URBAN DESIGN International (2008) 13, 6166

r 2008 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. 1357-5317/08

www.palgrave-journals.co.uk/udi

The upgrading of the sidewalk: from traditional

working-class colonisation to the squatting practices
of urban middle-class families
Lia Karsten*
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht,
130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Many lower class urban neighbourhoods have long been characterised by an abundant street life where
neighbouring mothers had coffee in front of their homes and a great number of children played in the street.
An early 20th-century civilisation offensive changed the housing culture of the working classes so that
residents drew a sharp line between public and private spaces. Decent families were expected to live their
lives indoors according to middle-class standards. City streets also changed and became spaces for car
parking and motorised traffic. Families who could afford to left the city for suburbia. Those who stayed
learned to see the public domain as a dangerous place that was better avoided. This paper, based on research
conducted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, argues that groups of middle-class families (called yupps: young
urban professional parents) are challenging existing patterns in the city. First, by their staying in the city,
and second, by their use of the sidewalk as a family place. In so doing, they transform the sidewalk from a
formerly lower class to a proper middle-class space. Colonising the sidewalk has become part of a new
middle-class lifestyle.
URBAN DESIGN International (2008) 13, 6166. doi:10.1057/udi.2008.14
Keywords: public space; middle-class families; urban lifestyle; colonising behaviour; sidewalk

Introduction
Working-class urban neighbourhoods have long
been characterised by their abundant street life,
something we call liveability today. Working-class
residents used to hang out of their windows to
chat, neighbours would socialise on their doorsteps, children played everywhere, and all kinds
of work were done outdoors (Figure 1). In this
short contribution I argue that, over the last
century, these practices of colonising the street
by urban working-class residents have become
less visible, while similar practices by urban
middle-class families have become more widespread. Empirical examples are drawn from the
Dutch case. This paper is based on different
studies fully reported elsewhere. These studies
consisted of interviews with two different gen*Correspondence: Tel: 31(0)20 525 4086, Fax: 31(0)20 525
4051, E-mail: c.j.m.karsten@uva.nl

udi udi200814

erations: parents and children living in the 1950s

and parents and children living today in centrally
located neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and
Rotterdam. In addition, we archived research
about public life in urban streets in the second
part of the last century and added to this
systematic observations of outdoor life today in
different neighbourhoods within the ring of both
cities (see Bouw and Karsten, 2004; Karsten, 2005,
2007; Karsten et al., 2006).

The shrinking of urban working-class

street life
The civilisation offensive at the end of the 19th
century was a first step in the direction of a
reduction of outdoor urban life in working-class
neighbourhoods. One of the aims of the Dutch
civilisation offensive was to discipline the housing culture of the working class. Residents were

Upgrading of the sidewalk

L. Karsten
62

Figure 2. Housing block Amsterdam School architecture (1923).

Figure 1. Amsterdam: Street life in the 1950s.

became less visible outdoors (Van Meyel et al.,

1982).

taught to draw a sharp line between public and

private space and although not all families were
easily persuaded, daily practices gradually
started to change. Several studies document the
retreat from the street by families, women, and
children (Van Meyel et al., 1982). According to
middle-class standards, respectable families were
expected to live their lives indoors and in private.
Traditional ways of colonising the street for
private purposes and for socialising outdoors
with the neighbours had to disappear. Housing
associations were one kind of institution charged
with the emancipation of the working class
towards middle-class standards. The housing
associations did so under their mandate to build
modern housing blocks and introduce new
housing regulations. Newly built houses had to
accommodate private family life under more
hygienic conditions and with a functional layout.
According to the Housing Act (1902) separate
functions were allotted separate spaces. Food had
to be prepared in small, but functional kitchens;
socialising was directed to private family living
rooms. Windows were compartmentalised into
small parts, which prevented the residents from
leaning out of them (Figure 2). Storing personal
goods in communal stairways, drying clothes in
front of the apartment block, obstructing the
entrance by hanging around the front door and
so forth became forbidden (Regt, 1984; Deben,
1988). Working-class families were driven back
into their homes and as a matter, of course,

The Dutch civilisation offensive was neither an

official set of policies nor was it unique. Industrialisation led to the explosion of city populations, unhealthy working conditions, and bad
housing in European cities around 1900. Improving physical conditions went along with propagating gendered philosophies on family life
informed by middle-class practices (Davidoff
et al., 1976). A strict gender division of work
was proclaimed and women were charged with
bringing up children. That was not an easy task.
Medical professionals, enlightened politicians,
and industrialists expressed their concern about
the negative circumstances in which children
grew up, particularly in the large cities. Childhood was seen as a vulnerable period and
children needed to be protected from the rough
urban practices of that time. Children were
thought to belong to a separate age category with
their own needs, which resulted in manifestos not
only about the prohibition of child labour, the
plight of childrens education, and childrens
right to play, but also in domains meant exclusively for children. Children had to be removed
from the public domain. But where were children
supposed to play? Streets were not the right place:
too crowded, dangerous, and unhealthy. New
urban spaces, specifically for children and their
playing needs, had to be built. The concept of
Dutch play gardens, which are in fact big
playgrounds, was born. The first opened in
Amsterdam in 1880 and is still open to the public

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today. Play gardens were supervised, fenced, and

an entrance fee was charged for membership.
These were also the places where children were
taught how to play in a proper way (Gagen,
2000). The aim of keeping children off the public
domain of the street has always been contested.
However, the ideal of the domesticated child and
the negative association of the epithet streetchild
did their work. Gradually, children were directed
out of the public domain and into their own childspecific (and later also commercialised) places
(McKendrick et al., 2000; Karsten, 2002).
The relative invisibility of family life in the city
grew further in the age of suburbanisation.
This started around 1960, relatively later in the
Netherlands than in other Western countries.
Somehow the out-migration of families can be
seen as one of the last steps in the civilisation
process with its strong gendered ideology of
family life. Family life and the upbringing of
children were considered to flourish in private
homes far away from the public city (Saegert,
1980). Discourses on good family life drove
families to settle in the suburbs where living
conditions were depicted as more sane for the
upbringing of children. The suburbs became the
child rearing factories of the city (Ward, 1977,
p. 66). Suburbanisation was seen as a form of
social mobility, but it also resulted in the isolation
of women and children from urban public life
(Miller, 1983). In the cities themselves the population changed character. The minority of families
who remained in the city were confronted with
broken social networks and new neighbours:
yuppies and immigrant families. The former
homogeneity disappeared and different motherlanguages made communication difficult. Social
life on the street lost its basis and did not get a
fresh start, as an elderly lady (78, Indische Buurt,
Amsterdam), who remained living in her street,
told us. She regrets that contact is rare with both
the new immigrant families and the new young
and childless neighbours: Im the only one who
sits in my chair on the street when the sun shines.
I take my knitting with me and I look after the
children here a little. You dont see their parents
on the street. That used to be different. We were
often a group of mothers, talking, drinking coffee,
and talking about the children and other things.
That doesnt happen any more.
The negative discourse on urban safety can be
added as a third important factor in the decline of

outdoor urban life. Children growing up in cities

have been particularly affected. Parents became
aware of all kinds of risk and possible danger to
their children in outdoor urban play areas and
public space in general (Hillman et al., 1990;
Valentine, 1997; Bouw and Karsten, 2004). Playing
outdoors became less a matter of course, and
childrens freedom of movement was considerably reduced. Karsten (2005) compared children
growing up in Amsterdam in the 1950s and 2003.
The results demonstrate a change from a traditional outdoor childhood to two new forms of
childhood: indoor children and backseat children.
Outdoor children can still be found even in large
cities like Amsterdam, but compared with the
past they form only a small minority. Indoor
children form a new and growing category. They
spend a great deal of their out-of-school time at
home and many of them are actually forbidden by
their parents to go outside on their own. Backseat
children are the more prosperous children who
spend their leisure time at different locations to
which they are for safety reasons escorted on
their way through public space (Figure 3).

The trends described above lead to the inference

of a serious shrinking of families and childrens
outdoor life in cities. First, these people were
driven back into their homes; second, they
became a minority among urban households;
and third, those who stayed learned to see public
space as a dangerous place that was better
avoided. Families and children were excluded
from urban public space and in fact were defined
as out-of-place.

Figure 3. Car bike (Linnaeushof, Amsterdam).

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The emergence of middle-class

sidewalk life

Yupps have discovered the sidewalk as a family

place on which to reside just as working-class
families did before them. This is a new phenomenon in the Netherlands, where these practices

were simply frowned upon by middle-class

people, as the following quote illustrates: In the
1980s when our children were only small, sometimes, when the weather was nice, we liked to sit
on the sidewalk to let our children play there. Just
a few chairs outside and some of the childrens
toys, nothing permanent. But not all our neighbours were very pleased with our sitting outdoors; they started to complain and told us that in
our street this kind of behaviour was not appropriate (Woman, 52, South Amsterdam). This
mother tried to change practices in a middle-class
environment, but as she herself now admits, she
was too early. At the end of the 1990s things
started to change, mainly because the number of
young families with children in old urban middleclass neighbourhoods was increasing again.
Families collectively started to reshape their
streets from quiet, decent, but somehow dull
streets into liveable outdoor spaces. They did so
by putting in place the equipment needed:
benches, pots of flowers, little steps, sandboxes,
and even tents. A young mother living on a
typical middle-class avenue in Rotterdam told us
about her own surprise: If you had told me that
to-day I would have a bench in front of our home,
I wouldnt have believed you. But, yes, I have one,
bought from the Praxis. All the neighbours have
such a bench and its very useful with the
children. Socially too, we meet each other near
our front doors and socialise a bit. I like to sit
outside at the front and we have lots of sun there
too. Sidewalks are being transformed into places
to play and to socialise. Sometimes, squatting
comes to mind (Figure 6).

Figure 4. Children on the sidewalk (Bergselaan,

Rotterdam).

Figure 5. Socialising on the sidewalk (Copernicusstraat,

Amsterdam).

Somehow, the massive out-migration of families

created a counter movement. A group of middleclass families distanced themselves from the
natural route towards the suburbs (Brun and
Fagnani, 1994; Butler, 2003). They are the dualearner families, dependent on the urban labour
market, who could easily afford to buy a house in
the suburbs, but who did not want to waste their
scarce time on commuting. They try to combine
caring tasks and careers. In the Netherlands they
are labelled as yupps: young urban professional
parents (Karsten, 2003). They prefer to educate
their children in a challenging multicultural
environment rather than in what they refer to as
the isolated suburb. They define themselves as
the real urbanites but, interestingly, they act like
(urban) villagers, living with blurred lines separating the private and public domains. These new
urban families do what the working class did
before them: collectively colonising the sidewalk
for private purposes, reflecting necessity (where
else can their children play?) and choice (preference for a new middle-class lifestyle) at the
same time. They create little villages, sometimes
only one block, in much larger anonymous cities
(Figures 4 and 5).

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65

belong to the new circle of sturdy urban families

(Karsten, 2007).

Discussion and challenges

Figure 6. Tent
Amsterdam).

on

the

sidewalk

(Laplacestraat,

Traditional ideas about reputable middle-class

ways of behaviour have been abandoned. The
collective character of the domestication of the
sidewalk reflects shared ideas about good family
life. Parents look after each others children and
new childcare arrangements are being organised.
It is becoming clear that urban family living
cannot succeed today without the help of other
families and together they try to make the city a
little more as they would like it to be. This
endeavour goes along with the breaking of
traditional class codes: whereas occupying the
outdoors used to be typical working-class behaviour, today it has become part of a new middleclass family lifestyle.

These changing ways of behaviour have different

backgrounds. The first is the growing number of
young middle-class families in certain areas of the
city. The families who colonise the streets never
operate on their own; such colonisation involves
group behaviour and a certain number of families
are needed to control the street and create a pool
of children to play together. A second explanation
lies in the lack of indoor space and (sometimes)
the lack of a garden. Like the big working-class
families in former times, these families are also
struggling with space. Where to store the bikes,
where to create a sandbox, and where to put a
bench? When there is no room indoors, space
outdoors can be claimed. And third, most
important, this outer directed behaviour can be
considered an act of distinguishing and belonging
at the same time. These families want to stress
that they are not a dull suburban family; they

Somehow, the reclaiming of urban public space by

families can be related to a more general trend in
cities. In the whole of Europe and in some cities in
the US, there is a revival of the outdoors a search
for a sort of Mediterranean atmosphere on public
squares and cafe terraces even in countries that
(so far) do not have the climate conditions
associated with this phenomenon (Zukin, 1995;
Atkinson, 2003). The sidewalk culture described
here is, however, different in at least one
important aspect. These new outdoor cultures
are not driven by commercial purposes. This
movement is about spontaneous activities that
can be labelled as bottom-up and grass-rooted. It
is about residents trying to control their own
neighbourhood and streets. In that sense it is a
break with the dominant trend of fear in urban
public space (Sorkin, 1992; Mitchell, 1995). These
families do not any longer retreat from public
space; they do not lock themselves behind the
front door. This may be the start of a positive
process, but some questions have to be explored a
little further.
Additional research is needed to find out more
about the social construction of the boundaries
between private and public, and the related
processes of inclusion and exclusion. Are colonised sidewalks forms of strongly defined space
with an exclusive character or can they be
classified as weakly defined spaces with open
boundaries (Sibley, 1995)? A second line of
research could focus on cultural differences in
attitude towards blurring lines between private
and public. So far, our research has demonstrated
a reserved attitude towards the privatising practices of public space on residential streets among
the Turkish and Moroccan families in the
Netherlands. Some of them told me that they
would be afraid to sit outside their homes; others
said that they simply preferred to go to real
public spaces such as parks and playgrounds.
They prefer clear boundaries between private and
public space, each with its own code of behaviour.
A third question still to be answered is whether
the issue treated in this paper is unique to the
Netherlands. It would be interesting to study this
phenomenon more fully in a European context. To
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what extent is the informal and direct manner of

Dutch behaviour, with the tradition of open
curtains, common in the rest of Europe?
To foster the positive sides of the reclaiming of
urban street by families some support from urban
planners would be welcome. So far, cities and
children are often conceptualised as two mutually
exclusive concepts. Reality, however, shows that
families, including many immigrant families,
continue to live in the cities. Cities have to be
defined in a more inclusive way incorporating
children and family life. The reproductional sides
of life can no longer be ignored as part of urban
policies. Liveable cities are cities with spaces in
which to grow up, play outdoors, and socialise
with neighbouring families and friends. Much
work has still to be done to make cities more
convenient for families and sidewalks are an
important element in this endeavour. To be useful
for families, residential streets must become
urban havens with pavements broad enough to
accommodate a function as a social space in
which to socialise and play.

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