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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Community resilience has become a ubiquitous normative goal for cities in the face of ongoing crises and the prospect of climate change, conflict and instability [1,2,3]. Meanwhile, the literature on planning and geography has increasingly problematized the transfer of the concept of resilience from ecological to social sciences and the way resilience has been instrumentalized by neoliberal projects to justify state withdrawal, disinvestment, and the further dismantling of the welfare state [4,5]. The latter is typified by the Conservatives’ project of the ‘Big Society’ in the UK, and the shift from a welfare state to a ‘participation society’ in the Netherlands [6,7]. Resilience has been criticized for shifting responsibility to the victims of crisis rather than addressing the causes of crisis [1], advancing narratives of ‘bouncing back’ to the status quo [8], imposing technocratic problem-framing and solutions [9] and reproducing colonial structures and subjectivities [10]. Finally, resilience is criticized for prioritizing adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, rather than its prevention through systemic change [11,12].

Critical engagement with these positions has highlighted the need to politicize resilience discourses, pay attention to power imbalances and inequalities, and foreground the promotion of community agency, capacity, and resourcefulness as empowering elements of resilience [13,14,15]. Scholars have also argued for an understanding of resilience as produced and maintained through practice, rather than an inherent quality or a mere side-effect of other factors such as social capital [16]. These perspectives take the criticisms of previous usages of resilience as a starting point for a progressive and potentially empowering understanding of the term, based in grounded practices of communities attempting to exercise agency over their environment, everyday lives, and collective futures as they attempt to ‘survive well’ [17]. This demands attention to the situated and contextual ways in which communities engage in practices that enhance their agency, and the ways these practices use, appropriate, and transform their everyday urban living environment.

In this paper we operationalize and spatialize a critical, agency-centered understanding of community resilience by identifying the emergent local phenomenon of self-managed ‘buurthuiskamers’, or neighborhood living rooms, in the Netherlands. Buurthuiskamers are informal social community spaces in urban neighborhoods which exist outside of the conventions of the private home, commercial spaces, and welfare-state institutions such as community centers or public libraries. They are loosely-defined spaces where residents meet to socialize, share meals and resources, discuss local issues, and to a greater or lesser extent engage in participatory governance and decision-making. In contrast to spaces such as community gardens, repair cafes or drop-in centers, they do not have a single aim or activity, nor a specific target group, but are oriented towards everyday meeting and social encounter, and offer space to whatever activities or initiatives emerge from that.

This focus on cultivating and exercising individual and collective agency enables these spaces to support practices of co-production of community resilience in the context of post-welfare-state austerity in the present, and towards more sustainable forms of urban life in the future. We aim to illustrate how practices of resilience incorporate elements of ‘surviving’ everyday challenges or threats, developing ways of collective ‘thriving’ in everyday life, and actively ‘transforming’ towards more desired futures. We dwell on the spatial manifestation of these practices in the specific urban geography of the Netherlands, and their relation to other forms of social infrastructure more broadly. Finally, we highlight some tensions in the organizational forms of buurthuiskamers, the ambivalent dynamics between communities and local authorities, and more broadly between enhancing community agency and justifying state withdrawal.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Community Resilience

Research on social and community resilience has historically been dominated by the socio-ecological resilience (SER) perspective, understanding resilience as the ability of a (social) system to adapt to changing conditions, while retaining coherence and continued functioning [18,19,20]. The adoption of ecological resilience in a social context is reflected in the much-quoted definition of social resilience as ‘the ability of individuals, groups, or communities to withstand external shocks and stresses without significant upheaval’ [21] (p. 358). However, scholars have challenged the transfer of the concept from ecology to the social sciences, arguing that the SER perspective is inherently conservative in privileging the continuation of the status quo, ignoring social and environmental injustices, and ‘naturalizing’ unequal power relations through the ecosystem metaphor [4,5,6,9,12,14,22]. The SER emphasis on adaptability is also seen as supporting neoliberal projects of state withdrawal and ‘responsibilization’ of citizens and communities [6,13,23]. Finally, SER is criticized for ignoring the agency of individuals and communities in actively seeking change from within, pre-emptively avoiding future shocks as opposed to passively enduring them [11,24,25].

Nevertheless, rather than rejecting resilience outright, others have suggested that it can be ‘a useful handle for further (critical) engagement’ [14] (p. 145). A ‘useful’ and yet ‘critical’ use of resilience, then, means foregrounding the political dimension of resilience and imbuing it with values and intent: what is to be resisted or adapted to, in what ways, and who decides? [5,15]. It also means seeing resilience as actively co-produced, and recognizing that resilience can facilitate both resistance and transformation, prefiguring more just alternatives to the status quo [16,25,26,27,28]. Thus, resilience is summarized by Hillier [29] as consisting of three aspects: persistence or resistance in the face of stress; adaptability to dynamic contingencies; and transformability, or the capacity ‘to steer away from undesirable trajectories by creatively transforming its structure’ [29] (p. 174). The fundamental difference between this critical understanding and the traditional SER perspective (and between communities and ecosystems) is agency: the individual or collective capacity to act, whether in the present or in the future [30,31]. Agency makes transformative action possible as a way ‘to break away from undesirable “normal”’ [15] (p. 4), whether in response to an external stressor or internal motivation. A critical, agency-centered definition of community resilience can be summarized as the capacity of a community to resist disruption, adapt consciously and deliberately to change, and together imagine and enact future change.

Agency is not an inherent quality, but is produced and reproduced through practice [16,29,32,33]. The capacity of communities to act and react needs to be developed and maintained in everyday ‘normal’ life to be in place if and when that normality is disrupted. For example, community groups which were already highly active in everyday initiatives were able to use these networks, spaces and capacities to respond to the COVID-19 lockdowns [34]. Focusing on social practices as an analytical category enables us to connect everyday activities of community groups to greater agency and capacity [33,35,36]. It also illustrates the ways in which agency is always partly constrained or shaped by wider structures, while also influencing and altering those same structures. Agency developed through everyday decision-making, co-creation, stewardship, and collective action translates to communities and individuals having greater ownership over their environment and everyday lives. This allows them to organize collective life in ways that are more environmentally sustainable and socially just, without losing sight of the pleasures and joys of life—what Gibson-Graham et al. [17] call ‘surviving well’—and to reimagine and transform their futures, as their everyday practice of alternatives produce ‘small-scale shifts in the conception of what is possible’ [8]. Over time, this allows them ‘to move from becoming survivors to being agents’ [30] (p. 41). To summarize, we understand agency as being cultivated and sustained through practice; having both an individual and collective component; and being in dynamic and situated tension, rather than binary opposition, with social structures.

The rest of this paper seeks to investigate the spaces and practices which enable the development and exercise of agency-based resilience. This analysis operationalizes a progressive, agency-centered understanding of resilience across the spectrum discussed above: how everyday practices help participants to survive, persisting in the face of external pressures and crises; to thrive by adapting to these pressures in ways which foreground their own needs and priorities; and to proactively reimagine and transform their everyday lives and living environments, opening up radical possibilities for our cities and for everyday community life. To clarify what kinds of spaces our object of analysis, Dutch buurthuiskamers, are, and how they relate to other types, we turn to social infrastructures literature.

2.2. Social Infrastructure

‘Social infrastructure’ builds on earlier ideas about ‘third spaces’ [37] to describe those spaces, networks and practices which sustain social life in cities [38,39,40,41,42]. Simply put, they are ‘the networks of spaces, facilities, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection’ [40] (p. 3). Latham and Layton [41] later expand this definition to differentiate people as infrastructure [43]; the ‘sociality that gathers around hard physical infrastructures’ [41] (p. 660); the infrastructure of social care, in the form of healthcare, education and social care infrastructure; and finally, the ‘public and quasi-public spaces and places that support social connection’ [41] (p. 661). This final category can include public open spaces such as parks, squares and swimming pools, institutional buildings such as churches or community centers, and commercial spaces such as cafes [42]. Such infrastructures provide specific functions that make cities work and have the further benefit of providing social contact, enabling residents to build social capital and support networks beyond their own home, family or ethnic group [44]. Casual, low-threshold forms of interaction, mingling and co-presence develop and sustain ‘weak ties’ and so-called social cohesion [42,45]. Finally, social infrastructures are understood as not only supporting the survival of urban dwellers but also offering opportunity for a richer, more rewarding life in cities [39].

A recent literature review by Enneking et al. [42] categorizes seven spatial types of social infrastructure: public institutions (further specified as community development; public services; public space; and care and educational facilities); commercial space; recreational facilities; places of worship; transit; digital infrastructures; and groups or networks of people. What is missing from these are informal, self-organized social meeting spaces which are not part of public institutions such as community centers or libraries; which are neither commercial nor purely recreational; which are operated by local groups of residents but are more than a social network; and which exist in the public realm but are designed to extend an everyday sense of home and collective belonging [46].

These neighborhood-level meeting spaces, known in the Netherlands as buurthuiskamers, are ‘quasi-public’ enclosed spaces in the sense that they are accessible to anyone during opening hours, but are not necessarily publicly owned or operated. Rather, they incorporate a spectrum of possibilities from those funded and managed by the state, to facilities managed by civic or welfare institutions through public or private funding, to those initiated and self-managed by (groups of) local residents. In contrast to most of the spaces described by Latham and Layton [40] and Enneking et al. [42], as well as larger, multifunctional social infrastructures such as Swedish medborgarhuset (‘people’s houses’; see [47]), buurthuiskamers are defined by having social encounter as a primary purpose, with other functions or programming emerging from that encounter. As social infrastructure, they consist of both the physical, material spaces in urban neighborhoods and the actors, practices and networks that develop in and sustain the spaces [42], and not only serve a ‘provisioning’ function of making urban life possible, but also produce a ‘surplus’ which can ‘encourage urban life to flourish’ [40] (p. 9) and help residents not only survive, but ‘survive well’ [17].

3. Methodology

3.1. Background

This study forms part of a wider European project about community resilience. As part of this, we engaged in a mostly desktop-based mapping of bottom-up community initiatives and spaces, in our case in the cities of Rotterdam and Eindhoven. From this, a database of 62 cases was built, with the intention of developing a typology of resilience practices [48]. Places and practices documented in this process were categorized according to the main activity; the overarching intent or concern of participants; and the ways their practice contributed to theoretically informed notions of community resilience. What emerged from this mapping exercise, our inductive classification efforts, and ongoing comparison with similar exercises in other European contexts was a phenomenon which appeared unique to the Dutch context and which defied attempts to categorize it as a ‘type’ of practice: the self-managed community buurthuiskamer. These spaces appeared to host and generate a variety of activities and programming, while remaining hard to define purely in terms of those activities. Rather, it was the space itself which was central and which permitted an ever-changing flow of activity in and around it—ranging from practices of ‘survival’ and social reproduction in everyday life; to recreation, socializing and everyday pleasures; to more activistic or political acts of organization and opposition. In this sense, they represented the full spectrum of agency-based resilience as discussed above.

3.2. Ethnographic Study

In order to understand how these spaces emerge and persist, how they are governed, and their impact on participants and the wider neighborhood, we initiated a multi-sited ethnographic study of four such buurthuiskamers. Potential cases were visited informally to develop an overview of the range of activities and characteristics which could be observed, after which four cases were selected for further study. All cases share the common criteria that they are free to enter and use, regularly active, and not run by state or commercial parties. Meanwhile, they differ in ranging from complete autonomy to active involvement of institutions; from an aim of neutrality to a more focused political intent; and from brand new to more established spaces (see

Table 1. Comparative overview of case study sites.

	De Nieuwe Maan	Buurthuis ‘t Struikske	Huis van de Toekomst	Het Bollenpandje
Inception	2022	2023	2019	2020
Initiator(s)	Local welfare organization	Residents’ association	Artist researchers	Active residents
Space	Former commercial space in ground-floor corner of a terraced housing block	Pavilion building formerly used as special needs youth center	Vacant former commercial space in ground-floor corner of social housing apartment block	Vacant former commercial space in ground-floor corner of a terraced housing block
Size (approx.)	110 m2	300 m2	70 m2	85 m2
Tenure	Rent-free access from housing association	Building: purchased for nominal sum from previous owners Land: ten-year leasehold granted by municipality	Rented from housing association through temporary vacancy management business	Rented from housing association with municipal subsidy
Typical schedule	Weekdays 10–17 h Occasional evenings	Weekdays, 2–4 h depending on activity	Variable, 1–3 days per week depending on programming and availability	Weekdays, usually 10–15 h but varies greatly
Funding	Municipal subsidy, welfare organizations (labor) and housing association (space)	Municipal subsidies; income from space rental; municipal leasehold	Artistic institution (initial); philanthropic organizations (ongoing); coalition of municipality, housing association and energy company (2023–2024)	Municipal subsidy through ‘Resilient BoTu 2028′ program; philanthropic organizations; project-based funding for artistic and social interventions
Governance	Welfare organization, in collaboration with local residents’ association	Residents’ association and dedicated board	Steering group of initiators and key actors; oversight by association board since end 2024	Initiators and long-term participants; administrative oversight by formal association

, below). The decision to focus on four sites was an attempt to balance the illustration of this range of conditions, the analytical depth provided by a narrower focus, and the practical limitations of a single researcher’s capacities.

The ethnographic fieldwork consisted of regular visits to all four spaces between September 2023 and November 2024. Initial visits were focused on participant observation, familiarization with the space and its users, and an immersion in the practices, routines and dynamics of each site, recorded in fieldnotes. Informal conversations were used to learn more about what participants were doing and why, and to familiarize the community with the researcher and the project. The researcher, a white non-Dutch male in his thirties, moved gradually from passive observation to actively participating in the activities of the four spaces over the course of this year. This included taking minutes of meetings, attending events, and being part of the everyday conversations and mundane maintenance of the space: washing dishes, chatting idly over a cup of coffee, or trying to repair a faulty doorbell. This cultivated a degree of embodied knowledge [49,50] and helped the researcher be seen as less of an outsider and closer to (but never entirely) an equal fellow participant. Through this, a degree of mutual trust and understanding could develop organically, leading up to a series of twenty semi-structured interviews in the second half of the fieldwork period. Interview participants included initiators (n = 7), regular participants (n = 11), and external stakeholders (municipality and local housing association, n = 2), and were selected according to their position in the buurthuiskamer or institution, their role leading a project or initiative within the space, and organically through repeated encounter during participatory fieldwork. The time taken to embed and develop mutual trust meant that interviews could be based on a shared set of understandings and references; that the research questions developed in line with the empirical observations; and that interviews could move beyond practical information or mere ‘factual’ descriptions of the practices and into the motivations, meanings, tensions and visions in participants’ experiences.

Interviews were conducted in Dutch, the first language of most participants and primary language spoken in all four spaces. An interview guide listed topics to be covered (the participant’s role and how they became involved; the history of the project; collaborations with other initiatives; the motivations and rewards of their participation; concerns and hopes for the future) but participants were encouraged to speak about what they found important or interesting. Interviews were recorded and translated into English by the researcher in the form of content summaries including key quotes in both English and Dutch. These accounts and the researcher’s fieldnotes were coded in Atlas.ti using a combination of deductive codes (based on research questions about the history and governance of the initiative, and key concepts such as agency, participation and resilience) as well as inductive codes emerging from participants’ own accounts (for example past experiences, relationships with other spaces, and challenges they experienced). Coding was performed by the primary researcher in collaboration and exchange with the second author, in order to limit the potential bias of having developed personal ties to the interview participants and the projects themselves.

4. Buurthuiskamers in The Netherlands

4.1. The Evolution of the Buurthuiskamer

The contemporary buurthuiskamer has its origins in the buurthuizen (community centers, literally ‘neighborhood-houses’) and clubhuizen (‘club-houses’) common in Dutch cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as working classes migrated from the provinces to industrializing cities [51]. Around the same time, the first civic associations were formed, and the first workers’ rights, child labor and workers’ housing legislation was passed—early seeds of the welfare state. The first community centers were predominantly initiated by philanthropists from well-educated upper middle classes, as a charitable effort to ‘educate’ and ‘enlighten’ the urban poor demographic. This was not only for their practical and economic benefit but had a moral, ‘civilizing’ intent founded on the belief that even poor people could ‘learn to be a good person’ [51] (p. 14). As Dutch civil life became increasingly organized within ‘pillars’ based on religious or political affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, Socialist, or Liberal) buurthuizen were likewise managed and programmed by and for members of particular social groups [52].

With the post-WWII process known as ‘depillarization’ [53], the Dutch state began to centralize and desegregate social services, developing a welfare state that served all citizens and institutionalized community-building and care work beyond the religious–political pillars. Housing associations played an active and holistic role in urban development, responsible for building housing units as well as commercial and community facilities. Meanwhile, increased education levels, economic affluence and the rise of consumer culture meant there was less need for the ‘emancipatory’ or ‘developmental’ work of the buurthuizen, hence their focus shifted to social public life and democratic participation [51,54]. Neoliberal reforms from the 1980s onwards saw welfare-state institutions increasingly subjected to market pressures and austerity measures, funding for social and community work reduced, and public social infrastructure cut to a minimum [55]. Housing associations were directed to provide only for poorer ‘target populations’ rather than the population at large, and were increasingly financialized [56]. Major austerity measures related to the Social Support Act (WMO) of 2007 and in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2010 radically transformed the Netherlands from a ‘paternalistic’ welfare state to a ‘participation society’, with an emphasis on individual responsibility and participation in the labor market [54,55,57]. In this period, many community centers and other municipally run spaces closed due to cuts in operating budgets.

It is in this context that buurthuiskamers have emerged in Dutch cities, sometimes as institutional spaces run by municipalities and welfare organizations, but more commonly as self-managed spaces run predominantly by groups of residents. Recognizing the need for greater social cohesion in the face of individualism and neoliberal policy, and remembering the earlier ubiquity and value of such spaces, local residents have organized to counter the loss of social infrastructures, while reinterpreting the form. Contemporary buurthuiskamers do not benefit from the strong cohesion and social capital provided by the societal pillars, nor the resources and centralized power of the welfare state. As such, they tend to have an informal, provisional, and improvisational quality, as different groups attempt to establish a space and a working model, and forge their own identity. Housing associations increasingly recognize the importance of social meeting spaces for the well-being of their tenants even if this is often considered beyond their mandate and budget, especially in the context of austerity, climate change and the energy transition, and hence seek to support and facilitate such initiatives where possible. Self-managed buurthuiskamers draw on shared references and cultural memories but can differ significantly in the ways in which they reinterpret this tradition, and the ways this manifests in space and in practice. Though familiar to ordinary citizens, municipal actors, and housing associations, buurthuiskamers are largely invisible in recent urban scholarship (although see [58,59]). Spatially, they differ from the scale and civic presence of more institutional social infrastructures, since they are generally located in a former home or neighborhood store and as such mimic the domestic scale of the surrounding neighborhood. This is continued in the design and atmosphere within these spaces, which are oriented more towards extending a feeling and practice of ‘home’ into the urban or public sphere (see [46]) than representing a wider infrastructural system or network.

4.2. The Contemporary Buurthuiskamer

For the present study, fieldwork was conducted in four buurthuiskamers in Rotterdam and Eindhoven. Their characteristics are summarized in Table 1.

Buurthuis De Nieuwe Maan, in Eindhoven, was initiated in 2022 through a cooperation between the Eindhoven municipality, the welfare organization WijEindhoven, and the local housing association Woonbedrijf (Figure 1). It aims to be a lively and welcoming place for all in the neighborhood and act as ‘first port of call’ for residents with questions or seeking help, whether with everyday issues, loneliness, social welfare or (mental) health, or economic or work-related queries. With low barriers to entry and without judgment, they can be directly assisted or referred to the most suitable places and processes. Through signage, window displays and the prominent corner location, the space communicates to passers-by that it is open for anybody to drop in, while publicizing the regular program and upcoming events. The main space has café-style décor and seating around three large, communal tables, as well as individual armchairs. Hot drinks and sandwiches are served by volunteers from behind a wooden counter A television screen, bookshelves and seasonal decorations demonstrate an effort to make a welcoming, homely space. The neighborhood, Drents Dorp, consists predominantly of social housing and is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Eindhoven [60]. The project emerged from the closure of two prior community spaces which had produced tensions and conflict in the neighborhood, and therefore consciously positions itself as a ‘neutral’ space for all residents. The role of a professional from the welfare organization as coordinator, rather than a local resident, reflects this mediating position and the (perceived) lack of capacity and experience among residents. The intention is for residents to take over the day-to-day management over time, but this has not succeeded yet.

Buurthuis ‘t Struikske is a community-led space located in a former recreation center for disabled youths in Het Ven, Eindhoven, a neighborhood with relatively even proportions of social housing and privately owned homes [61]. The building, a free-standing pavilion set back from the street (Figure 2), was sold for a symbolic amount to the local residents’ association, who converted it to a space ‘by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood’. This is supported by a 10-year leasehold extension (‘erfpacht’) granted by Eindhoven municipality, municipal and institutional subsidies for social activities, and income generated by rental of the space to commercial parties. Fixed programming takes the form of a weekly schedule of tea and coffee hours, card games, billiards, shared meals and crafting, as well as occasional events such as flea markets and community meetings. The buurthuiskamer has a central kitchen and bar, surrounded by a flexible open space accommodating multiple activities. The usual arrangement combines circular coffee tables with movable chairs, a billiards table to one side, and repurposed desks pushed together to form a shared dining table. The institutional quality of the gray linoleum floor and grid of ceiling panels has been softened by the use of bunting, donated domestic furniture, and regular displays of fresh flowers or participants’ arts and crafts. Opening times are hosted by volunteers from the neighborhood, who serve the hot drinks and take responsibility for welcoming visitors and maintaining a convivial atmosphere. The buurthuiskamer is managed by a board of volunteers who aim to facilitate the activities and events initiated by residents, and who value their independence from the municipality and institutions.

Huis van de Toekomst (‘House of the Future’) is an experimental community space in the ground floor of a 1920s social housing block awaiting renovation in Tussendijken, Rotterdam, an ethnically and culturally diverse working-class neighborhood where the vast majority of the population have a non-Dutch background [62]. The project was initiated by artist-researchers aiming to explore social aspects of the energy transition currently being implemented by the municipality and how it relates to the everyday life, diverse cultural backgrounds, and future visions of local residents. One aspect of this project is a shared living room, in a vacant former corner store (Figure 3), which hosts meetings, workshops, and everyday practices such as collective cooking, baking and eating. Through this, they try to build connections between local residents and artists, designers, and students from beyond the neighborhood, questioning what the energy transition might mean in this context and how communities might actively reimagine their own collective energy practices. The space was previously vacant and in a state of disrepair; the initiative has dealt with this by stripping out old fittings and reducing it to a minimalist project space. Over time, the artifacts and prototypes developed in the project have come to furnish, decorate and ‘soften’ the space. This both communicates the content of the project and facilitates the alternative everyday practices they seek to cultivate. For example, the central table has an attached blanket to share warmth during winter; the meeting space can be screened off with insulating curtains made on site; and the drawings, flyers and photos from past events and activities decorate the walls.

Het Bollenpandje, in the adjacent and similarly diverse neighborhood of Bospolder [63], is a self-organized community space located in a former corner store which was deemed commercially unusable due to persistent leaks and water damage (Figure 4). Starting out as a greenhouse for incubating flowers for free distribution, it has grown into a vibrant community with daily social activity and various projects around food, crafting, memory, and sustainability. Plants and seedlings still line one side of the space, which is otherwise dominated by a large central table used for everything from casual conversations to knitting, bread baking, and collective assemblies. The large windows along both edges of the triangular space means these activities are always ‘on display’ to passing pedestrians, demonstrating their practices and inviting others in. Their presence extends to the triangular plaza in front of the building, where participants have initiated a small community garden. Het Bollenpandje is funded through ongoing subsidies and grants, including a rental subsidy provided by the municipality as a reward for social impact, and participants are encouraged to take ownership of the space (according to one facilitator, around fifty people currently have a key to the front door), initiate their own ideas for projects and activities, and contribute to governance and decision-making in weekly open assemblies.

These spaces differ in their governance structures and degree of self-management (see Table 1): De Nieuwe Maan is still largely managed by the welfare organization at the time of writing; ‘t Struikske by a board of local residents on voluntary basis; Huis van de Toekomst by a core group of actors and initiators from within and outside of the neighborhood; and Het Bollenpandje by two of the initiators, both residents and artists, although they have tried to implement a weekly ‘open assembly’ to incorporate more participants into decision-making processes and distribute responsibilities more. Related to this is the varying degree to which visitors are invited to fully take part and make use of the space, and the distinction between ‘volunteers’, ‘regulars’ and ‘visitors’: at De Nieuwe Maan, only volunteer hosts are permitted beyond the kitchen counter, while at Het Bollenpandje, even first-time visitors are encouraged, even expected, to take part and contribute somehow. All four cases are located in neighborhoods dominated by social housing and with social index scores below the city average; Bospolder-Tussendijken is currently the subject of a ten-year program to leverage the energy transition to raise social welfare levels to at least the Rotterdam average [64]. The enduring importance of housing associations in the social life of the neighborhoods, even after decades of austerity measures and reductions in their social mandate, is reflected in the fact that all except ‘t Struikske are located in buildings belonging to the local housing association. The involvement of the municipality ranges from up-front structural support in the form of legal responsibility and leasehold provision, to ongoing rental subsidy based on social value, to one-off subsidies and symbolic support.

5. Practices of Resilience and Agency

Community practices in these buurthuiskamers illustrate how the notions of resilience and agency discussed above are operationalized in everyday life. The ways this manifests can be read across the spectrum of resilience: at one extreme they are concerned with collective practices of ‘survival’ to cope with environmental challenges such as (energy) poverty, societal challenges related to post-austerity urban governance, and crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond mere survival, they address forms of communal ‘thriving’, attempting to make everyday life more convivial and pleasurable, increase social contact, and stimulate residents’ agency and capacity to propose new initiatives and effect positive change in their neighborhoods. This addition of pleasure and quality to survival is what Gibson-Graham et al. [17] refer to as ‘surviving well’. Finally, this enhanced agency illustrates ‘transformational’ resilience by allowing participants to imagine and put into action other ways of living in the future. By transforming their own individual and collective lives, behaviors and spaces, participants are able to connect their everyday lives to wider issues, taking an active role in shaping the futures they want.

5.1. Surviving

The first level of resilience concerns the ability ‘to withstand external shocks and stresses without significant upheaval’ [21], and this is what we refer to here as practices of ‘survival’. In their neighborhood contexts, buurthuiskamers serve as a low-threshold way for residents to access advice, practical support, and social contact. At De Nieuwe Maan, this often entails residents being able to discuss what they are struggling with and having either a volunteer or social worker advise them on where and how to access professional or institutional support. But outside of this ‘formal’ assistance, they are also likely to enter into conversation with a neighbor with similar experiences, who can offer practical support, or will simply listen—something which is not necessarily accessible in everyday life elsewhere. These exchanges not only support the residents in their particular needs, but create a culture of mutual support that can be carried on to addressing future challenges. As Strange et al. [45] note, ‘knowing what’s going on’ and feeling that ‘help is nearby if you need it’ are central elements of the connectedness cultivated in social spaces. One interview participant echoes this when she states that the buurthuiskamer allows her to know ‘what’s happening in the neighborhood’ and that this cultivates a sense of ownership and ‘the feeling that you can exercise control over your own community’. Other ways in which buurthuiskamers help participants navigate everyday struggles include serving as a location for donations of surplus food or household items, observed at De Nieuwe Maan and ‘t Struikske; cultivating networks of support for emergencies such as having to be taken to hospital; and sharing space in response to energy poverty. For example, during the recent energy price crisis, Het Bollenpandje was one of several buurthuiskamers across the city which received a municipal subsidy to provide a heated communal space for residents who could not afford to heat their homes. The material ways in which buurthuiskamers contribute to everyday ‘survival’ in the post-welfare austerity city are therefore interwoven with intangibles such as greater social contact and the subsequent development of social networks and capital. The value of such networks during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic has been written about extensively [34,65], but it is in these mundane moments where resilience is built, in order to be leveraged in crisis moments.

5.2. Thriving

Beyond addressing the pressing needs of everyday life, the initiators and participants actively work to make their collective lives and activities more social and pleasurable, often captured by the Dutch word ‘gezelligheid’ (conviviality, social enjoyment). This means the core activities in these spaces predominantly revolve around shared meals, tea and coffee, crafting, games, and conversation. It also involves, to varying degrees, creating and sustaining the feeling of ‘home’ and of belonging through the physical alteration, decoration and maintenance of the space: donating a tablecloth or sewing new curtains is not an act of charity, but a way to exercise agency over a shared space by improving it for oneself and others. This work addresses what people desire, not only what they need. A resilient community in this sense is not only one which can endure and adapt to hardship, but can at the same time find ways to enjoy life together, and their everyday experiences help them develop the networks, sharing practices and collective ethic which can be leveraged in times of need and crisis. Agency is prioritized in the organization of this social life, with initiators emphasizing the importance of not only ‘providing’ activities and programming, but encouraging and facilitating other participants to put their own ideas into practice. At Buurthuis ‘t Struikske, the initiators make a point of not directly acting on residents’ ideas or suggestions, but rather stimulating them to organize it themselves, and facilitating this process: instead of telling someone what to do or how, ‘you’re going to sort that out yourselves, together (…) we’re not going to do it for you.’ This is described as something that ‘takes time and practice,’ since people are more accustomed to ‘sitting and waiting’ as passive consumers or recipients of care and welfare.

A similar approach is described by a facilitator at De Nieuwe Maan, who sees the space as a platform to stimulate participants’ own initiative rather than ‘serving’ them social activities: ‘You can offer all sorts of activities and events, but we turn it around: we go to the resident, and ask, what is your talent?’ Through these conversations, they attempt to encourage participants to connect with their own ambitions and desires (‘what are the things you liked doing as a child...what were your dreams?’) and to translate these into small-scale actions in the buurthuiskamer, and subsequently into critical reflections on their lives and renewed visions for the future: ‘if you were to wake up tomorrow and the whole world was as you wanted it, what would it be?’. This facilitator makes explicit that this approach contrasts with institutional forms of assistance which are oriented towards coping with crisis, instead trying to provoke imagination and creativity in people who ‘for years have just been surviving’. Engaging with participants’ agency through their own abilities and ambitions is therefore an approach to resilience which connects simultaneously to alleviating everyday struggles, pursuing enjoyment and pleasure, and transforming one’s future.

However, the structure of the buurthuiskamer can both facilitate or inhibit this agency: at De Nieuwe Maan, a clear distinction is made between ‘users’ of the space, the facilitator (an institutional employee) and hosts (volunteers from the neighborhood). This arguably restricts other participants’ freedom to take ownership of the space and processes beyond the structures given by the facilitator, which may restrict the degree to which their agency is developed. The fact that local residents have not been in a position to take over the management from the welfare organization suggests that this might be a limitation. At Het Bollenpandje, where this explicit hierarchy does not exist, a participant who wished to start a regular board game day was given the responsibility for opening and hosting the space on a weekly basis—with mixed results, as she struggled to do this with consistency. Distributing responsibility and agency both develops and relies on the capacity of participants—a delicate balance that different buurthuiskamers approach in different ways. Internal inequalities also sometimes affect decision-making processes and the exercise of agency. This is illustrated by a short fieldnote from a meeting where one member objected to the idea of using community activities as a source of income:

[Initiator] thanked [younger participant] for raising these issues and said how positive he finds it that she feels safe and able to do so; for him it is valuable that the tensions and conflicts under the surface are brought up and used productively. However, he did not engage further with the substance of what she had said. It was suggested that a smaller working group take this further (…) [younger participant] clearly wanted to continue discussing the issue, but at this point [paid coordinator] interrupted to ask for our attention for the newspaper launch…

…Later, [younger participant] would tell me that these conflict moments often ended on ‘a sort of unspoken “agree to disagree”’ in the interest of time.

5.3. Transforming

As social spaces largely initiated and run by local residents themselves, buurthuiskamers deviate from institutional spaces such as libraries or community centers, from commercial space, and from individuals’ private homes. In the absence of familiar structures or authority, participants have more freedom (and responsibility) to consciously choose how to act: how to relate to other participants, how to program and care for the space, how to make decisions and solve conflicts together, and how actively to participate. As one of the initiators of Het Bollenpandje explains,

‘it’s kind of a chaotic space, but precisely that gives it the power, from out of chaos, to make things happen, things that couldn’t happen anywhere else. There’s a sort of feeling of freedom, that everyone who comes here, I think, is looking for…the feeling that you are welcomed, and you have the space—spiritually but also the physical space—to do the things you’d really like to do.’

The open-ended nature of the space stimulates agency by putting participants in the position of needing to make active choices, first at the scale of small actions in everyday life, and potentially progressing to wider engagement in governance of the project and its relation to neighborhood or city-wide process. Het Bollenpandje’s ongoing engagement with the everyday issues and experiences of local residents, and their collective practices of sharing and mutual aid, have helped them develop a critical view of the municipality’s current welfare policy as well as an alternative approach. This has led to a collaboration with other initiatives across the neighborhood to challenge this policy and potentially compete for future welfare tenders, in order to distribute the funding and responsibility for social welfare to self-managed community spaces. The buurthuiskamer represents a small part of public urban life where people are able to exercise agency in their social and physical environment, and this becomes a stepping-stone towards becoming more active and empowered citizens at a wider scale. Becoming ‘resilient’ in this way therefore also means developing political subjectivities [27], which may come into conflict with the political agendas of the municipality or other institutions—for example, around social welfare or the energy transition. At the same time, these same institutions are often the ones funding or otherwise supporting buurthuiskamers and calling for more resilient communities. In this case, a community that has and exercises agency is different to a community which passively deals with change and stress, illustrating the importance of making explicit the political dimension of resilience [15].

Connecting everyday collective practice to future transformations is an explicit theme of Huis van de Toekomst, which started as an artistic action–research project around the energy transition and somewhat organically developed into a buurthuiskamer. The founders realized that in order to make conversations about energy and sustainability tangible and relatable, and to engage in these higher-level conversations with residents who are preoccupied with more immediate challenges, it was necessary to address everyday domestic life. One of the first local residents to become a core participant was a Turkish woman in late middle age, who was critical of the theoretical approach and pushed them to focus more on tangible experience: ‘you can explain something ten times, but (…) you have to feel it. Not read or write it.’ As a meeting place for conversation, shared cooking, storytelling and experimenting, Huis van de Toekomst became a way of connecting different cultures and traditions with the everyday struggles of the neighborhood and the challenges of the near future, in order to develop shared visions of alternative futures. Collective practices around cooking, eating and domestic life are framed as forms of sustainable, low-carbon and low-cost future life while also offering more social connections and continuity with traditional cultures in residents’ countries of origin—for example, collective bread-baking among Turkish women in the area is reframed as not only a practice of maintaining a tradition but also one of resource efficiency and solidarity. For one of the founders, this reframing means ‘the everyday becomes an adventure that you’re in the middle of’ as alternative futures are made tangible in the everyday, and everyday life is defamiliarized. As such, participation is seen as a way for residents to develop more agency over the future trajectory and narratives about their neighborhood, as well as their everyday challenges with energy poverty and community-building. Coping with existing challenges, adapting to ongoing changes and gaining a voice in future developments are approached as intertwined processes of advancing agency and capacity in participants.

6. Discussion

By cultivating individual and community agency, the everyday practices described above help participants navigate daily life challenges such as isolation, poverty, care deficits, and diminished state services. Furthermore, these spaces not only try to compensate for these challenges and help people ‘survive’, but actively try to make everyday community life more pleasurable, convivial and socially rewarding. They thus represent collective efforts to ‘thrive’, or ‘survive well’ [17], by finding more sociable, connected forms of everyday life in the city. Implicit in this is the transformative aspect of resilience, as participants collectively challenge the status quo through their small-scale ways of doing things differently. By trying to create and sustain alternatives to what the city offers them, these groups create microcosms of alternative urban realities, which embody the values and priorities they would prefer to structure their lives by. The capacities of resilience which they develop through their activities are therefore not only useful in navigating crisis or challenges but allow participants to reimagine and influence their own futures, illustrating the transformative dimension of community resilience [5,29]. However, buurthuiskamers also illustrate the tensions and challenges facing communities and grassroots initiatives in the neoliberal city.

6.1. The Precarity of Resilience

While the practices and places we analyzed have wide social value by cultivating community resilience at the scale of the neighborhood and the city, this value is generally not reflected in political and institutional support. Instead, buurthuiskamers face structural precarity and ongoing threats to their survival, including unreliable funding, temporary access to space, and the risk of burnout among key actors. Given this, it is unavoidable to ask how ‘resilient’ this resilience really is. Indeed, we observe that the initiation, direction and sustaining of buurthuiskamers appears to be heavily reliant on a small core of key individual actors. These are people who have the drive, knowledge, energy, and social networks to access space, take the initiative of building something up, and sustain it over time. This involves the continual work of acquiring and managing funding, and managing relationships and expectations of external partners. It also includes the affective work of caring and maintaining relationships among community members, while producing and sustaining a sense of home in a precarious (semi-)public space; work which is often gendered and remains invisible by dominant reporting and governance processes. This reliance on individuals puts them at risk of burnout and introduces immense risk to the ongoing functioning of spaces, and by extension the social resilience they cultivate, in the form of single points of failure, while arguably serving neoliberal aims as volunteers compensate for the withdrawal of state services [66,67]. The transformative impact of the space is also limited if this level of agency and capacity does not spread to other participants. Better understanding the motivations of such actors could support the further creation and sustainable management of similar spaces.

The precarity of these spaces further risks undermining their potential to reimagine, experiment and prefigure radical alternatives to the status quo. Facilitators of such practices face the dilemma of needing to satisfy existing criteria and maintain good relations with institutional partners or sponsors, while pursuing an agenda which may be at odds with that of the municipality or institutions: they are pressured to ‘play the game’ to ensure their continued survival and their continued ability to try to ‘change the rules of the game’ [68]. Citizens and groups who gain greater agency are likelier to challenge local authorities’ intentions for their neighborhood, and to speak out and act on these intentions. This conflict can in turn threaten the support which sustains the spaces where this agency is cultivated in the first place. Navigating this tension becomes an energy-intensive, and potentially conflictual, process of negotiating degrees of collaboration and compromise internally, and can determine which practices or experiments are attempted or not. Some actors pragmatically seek to prioritize protecting or expanding funding and material support, while others prioritize the values they associate with the initiative, potentially risking support or forgoing funding opportunities altogether. Their agency—the range of actions available to them—is partial, shaped and constrained by the structures within which they operate. At the same time, these are the structures they attempt to influence and reshape through their exercise of agency [35]. This internal deliberation and decision-making in turn arguably requires a relatively high degree of existing cohesion and capacity, further privileging the agency and perspectives of those with higher social capital, and can pose challenges for groups still trying to build up those capacities. This raises questions about how inclusive full participation in such spaces can be, especially in the marginalized neighborhoods where the need for these spaces and their benefits are most urgent. The way such dilemmas are ultimately decided risks enforcing existing inequalities within the group as more educated or powerful voices tend to carry more weight.

6.2. A Neutral Infrastructure or a Home in the City?

We also observe a tension between ideas of identity and neutrality. Certain buurthuiskamers, notably De Nieuwe Maan, have an explicit orientation of being ‘neutral’ spaces, welcoming to all residents and free of prior associations. The role of the welfare organization WijEindhoven as a mediating third party contributes to this. In other cases, for example, Het Bollenpandje, the organizers accept that they cannot serve everyone in the neighborhood, and see themselves as part of a network of similar but differentiated spaces where any resident can find an appropriate or resonant ‘fit’. For them, it is important and valuable that different buurthuiskamers have their own particular identity, which participants identify with and contribute to, and which consequently gives them a sense of belonging and ownership. The sense of cultivating a space of belonging and home, differentiated from the rest of the city and from public institutions, is reflected in the way space is personalized maintained through collective decoration, alteration and care—a contrast with the universality of public institutions and the formal, anonymous way they are decorated, maintained and managed. The solidarity, meanings and collective identity produced by shared struggle and co-creation therefore exist in opposition to the equality and universality of social infrastructures provided and maintained by the state. Buurthuiskamers’ position between being a public institution and a grassroots initiative is a key difference from other forms of social infrastructure, and this tension has historic parallels in their origins within self-organized but segregated societal ‘pillars’, and their later institutionalization as standardized facilities open to all. It is their in-betweenness which necessitates the exercise of agency, supporting communities in their survival while encouraging participants to shape the space, and their everyday lives, towards collective thriving. As community spaces between the scale of the home and that of the city, buurthuiskamers might be conceived either as a form of infrastructure brought down to the scale of everyday life, or as a practice of extending home and the practice of home-making into the urban realm [46].

6.3. Mediating Between State and Community

The unresolved tension between bottom-up autonomy and top-down social infrastructure reflects the ambivalence and conflicts found in resilience discourse and scholarship more broadly [12,14,15,22]. That is, the tension between, on the one hand, increasing community agency and cultivating personal and community resilience by giving participants more ownership and responsibility, and on the other hand, falling into the neoliberal trap of ‘responsibilization’ and justifying state withdrawal and inaction. While local governments can enable citizen agency by giving community spaces autonomy over their governance and decision-making, this should not translate into increased disengagement and disinvestment in local state services, potentially exacerbating the conditions which require ‘resilient’ responses [9,66,67].

Different groups take different perspectives towards local authorities, and the tension between support and empowerment, according to their political aims and values as well as local structural conditions. This can range from holding the municipality accountable for the services they ‘should’ provide, to seeing the municipality as a facilitating but ‘hands-off’ partner, to actively avoiding engagement with them where possible and only making use of their subsidy opportunities if the group’s autonomy is fully guaranteed. It should be stressed that groups developing their position along this spectrum is itself an important process of asserting agency, and this cannot be imposed from outside. In a world where urban governance is increasingly understood to be complex, incomplete and discontinuous across multiple scales [69], buurthuiskamers can be said to occupy an ambiguous position in between communities, municipalities and institutions. They can act as a legitimizing force for residents, grassroots associations and community groups to coalesce and ‘speak for’ their neighborhood, and as a concrete place where municipalities in turn can address these neighborhoods and groups. At the same time, the buurthuiskamer remains an independent entity from both. Maintaining this independence is important in giving the space a mediating role, beyond being a neutral conduit of communication: a mediator, instead, can influence the way power and information moves between parties [70]. This in-between position itself produces a tension, as buurthuiskamers and those who run them need to remain mindful of not becoming overly antagonistic towards the state, lest they lose this position, nor too closely allied with authority, as they risk losing their legitimacy among their community—again illustrating the dynamic interplay of agency with structure [35]. Given that the people managing the spaces are generally also members of the community, there is a further tension between their personal identity or views and the decisions they make as responsible parties for the buurthuiskamer. This entanglement, of course, puts further strain on these individuals’ ability to persist with this work.

7. Conclusions

Through their practices of surviving in the neoliberal city, thriving through social conviviality and collective action, and developing the agency to reimagine and transform urban futures, buurthuiskamers represent tangible examples of community resilience in its full spectrum of meanings. Although this study is limited to the Dutch context, they add to our understanding of social infrastructures for community resilience more broadly, specifically as a form of community-led space existing between the scale of the home and the institution. The post-welfare-state, neoliberal urban context in which they have emerged, and the challenges they face in relation to this, are not unique to the Netherlands, and nor are their expressions of basic community needs around collective survival, well-being, and the development of agency in an alienating world. These are spaces which help communities develop solidarity and cohesion to better deal with the challenges of everyday life in a post-welfare-state, post-austerity city, and to develop the networks and capacities to adapt to future shocks or changes. Through the collectivity and sociality of their practices, they add a degree of richness and pleasure to everyday urban life, and help participants to develop the confidence, agency, and shared ideas to actively imagine different futures, and begin to take action towards achieving them.

At the same time, these spaces make visible the tensions and contradictions that exist in academic discourse around resilience, and the ambivalent position of local authorities reflects critiques of resilience as a tool of neoliberalism. Users and initiators of buurthuiskamers fight for sufficient state or institutional support and facilitation, while valuing the self-sufficiency and solidarity they develop in its absence—and avoiding the disempowering dependence on paternalistic welfare provision and bureaucracy. They seek to further community agency and autonomy, without stepping into the neoliberal trap of justifying state withdrawal or abandonment and being left to their own devices as ‘resilient’ and self-reliant subjects [9]. Community practices are seen to cultivate agency and social capital, but are also disproportionately reliant on key actors who already possess it. Finally, these practices emerge in provisional and marginal spaces where they are both possible and needed, yet the challenges and precarity of these conditions risk undermining their continuation and therefore the resilience they build and maintain. The value of developing solutions and alternatives is celebrated and appreciated, held in tension with the recognition that this ought not to be necessary; or at least, that it ought not to be as difficult as it is. The critical engagement with this question, and the ability to persist and evolve within the ambivalence it creates, is perhaps itself evidence of an increased level of agency and capacity, and a reflection of the complex, open-ended and processual nature of resilience as practiced in everyday community life.