Housing, Personhood and Affect in Gentrifying Garden Villages of Amsterdam

Abstract

This article offers insight into how housing, renovation, and gentrification are more than matters of upgrading material dwellings and neighborhoods, but they substantially engage residents’ very notions of who they are and how they are perceived. Using the lens of valuation, gentrification is presented as much more than an exclusionary market relationship but as a process that shows how human perspectives on selves emerge and transform along with housing discourse and relations and informs feelings of socio-spatial (in)justice. The case is the ongoing transformation of the working-class garden villages in postindustrial Amsterdam North, an area that has become subject to active urban redevelopment since the 2000s. The material upgrading of the industrial spaces and social housing makes tangible the long-term active residents’ historically sensorial relations with the built environment, around which their sense of self was shaped. Long-term residents and their children increasingly demand that the ongoing spatial improvement of the area does justice to the deeply embodied history of social emancipation in the garden villages.