerns of the resident. This paper brings forward various tools developed in the Staatsliedenbuurt that were used as vehicles to bring women’s voices into urban renewal processes, such as the fictiocritical character Els, a workshop on dwelling stories, and a manual. The paper contributes to histories on the collective efforts by various women’s groups in the 1980s that fought exclusion and sought to develop feminist approaches for urban design by making what is the tacitly known, explicit; making the invisible, visible.@en

In the 1970s many houseboats were docked throughout Amsterdam and its fringes. Especially among low-income groups, houseboats offered a solution to the housing shortage. Most water dwellers also occupied part of the quay through informal gardening. They experimented with other forms of living through spatial experiments, in relation to each other, to greenery, weeds, water, and to other species. Strategies to expel houseboat owners employed by municipalities throughout the Netherlands included shutting down gas, electricity, and water supply; destroying cared for gardens and self-made sheds on the quays; rising the harbour dues disproportionately; and demanding ships to be painted a certain colour. Houseboats were criticized for being unsightly and unkept, ruining the aesthetic qualities of city, village, and landscape. Their variety in design was often not wanted, nor their experimental forms of urban gardening, keeping small livestock, recycling, crafts, and self-building. Nowadays, these socio-ecological spatial experiments of houseboat-owners and urban nomads range from being cleaned up and criminalized through policy, to being long formalized and regulated. Living on water was also co-opted by developers and municipalities, while becoming inaccessible for low-income groups. This paper aims to bring to the fore some of the forgotten spatial experiments of water dwellers, mostly from the 1970s, when the awareness of the Limits to Growth spread across Europe. By examining under-explored administrative records in several archives in Amsterdam, the paper uncovers some of the spatial, ecological, and political struggles of the houseboat-owners, and their expressive self-build architectures, quay landscapes and floating gardens. It foregrounds the often-forgotten role that civic society played in bringing sustainability thinking into political agendas, urban policies and design. @en

This article investigates how sustainability thinking influenced urban development in the city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by narrating microhistories of the Kadijken, a former harbour area in the eastern inner city. First, the site and researcher are introduced through a short story that is used as a springboard from which to further explore the rich histories of the site. The following three microhistories are interlaced with archival photographs.@en

A short explanation to the archival selections from the national collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut, which focuses on historical examples of interdisciplinary exchanges between architecture, planning, ecology and system theory.@en