We need to stop building luxury single-person studios for students
According to Lucas Bongard, it’s time to stop building studios for students. Instead, universities and municipalities should focus on student housing with shared kitchens and bathrooms. “The social aspect of living should not be underestimated, especially at a time when loneliness among young people is on the rise.”
For students in the Netherlands, the housing shortage is a topic of every-day discussion, a common cause of stress and a crisis that causes perceived division between Dutch, international, wealthy and poor students. In the last decades, studio’s seem to be the preferred form of student housing. This is counter-intuitive, in times when loneliness and lack of space persist.
Recently, the UvA gloatingly announced the construction of 102 new studios near Amstel station in collaboration with Hub Studios. This is nothing more than a drop in the bucket in the face of the current situation, not to mention the questions about who these studios will be allocated to or when construction will actually finish.
It seems that recently, student housing construction consists of what are basically low budget hotel suites: small bathrooms, underequipped kitchens and a uniform room design just large enough for a bed, desk and closet. The hallways are characterised by numbers, colour codes and linoleum floors, giving entire buildings an impersonal atmosphere that screams ‘hospital’ more than it does ‘student residence’. Downstairs is the reception, a common room directly out of a booking.com ad, with security in the form of a bouncer or a digital code system.
For a business hotel this would suffice, but for a student home it is not only wildly inefficient but also dehumanising and counterproductive in giving students the communal feeling they deserve.
Community building
A realistic option would be to adopt a revised post-WW2 vision on student housing. From the 50’s to the 70’s, Amsterdam decided to invest heavily in student housing facilities with large amounts of bedrooms and shared facilities (kitchens and bathrooms). Some of these buildings, such as the Weesperflat or Uilenstede, are still in use. While these buildings may not appeal to everyone’s architectural preferences, or adhere to the standards and hygiene that some students expect, they do very well in one aspect: community building. The same can be said for dentist school turned student housing building Acta.
Of course, I am not arguing to bring back modernist architecture in the middle of Amsterdam. But as articles in the NRC and Vrij Nederland have previously noted, the value of community in places of residence cannot be understated, especially in times of increasing loneliness among young people. Universities and governments, both local and national, should shift their focus immediately to building housing that may appeal less to minds shaped by sterile Airbnb-culture, but will improve the lives of its young residents vastly.
In fact, we should take student housing one step further than the post-war model: we need to start constructing shared bedroom dorms. Imagine the capacity of a project such as that recently announced, but with 80 slightly larger bedrooms and two people in each. The space freed up by the 22 other bedrooms could be used, with humane interior design, for welcoming common areas that facilitate human interaction and high-quality kitchens and bathrooms. This hypothetical building could house 150% as many people, while reducing loneliness through community.
Roommate
The alarm bells of privacy that undoubtedly ring for an age group of social, sexual and personal self-exploration are addressed by the fact that there is one scenario with even less privacy than a shared dorm: a room in your parental home. Ask yourself: would you rather live in Amsterdam with a roommate and a shared kitchen, or not live in Amsterdam at all? For many first year students, the answer would be obvious.
Of the total of 46% of students in the Netherlands living at their parental home, 62% mention cost or housing availability concerns as the reason for not moving out. In other words, many students do not get to move out even when they want to, and international students may be deterred from the idea of studying in the Netherlands at risk of not finding accommodation. The message is clear: to let Dutch students transition into adulthood under the liberty of independent living and to maintain an influx of international students beneficial to our educational system, we need significantly more accommodation. But building more seems impossible. So if we cannot build more, we must build differently.
Luxury
While it is hard to compare systems internationally, the questions of what is going wrong and why studios are prioritised needs to be raised. The main answer lies in neoliberal legislation. Starting around the 80’s, Dutch universities slowly became detached further and further from their students’ housing, resulting in the current legal situation where a university is not allowed to own or construct any housing by itself. This was framed through the lense of letting universities focus on education, but it in fact meant giving more business to housing companies, many of which are primarily profit-driven. Comparing this to the more centralised student housing provisions operated by German and French governments, or to the UK and US where universities could almost be considered real-estate players themselves with large housing facilities and campuses, the Dutch system’s flaws become clear. When housing is left to the market, it becomes geared towards those with the most capital: in this case by building small, “luxury” one-person studios. Ironically, Dutch institutions have generally dealt far better with this knowledge than the UK or the US. Yet, when it comes to students, the logic is ignored.
In a time of loneliness, individualism and an extreme housing crisis, universities need to reclaim the autonomy to give their students the communal studying experience they require to develop as humans. As long as we let financial reasoning decide what housing gets built, the issues will only worsen. No option is perfect, but returning to more communal housing types is the most realistic way of allowing everyone, regardless of financial and social capital, to escape their parental nests and take flight.
Lucas Bongard is a third-year student of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at the UvA.
