This project explores the utilisation of the collective memory of vacant churches and the architectural elements within them as incentives for their transformation and reuse. The number of decommissioned churches in the Netherlands is increasing with rapid secularisation, and many churches remain empty. The purpose of this paper is to find a method to connect the collective memory within elements in a church and utilise them for the church’s redesign. This study will focus on one such church for theoretical application of the methodology, the Saint Augustinus church in Amsterdam Noord, which has been empty since 2014. Finding a way to reconnect the church to its neighbourhood using the collective memory of the neighbourhood around this church, could be a way to socially sustain the church and prevent it from going into disuse. The individual memory of the churchgoers is rather subjective, but as churches have been a part of the landscape of the cities of the Netherlands for long periods, they also have shared memories. The way to investigate the collective memory of the church is to collect individual stories and find common strings among them. A phenomenological study of these architectural elements provides the way they are experienced and how this can be enhanced for the community to feel connected to them again. This paper thus answers the question of how the collective memory of the church can set in motion the transformation and conservation of vacant churches.

The migration of different ethnic groups into an urban ecosystem over generations can lend to diversity and religious plurality. As people migrate from their homeland, they bring with them their culture and mould their surroundings into something that emulates ‘home’. These migrant populations try to fit into their new environment, and the host country has to take measures to help them adapt to their new home. Their place of dwelling is the zone within the larger urban context that should make them feel secure, and the various housing projects implemented for migrants may reveal strategies for their integration into their current environment.

This architectural history thesis focuses on the story of migration and migrant housing in the Netherlands, beginning with the influx of guest-workers between 1964 and 1973, family reunification programs in the late1970s and the recent migration after the European Refugee crisis. There are three phases of assimilation in terms of scale, the larger urban context studies through the case study of the housing crisis for guest-workers in Utrecht in the 1970s, the neighbourhood level study conducted in the Post World War II Neighbourhoods of Enschede, and the residential level study conducted in the INTERACT projects in Startblok Riekerhaven, Amsterdam and Place2BU, Utrecht and the ‘Utrecht Refugee Launchpad Project’.The historical time frame of migration and the different integration methods implemented along this timeline may facilitate newer modes of integration while overcoming the shortcomings of the existing bundle of techniques. Moreover, the study of migration architecture may help understand the urban ethnographic polyvalence. Through literature and spatial mapping studies conducted from the larger urban context (in terms of frequency in social housing schemes) to the changes in the spatial layout of homes (understanding prevalent Dutch rituals compared to Turkish cultural traditions), we may understand these pre-existing transitions methods.