[Presentation[Summary[and[other(things)]]]]

So just to summarize my ideas (feedback would be more than welcome!),

My overarching question would be "In what ways does squatting make Amsterdam more habitable?" And of course habitable could mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts. My particular context is gastronomy, especially looking at it through the lens of Michel de Certeau's concept of consumption as a form of production, in the same way that reading is a form of writing (this idea comes from my reading of the essay "The Practice of Everyday Life" in the anthology The Consumption Reader).

Whereas the conventional conception of a consumer is as one who simply "consumes" what is made available by the "established order"--a role devoid of power--de Certeau's consumer practices production by consuming things in particular ways, and thereby turning things into other things. And whereas one conventional view of squatting culture is that it is "anti-consumerist," by this other concept of the consumer, squatters are actually empowered by their consumption.

That is not to confuse this kind of consumption with the act of eating, although they're related. The empowering consumption of the squatting movement is in how it consumes vacant buildings, and turns them into habitable places. What I want to look at are the ways in which practices around food (growing, buying, scavenging, cooking, dining, etc.) serve this "habitable-ization."


This is all subject to drastic change. I'm thinking now that I might need to either make gastronomy more central to my question (rather than being just one focus, or one example), or else change my topic to be more inclusive of other forms of habitable-ization.