Do It Yourself urbanism

The financial crisis of 2008 hit the Dutch housing market heavily because the development of houses and neighbourhoods leaned on large scale project done by private developers. These developers couldn’t be funded any more due to a lack of money and banks weren’t willing to give mortgages to individuals. A new movement started; Do It Yourself for housing. This led to a boom in houses build by individuals and also led to apartments build by groups of people. The next phase could be that groups of people would build their own neighbourhood, or even their own city. We researched this opportunity. What would this DIY neighbourhood and city mean legally, financially, spatially, etc A case study will be done in the city of Almere.

Interested? Please take a look at the project we did for the municipality of Schermer. Because if people do more, cities have to do less and we made a strategy and plan for the municipality what would be their role and how to communicate to the local citizens that they could build their own houses and neighbourhood.

Assignment: Nederland wordt Anders (the Netherlands changes)
year: 2010