Good news for artists who rent a studio through the municipal Ateliers en Broedplaatsen Amsterdam (ABA). In November 2025, the council finally decided to abolish the so-called ‘flow-through policy’ once and for all. Platform BK, together with many partners, has been campaigning for this for years. Under that regime, all tenants would have been evicted from their studios without warning after ten years. The abolition of this eviction policy is a tremendous victory for everyone who opposes the normalisation of insecurity.

But in other Dutch cities, the threat of an eviction policy still looms. So the battle is not yet won!

We need more security, not more instability. We know how damaging temporary rental contracts can be to the development of a stable artistic practice. Moreover, artists are thus turned into instruments of the gentrification of their own living and/or working environments. Temporary arrangements make it difficult and unattractive to build relationships and trust with the people around you, both within your studio building and within the social fabric of the neighbourhood. This does not help to make the creative hub (‘broedplaats’) the open, inclusive and accessible place for artistic and social cross-pollination that we all want it to be. That is why the policy of turnover and replacement is at odds with the municipality’s efforts in Amsterdam to strengthen the ties between those studio buildings and the social fabric in which they are situated. The policy would, in fact, severely damage those ties.

The eviction policy also failed entirely to address the underlying causes of the shortage of affordable studios. There is a structural lack of spaces in our cities where people can work, relax, meet, do business, learn and live in ways that do not revolve solely around maximising profit. We know full well that there is no functional ‘free market’ that meets our needs.

Platform BK’s commitment to affordable studios and housing for artists has always been in solidarity with all individuals, initiatives, communities and organisations being pushed out of our cities by gentrification. There are many practices that do fit with how we as people want to live together, but do not fit within the neoliberal market mindset that dominates the planning of our cities. As an association for and by art workers, we can address the specific needs of our members most concretely, but always within a broader social context.

In this fight against the studio eviction policy, we have worked closely with partners such as the Kunstenbond, the CAWA Committee, Maqam, 26H, Tugela85, Vereniging 2e Nassaustraat 8 and Vereniging De VerADEming. Together, we sat on the advisory committee that advised on the design and interpretation of the survey on eviction policy among current and potential (searching) tenants, and property managers/owners. Based on that survey by DSP Group and Ipsos I&O, and partly due to years of lobbying by Platform BK and its allies, the City of Amsterdam has now decided to abolish the policy.

As far as we are concerned, the survey clearly showed that there was no reason to believe this policy would deliver on its promise to give younger and/or under-represented artists more opportunities to rent an affordable studio. And even if that were the case, it would only be for ten years. The artists who would be expected to benefit in the short term from the fact that their colleagues are being forced to ‘make space’, would later be exposed to the very same precariousness, isolation and eviction. So the eviction policy used the words but not the values of a diversity and inclusion policy, thereby stimulating a perverse competition in uncertainty.

Neither the scarcity itself nor the structural inequality in the distribution of that scarcity would have been resolved by the eviction policy. The research shows that to address this, one must focus on how you get in, not on how you get out. The process of getting in must be made more inclusive and transparent. Platform BK wholeheartedly endorses this. We are keen to contribute to research and action to achieve this. This begins with both a fair acknowledgement of the inequalities that still cause too much pain and exclusion in our sector, and with trust in and commitment to the idea that, from within the arts, we can envision and bring about the social change we want for ourselves and eachother.

Fair practice in a fair city. For everyone.