ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Resilient hope: sustaining neighborhood living rooms as everyday activism

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 17 | PUBLIC SPACE

Speaker

Mr Louwrens Botha (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Description

Neighborhood living rooms ('buurthuiskamers') are a distinct form of public space in urban neighborhoods in the Netherlands. As social and community spaces of meeting, encounter and connection, they play an important role in maintaining feelings of home and liveability in urban neighborhoods under austerity and neoliberal governance regimes, allowing communities to 'weave new networks of trust and care amid the alienating pressures of the capitalist cityscape' (Huron, 2015). At the same time they represent spaces of hope: existing somewhat beyond the conventions and restrictions of both the market and the state, 'buurthuiskamers' offer participants the opportunity to 'act otherwise' and to enact and embody preferred forms of social relations, governance and priorities. In this way they function as 'everyday utopias' (Cooper, 2014) which demonstrate alternatives to the neoliberal status quo and offer tangible hope for transformed everyday realities.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study in four such neighborhood living rooms, we show how the continued existence of these spaces is made possible by the physical, emotional and administrative labor of dedicated organizers, facilitators and volunteers who work to keep the space open, facilitate social relations, organize activities, produce and reproduce a feeling of home, and fight further cuts, austerity and privatization. What motivates these actors to become involved in this kind of work, and to keep doing it in the face of these challenges and the potential for burnout and despair? This paper draws on embedded fieldwork and interviews with key actors to explore the meanings and motivations of their work, demonstrating how their personal backgrounds and experiences, the pleasures of participation and togetherness, and their desire for and belief in change inform their continued efforts. These accounts illustrate the ways in which 'buurthuiskamers' constitute prefigurative spaces of hope which cultivate and sustain their participants' belief in 'another world in the world' (Moten, 2013), and how this belief in turn allows community actors to sustain these spaces.

References

Cooper, D. (2014). Everyday Utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces. Durham: Duke University Press.
Huron, A. (2015). Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons. Antipode, 47(4) : 963-979
Moten, F. (2013). 'The General Antagonism: Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis,' in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.