2023-04-15 01:00:35
The municipality of Amsterdam now wants to know: why does no one trust us? A former squatter with anarchist roots is allowed to investigate. ‘Also interesting: what regarding the confidence of administrators and civil servants in the residents?’
From Monday, Femke Kaulingfreks (41) may call herself professor of Amsterdam. The philosopher and anthropologist has been appointed to the Wibaut chair, established in 1991 by the city council for research into metropolitan problems.
A special appointment, in several respects. Twenty years ago, Kaulingfreks was still standing on the barricades as a squatter on the Heiligeweg, negotiating with the police as spokesperson for squatting group Schijnheilig. Now she can find out for the municipality why it is that citizens no longer trust the government.
“During my cracking period I learned everything I needed in my professional life,” says Kaulingfreks. “Of course: I have a PhD and have read an entire bookcase, but when it comes to the question of how to organize something, how to deal with contradiction and conflict and how to achieve results under great pressure; I learned all that in my activist life.”
Has your squatting past been discussed in your application?
“I said that I am a committed scientist and that I do not believe in a neutral position as a social scientist. But I’m not pushing any particular perspective or ideology. I’ve never wanted to be pigeonholed, so I don’t do that with others either. I stand for plurality. I can work well with people who are very much once morest squatting.”
“It was not for nothing that I talked to the police on behalf of the squatters. I feel comfortable in such an intermediate position. I cracked out of conviction, but I wasn’t a stereotypical squatter. I didn’t have a black hoody and I didn’t like punk music. I wore big pink heels and flowery dresses and went to salsa parties.”
Kaulingfreks is the successor of urban planner Zef Hemel, who spent ten years announcing his visionary views of the built city. A man who wanted to see everything big, including wide arm gestures. With the appointment of Kaulingfreks, the municipality is now clearly taking a different tack.
“I don’t understand planning,” she says. “I look at the city as a social fabric: how do people interact with each other, how do they relate to each other? The municipality wants me to conduct research into the declining trust of citizens in the government. That is a very topical theme, but what do we mean by it? There are neighborhoods in Amsterdam where only 15 percent will vote. What does that mean?”
“I find it interesting to ask why people don’t trust the government from the other side: what regarding the trust that administrators and civil servants have in residents? The municipality quickly thinks: how can we organize the policy in such a way that we cover the risks, that we are not abused?”
She laughs: “We have sometimes observed the interactions between politicians and young people in the neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. They then visit a community center or school, usually when elections are coming up, and they are gone following an hour.”
That must have been painful to watch.
“Uncomfortable to say the least. Those young people want to ask questions and tell stories and not just hear that they have to vote. If, as an alderman, you talk directly to young people, you miss all kinds of links in the chain: the community police officer, the teacher at school, the social worker of the neighborhood team. How can you strengthen those links? How can you make sure those people can work without having to fill out forms all day? That is what my research will be regarding: the chain of trust.”
“Participation is important to the municipality. Democratisation, resident participation, participation, it is all very high on the agenda.”
And it fails all the time.
“Yes, it often fails. This is because the municipality assumes that it will happen automatically. It has become a mantra: I am responsible for my own success, I have to do it myself. Some can do that: the participation elite of eloquent residents who know very well how to find their way to the municipality. I would love it if there was a training institute where you learn how to make effective use of your right to participation.”
Kaulingfreks is a child of the city herself, she says. “If my mother wanted to do something fun, we didn’t do it at home, because we lived with my grandfather and always had to be quiet, because he was often in bed with migraines. Then we went to eat tomato soup in a cafe or to the pancake farm in the Amsterdamse Bos. There were always worries regarding money at home, but when there was something to celebrate, she said: come on, let’s have a cake at Café Américain. I learned that you should enjoy what the city has to offer.”
Her grandfather still planted trees in the Amsterdamse Bos in the 1930s and following the war worked at the NDSM wharf and later at the social services. Her grandmother came from Koedijk and made urban life her own by cycling a little further. They lived in the Vogelbuurt in Noord. Social democrats through and through, who believed in uplifting the people through education.
Kaulingfreks’ mother struggled with a borderline disorder all her life, her father, a Chilean Dutch refugee, soon disappeared from view. At the age of sixteen she went to live on her own in De Pijp, following her mother was admitted to a psychiatric institution.
“Young, yes,” she says. “I had a boyfriend from former Yugoslavia. He was ten years older. He was a musician and worked in a coffee shop. I used to sit in the pub every night for live music sessions, on Bourbon Street or Maloe Melo. If youth services had come by, they would have immediately categorized me as a problem young person.”
Didn’t the school intervene?
“I was such a very stubborn teenager. I only came to school when there were tests. At one point I said to the deputy principal: listen, I want to make a deal with you. If you stop whining that I’m always truant, I’ll make sure I pass my final exam. He had the courage to take me seriously.”
“I had my grandmother on one shoulder and my grandfather on the other. They said to me: you have to make it, because you are smart. You’re just as smart as your mother, maybe even smarter. On paper it was a terrible situation I was in, but in real life it was great. When I sat in the coffee shop in the morning, they said: you have to eat well, because you have to go to school and you have to pass your test today. You need vitamins, here you have fresh orange juice. It is important to take adolescents’ own perspective on their situation seriously, even if this goes once morest the views of professionals.”
Is Amsterdam still a city for young people?
“That’s probably what worries me the most. I give today’s youth the informal safety net I’ve had, but the city has become expensive and the places where they can just hang out together are scarce. Amsterdam is perhaps a bit too raked in some places.”
You have done a lot of research into disturbances by young people.
“Without disruption, no change. To move forward you need a certain amount of resistance, of stubbornness and courage to break through things. Which does not mean that I am in favor of violence, but that I think we should analyze what moves rioters. After the curfew riots, Mark Rutte said: I am not looking for sociological explanations. I really thought that was a missed opportunity. Riots always carry a political element: the feeling of not being heard by the government. The more you have that feeling, the more you also feel that you have nothing to lose, the easier it becomes to cross borders.”
Has contact with your father been restored?
“We came together at a later age. He was 28 when I was born and not ready for a baby at all, especially with a mentally unstable woman. He was an anarchist in the time of Salvador Allende. His father, who was Dutch, saw things go wrong. He dragged him here just before the 1973 coup. A trauma. Friends of his have disappeared, others have been imprisoned for a long time. His best friend became addicted and he was here when he really wanted to be there.”
How has he influenced you?
“I inherited my sense of justice from my grandfather and grandmother and his anarchist ideals from my father. The idea that people can manage well together without government. My father is the most tenacious, authentic cross-thinker I know. He never votes.”
Nice: you are now conducting research into trust in the government.
“That doesn’t interest him. Government? Who cares?”
Have you ever discussed this with him?
“All the time. My father is the one who keeps me sharpest. He is a disruptive thinker. Which invites you to go back to the core. He asks me all the time: what are you worrying regarding? Why should people trust the municipality at all?”
Good question.
“I think we need institutions to promote equality of opportunity. I try to stretch the system to fit as many people as possible. But Jesus, what my father saw in Chile… The state apparatus only unleashed violence on the people, without ever being held accountable for it. I have the ambition to advise institutions, but it is very good to do so with a healthy dose of mistrust.”
Femke Kaulingfreks (1981) was born in Amsterdam. She studied political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and obtained her PhD in 2013 at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht on the political significance of riots and public order disturbances by young people with a migration background. She worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, Radboud University in Nijmegen and Utrecht University. From March 2018 she is a lecturer in youth and society at the Hogeschool InHolland in Amsterdam. She lives with her husband and son Victor (6) in North Amsterdam.
The Wibaut chair was set up by the municipality of Amsterdam at the UvA in 1991 to stimulate research into metropolitan problems, particularly in Amsterdam. The appointment is for two days a week. Previously on the Wibaut Chair were social geographer Willem Heinemeijer (1992-1993), economist Annemieke Roobeek (1994-1996), physicist and politician Jan Terlouw (1997-2000), writer Geert Mak (2000-2023), publicist Paul Scheffer (2003 -2011) and planner Zef Hemel (2011-2023).
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