The economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic have been devastating for many companies around the world. For squatters, this can create an opportunity.
As corporations break and close their stores, they leave an excess of advertising buildings and warehouses empty. This gave a concept to the Amsterdam Internet developer and leftist Sjerp van Wouden.
“I was drinking with a friend, and I said what would happen if I took all the knowledge about bankruptcy and crossed it with the knowledge of the Chamber of Commerce. Would we have a map of all the busy places?” said van Wouden. His friend was skeptical, but Van Wouden still had to try.
[Screenshot: kraakapp.nl] After spending a few hundred hours coding over the next 3 months, van Wouden posted an online map of potentially empty buildings in the Netherlands. Pins on the map indicate where the houses are and shading indicates how long they are empty.
Technically, it is a publicly available data set, but van Wouden does not hesitate to know his true intention, which he hopes “demystifies the discovery of squats”. Site visitors will see their philosophy explained in the tab of their browser: system. That he’s Dutch just because of what you think.
The squatter has a long history in the Netherlands: in the early 1970s there were about 20,000 squatters in Amsterdam alone, however, it was officially banned in 2010. Van Wouden says the motion has been disappearing for decades. But with the existing economic downturn and emerging rents in the Netherlands, van Wouden says more people might be interested in looking plump.
“The knowledge of the Chamber of Commerce is at the heart of squatter research,” van Wouden says. This is because it shows how many companies are located in each of the assets and how many of them have gone bankrupted. The most bankrupt places can be better places to fill positions. But few other people know how to locate this information. Even fewer know what it means to squat an empty construction. Van Wouden says the city’s former leftists and squatters do not welcome newcomers with open arms. Remember to squat in a construction and be greeted at the door with arrogance. “It’s like, “Who are you, mere mortal, coming before us? “he said.
“Even though I like the culture of choice and radical left-wing politics, it can be a battlefield,” van Wouden says. “This map is meant to make the cultural task simple and available for other interested people to say that we simply crouch somewhere instead of having to move to a low-light construction where other people are dressed in leather and pay attention to punk music. great, I love doing it myself, but it’s not the horniest thing.”
The map is still a chart in progress and has already gained helpful feedback from other developers on the map’s GitHub page. Future features will come with main points on asset length and environmental regulations. Although he has only been in a lifestyle for a few days, he plans to run a painting shop on assignment at the Amsterdam Anarchist Book Festival in November. Given similar sources of knowledge, the map can also be adapted to other countries.
But despite all the efforts he’s put on the map and the innovations he plans to make, van Wouden won’t use it to squat. “That’s the strange part. I own it,” he says. “I have a mortgage.”
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