Public sector Housing in Amsterdam 1900-91

Every foreign visitor to Amsterdam notices its mixture of small-town cosiness and international character, but may not stop to consider the reason for it: unlike most city centers, which are full of offices and expensive privately owned houses, Amsterdam has kept and renewed public-sector housing in apparently unaffordable locations. Since early this century, Amsterdam's planners have aimed to sweep away the slums where the workers used to live. The painter J Sierhuis recalls his grandmother, who brought up eight or nine children in two rooms, several of them succumbing to TB before they reached adulthood.

Different schools of architects had different ideas for public housing, some of them magnificently futuristic, but the devastation of the Second World War meant that quantity, not quality, was what the people demanded - sometimes with violence. Since the 1980s nineteenth-century neighborhoods have been restored or demolished and rebuilt while the inhabitants are temporarily rehoused. More than half the dwellings in the city are now in the public sector.