Narratives of Amsterdam inevitably open with a description of the city's historic canal system, noting its place-defining character. This doctoral dissertation research project investigates the relationship between Amsterdam's canals and the city's 20th century political struggles over rights to housing, safety, wealth, and identity. The study focuses on three periods of political volatility: socialist activism for labor reforms in the 1930s, countercultural demonstrations against market domination in the 1960s, and conservative populist campaigns for economic deregulation since the 1990s. Newspaper clippings, union archives, activist paraphernalia, and municipal reports from these years document surges of social advocacy surrounding employment conditions, residential evictions, financial inequities, and cultural repression. Using these documents, this project reconstructs the spatial history of these social movements. In so doing, it explains how activists used the historic canals as a physical site, economic resource, and symbolic icon to facilitate their campaigns for civic reform.
This research project is part of a large-scale effort to rethink spatial politics both within and beyond the field of Geography. Instead of analyzing Amsterdam's canals according to their construction history, this project illuminates the political utility of the quays. This approach sheds new light on the material dynamics of political activism using a theoretical framework that is compatible with the existing sociology literature on social movements. It also responds directly to calls from geographers and anthropologists to integrate knowledge about land practices with theories of social change in urban settings. The findings contribute to important city planning debates about the changing nature of public space and its relationship to housing, jobs, environmental health, and community wellness. Cumulatively, these contributions help re-politicize spatial analysis, generating new insights into the relationship between built landscapes and citizenship rights.
