D - Entwurf EUW: Under the Open Sky. Student Housing in Amsterdaml [E]

Student housing has become a new frontier in the financialization of housing. Across many university cities in Europe, new forms of student accommodation are emerging in response to growing demand. Yet while student housing was once associated with the welfare state and public intervention, private developers have increasingly tapped into the sector, revealing it as a highly lucrative real-estate investment. For many students, however, these new housing complexes do little to resolve their housing problems. They are often expensive, rigidly organized, governed by extensive rules, segregative from within and far from university campuses. The Netherlands is no exception. Over the past decades, Dutch universities have become increasingly attractive to students from across Europe and beyond. Generally highly ranked, well equipped, with relatively affordable tuition fees, and offering a growing number of programmes in English, they have become a favourite destination for an international student population. Yet if admission to a Dutch university was once the primary challenge, today being admitted is often easier than finding adequate accommodation. It can take months to find even a floor where to sleep. In the meantime, students are pushed into precarious arrangements that can involve sudden evictions, problematic relationships with landlords, and informal agreements rather than secure contracts. These conditions extend far beyond the question of housing: they directly affect students’ ability to study, participate in university life, and establish a stable everyday life. The studio approaches this condition as both a housing and an architectural question. On the one hand, it will explore the possibility of a large-scale, self-administered student housing block, in which students can access affordable rents in exchange for participating in the management of their building and performing small services for the community. Rather than treating students as passive tenants, the project asks how housing might become a collective institution in which forms of cooperation, responsibility, and self-governance are embedded within the architecture itself. On the other hand, the studio will confront these questions within the Dutch city where the pressures on student housing are particularly acute: Amsterdam. Students will develop a student housing intervention on a large vacant site in the proximity of the University of Amsterdam’s Roeterseiland Campus. The project will establish a critical and thoughtful confrontation with the seriality, repetition, and infrastructural character of the large blocks and storage facilities that traditionally define this part of the city. The studio therefore asks how an alternative model of student housing might operate simultaneously as a building, a collective institution, and a piece of the city. How can architecture challenge the increasingly commodified model of student accommodation? And what spatial, organizational, and architectural forms might emerge when affordability is exchanged not simply for less space, but for participation, responsibility, and self-administration? First Meeting: 14 OCT 2026, 13:00, FG EUW