Networked intimacy:Remaking welfare in precarious Amsterdam
In the Netherlands, welfare tasks are increasingly shifted to oftentimes precarious local communities. Amsterdam’s welfare community thus pioneers an “intimate networked welfare”, fostering neighborhood-based welfare provision. I investigate how various welfare actors, constrained by limited resources, craft and navigate this landscape through personal relationships and reimagine welfare as a social infrastructure.
Like elsewhere in Europe, in the Netherlands, welfare state tasks have been devolved to the local level and unto what are imagined as active and caring communities. But how to build a welfare community in today’s precarious times? With Amsterdammers increasingly grappling with financial insecurity, a scarcity of (good) jobs, and lengthening waiting lists for services, such community-based welfare aspirations become elusive.
A pervasive sense of disillusionment with traditional welfare structures has sparked a wave of experimentation and innovation. This has made Amsterdam a prototyping city for informal and welfare provision. Policymakers, professionals, and residents pioneer intimate, neighborhood-based networks of social services, weaving together new safety nets. This emerging social infrastructure seeks to prefigure more efficient, personalised, and accessible informal welfare services – resulting in what I term an "intimate networked welfare".
In my research, I look at how professionals imagine, craft, and navigate this informal welfare network through the active fostering of personal relationships among themselves and with their clients. I explore how various actors (policymakers, professionals, volunteers, and residents) strive to animate a welfare community through feelings of neighborliness, friendship, and love – all the while being constrained by limited budgets, everyday precariousness, and the burdensome feelings this may entail. I examine the political imagination underlying these everyday welfare experiments, questioning the envisioned state-society and state-citizen relations, and elucidate the roles of diverse welfare actors in repairing and reinventing Amsterdam's welfare infrastructure.
At the heart of my exploration lies Amsterdam Zuidoost, a puzzling district characterised by its highly diverse population, job precarity, economic hardships and a prevailing sense of distrust towards state institutions. Amsterdam Zuidoost encapsulates the socio-political dilemmas of our times, making it a fertile ground for welfare experimentation.
