Living Room Solidarity
by WORKNOT!
Home today is the subject of privilege, the locus of precarity and unpredictability. The capitalist crisis of housing goes beyond the century-old issue which precarised working bodies across the world have been dealing with. Since the creation of the modern concept of the house in the early 20th century and universalisation of living space for working families by mainly Western European architects and states, spatial arrangement of regular working families' houses has been a concern for both. Working families became the subject of designing for predictability, their everydayness calculated by architects and other ‘professionals’ for the purpose of categorisation, generalisation and further programme not just their living space but also their living practice. New forms of life emerged partly as the result of this effort. Working families started living a new way of life with new ways of using the house under the regime of the new financial quandary of labour = rent + food.
During the 1930s economic recession in Europe, many lost their employment. Yet, food and rent was to be paid for. German architect Ernst May rightfully referred to working families in the introduction to the archetype of minimumwoning (minimum dwelling) in the 1920s, as the “living-income-earner”.
The collective refusal of rent increase has historically been a mode of collective action against precarious living conditions and eviction processes throughout the 20th century until today. Rent strikes have been used to resist poor housing conditions, government housing policies, rent increase, eviction and forced relocations in cities around the world. In the earlier 1900s, while collective refusals to be displaced were organised locally, they were empowered across cities through shared infrastructures of socialist organising, trade union networks, anarchist press networks, suffragists (especially socialist feminists), as well as communist groups. In the Netherlands, the first nation-wide rent strike occurred in the 1930s. These were organised and performed mostly by women, elderly and unemployed individuals who spent the majority of their time (working) at home, while the industrial worker left the house, the sphere of political action, to labour.
The home was the subject of aanslag (attack) by the landlord and state, while the living room was a situation room for verzet (resistance) and actie (action). A living room decorated with socialist posters and banners, a type machine, a gramophone horn hanging on the wall, a table in the middle with a couple of seats spread around the room. This living room, once determined by architects as a multifunctional space for living activity—dining, doing homework, caring for a baby, sleep and play—was now a space of action, resistance and solidarity.
The facades were no longer neutral either: they were feastfully decorated with posters and hand-painted slogans stating “hier is huurstaking” (here is rent strike), as well as signs and banners showing solidarity and inviting people to join the actions, with residents boycotting shops if they did not join. The street was crying solidarity in a collective rent strike.
In Amsterdam, the rentstrike association, which was organised by tenants, would help those that were in danger of eviction with crowdfunded financial support or help them with moving to a (rented or squatted) house in the neighbourhood. When bailiffs attempted to initiate an eviction, a strike whistle called on all the neighbours to come together and make a human wall blocking the door of the house in order to stop bailiffs from entering and carrying out the eviction. Bikers slow down to watch and more people come to join. There is a sense of empowerment: four women standing on a balcony of the rescued house, with a baby in their arms and a toddler shorter than the balcony fence; the house was not neutral or predictable any more, and the precarity fuelled the resistance.
Videos are excerpts from the longer video named “First Food / Rent Second” which is part of a six-part video essay focusing on archival research on minimumwoning. These were commissioned by Nieuwe Instituut for the exhibition Het ontwerp van het sociale, 2021–2024.