Agency, Resilience and ‘Surviving Well’ in Dutch Neighborhood Living Rooms

Literature on community resilience has argued that it is (re)produced through sustained collective practices, and cautioned against neoliberal ‘resiliences’ which serve to justify state withdrawal and disinvestment. A critical and progressive understanding of resilience accounts for this by politicizing everyday practices and foregrounding community agency. More research is needed to show how these concerns are spatialized in different social, political, and economic contexts. This paper investigates the self-managed ‘buurthuiskamer’ (neighborhood living room) as a site of everyday practices of community resilience in the Netherlands. These spaces represent a historical form of social infrastructure being reinterpreted in the post-welfare-state, post-austerity urban context. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in four such spaces, we use buurthuiskamers to illustrate a critical and plural understanding of community resilience based on cultivating agency. We show how communities ‘survive’ by defending and enhancing everyday urban livability in the present; how they move beyond mere survival towards communal ‘thriving’; and how participants are empowered to take collective action and decisions to ‘transform’ towards more just and inclusive futures. Finally, we highlight the structural precarity underpinning these spaces; the tension between the roles of meeting spaces as neutral social infrastructure and as spaces of belonging and appropriation; and the ambivalent mediating position they occupy between neoliberal local government and local communities.