The white prefab housing blocks dropped in a field next to a highway bypass here don’t look like much. But the project known as Startblok Riekerhaven is an innovative housing experiment—and social experiment—worth watching.
Since July, more than 550 young adults under the age of 28 have been living here. Half of them are Dutch, including students and others without the means to afford Amsterdam’s high rents. The other half are refugees, recently arrived from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, and eager to settle into a new life in a new land.
The two groups are not only encouraged to mix socially but to think of themselves as building a new community together. They organize joint activities, like movie nights and football matches. Through a buddy system, they learn about each other’s cultures. They also share responsibility for maintaining the buildings and grounds, a “self-management” structure intended to unite all the residents in the common cause of caring for their living space.
The project is unique in its approach and required a lot of creative thinking by municipal officials, the leaders of a pair of social-housing agencies, and the residents themselves. In just nine months, they turned what first seemed like a crazy idea into a potential European model for housing refugees and integrating them into society.
It all started a little more than a year ago. Leon Bobbe, CEO of the social housing corporation De Key, had to find a new location to put hundreds of empty container apartments. These low-cost mobile dwellings have become a popular solution for student housing in Amsterdam; the units Bobbe needed space for had just been moved to make way for permanent construction.
[For more of this story, written by Letty Reimerink, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...ect-together/510125/]
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