The Vanishing Fabric — Statecraft

The neighbourhood where no one is met

In a new-build district just outside a mid-sized Dutch municipality, a retired woman walks to the recycling bin on a Tuesday morning. It is eight minutes there and eight minutes back, past eighteen front gardens that are laid out identically because that is how the zoning plan ordained it. She meets no one along the way. Not because the neighbourhood is deserted, but because the moment people leave their homes is precisely the moment they get into their cars. Front door, driveway, car, exit road. Between those points there is no crossing. She returns home with an empty feeling for which she has no word. At the GP’s office, the practice nurse notes nonspecific complaints and suggests a bit more exercise.

The woman already exercises. What she does not do, and what the architecture of her neighbourhood does not afford her, is to encounter someone. The unplanned contact that weaves a community, the brief exchange at the baker’s, the neighbour sitting on the bench by her door, the older man who walks the same route every day and whom you know by name: these are not provided for in the spatial and functional logic of her district. That design is neither accident nor malice. It is what arises when a housing-market task is solved in square metres, a mobility task in lanes, a services task in retail floor space, and a care task in indications, without any single policy column considering itself responsible for what lies between those tasks.

The disappearance of the social fabric in the Netherlands is not a cultural complaint and not a question of mentality. It is an institutional outcome.

What the figures show

A 2010 meta-analysis by the American psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, repeatedly confirmed in subsequent research and endorsed in 2025 by the WHO Commission on Social Connection, places the effect of social isolation on premature mortality at a 29 per cent increase in the mortality risk.¹ That is an order of magnitude comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and greater than the well-known risks of obesity and physical inactivity. The World Health Organization estimated in 2025 that social isolation is associated globally with approximately 871,000 deaths per year, and that one in six people worldwide feels lonely.² The figure is taken more seriously, as a matter of course, in healthcare than in spatial planning, even though the social fabric is shaped or destroyed above all by spatial, services, and mobility decisions.

Statistics Netherlands has measured loneliness in the Dutch population annually since 2019. In 2024, ten per cent of the population aged 15 and over reported feeling severely lonely, while thirty per cent reported feeling somewhat lonely and sixty-one per cent reported not feeling lonely. The percentage of severely lonely people has remained roughly stable since 2019, but the percentage who feel not lonely fell over those same years from sixty-six to sixty-one per cent.³ In the Adult and Senior Health Monitor, which uses a different methodology among adults aged 18 and over, more than 46 per cent of adults reported feeling somewhat or severely lonely in 2024, with thirteen per cent in the severely lonely category.⁴ By municipality, the share of severely lonely adults aged 18 and over varies from five and a half to more than twenty per cent. One in seven adult Dutch citizens lives in a state in which the risks of mortality, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and depression are measurably elevated.

Statistics Netherlands also tracks the decline of associational life that has carried the Dutch civic fabric for centuries. Between 2012-2014 and 2023-2024, the proportion of Dutch citizens who are members of one or more associations fell from seventy to sixty-two per cent. The decline is steepest among 25 to 35-year-olds and the lowest income group, where the rate of association membership dropped from above half in 2012 to forty-one per cent in 2024.⁵ Sports-association life, traditionally the most deeply rooted, shows a decline among 15 to 25-year-olds since 2023 from nearly forty-five to nearly forty-three per cent. Robert Putnam would not need to write a Dutch translation of Bowling Alone to recognise the picture. The curves are his.⁶

The number of cafés in the Netherlands has fallen by nearly a third since 2007, from over fourteen thousand to fewer than eleven thousand. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, nearly nineteen per cent of café establishments disappeared.⁷ Over the same period, the number of delivery restaurants and one-person event-catering businesses rose substantially. It is a shift presented in the hospitality economy as modernisation, but admitting of a different reading as a social fact. A café is a third place in the sense of Ray Oldenburg: a space between home and work where contact can occur unplanned among people who do not approach each other primarily with a request. A delivery restaurant is not a place. An event-catering firm is not a place. Places that carried the social fabric are being replaced by services that produce no fabric.

Measured at the level of society, this is exactly the pattern that the outline of this series identifies as the signature of the vanishing fabric. It is not a sudden implosion. It is a steady thinning, measured in tenths of a percentage point per year over decades, that becomes visible only in its accumulation.

The third place, and why we abolished it

Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, described in The Great Good Place how healthy societies require an infrastructure of third places to function. The first place is the home, the second place is work, and the third place is everything beyond that where people gather voluntarily and informally without the relationship being organised by family or by function. The corner café, the neighbourhood library, the playground with benches for parents, the community centre, the market square, the church one can walk into on a weekday afternoon. Oldenburg’s point is not that these places are sentimentally valuable. His point is that a society without third places loses its social chemistry. Trust, shared memory, recognition across generations, the tolerance for those who think differently that arises from daily exposure: these are all by-products of places where people end up without an appointment.

In the Netherlands the infrastructure of third places has been thinned in two waves. The first wave was the postwar functional ordering of the city. The zoning plan distinguished living, working, recreation, and traffic. It no longer mixed them. The second wave was the wave of cuts to public services between 2010 and 2020, in which community centres were closed, public libraries were merged, and municipal welfare grants were succeeded by professionally procured trajectories with intake and target-group definition. What was lost was the place where you did not need a reason to walk in.

A church congregation that closes does more than end its own weekly service. It loses a weekly moment of meeting with neighbours one has no other reason to see, a space where birth and death are marked, a body that organises help when someone falls away, and a place where the silent presence of people occupied with something other than the economic register can be felt. The Netherlands currently has more than four thousand four hundred church buildings, and over the coming years some eighteen hundred more are expected to close or be repurposed, in addition to the hundreds withdrawn from worship over the past two decades.⁸ A community centre that closes does the same on a smaller scale. A café that closes, smaller still. Oldenburg’s thesis is that below a certain density of such places, the fabric no longer regenerates, because there are no longer places where regeneration can occur.

In an interim assignment in the welfare portfolio of a municipality in the eastern Netherlands, a newly appointed alderman explained to me that the community centre that had been operating in a deprived neighbourhood since 1968 “no longer met the requirements of our time”. What she meant, on closer questioning, was that the community centre could not demonstrate which specific group was being moved by which specific intervention to which specific outcome. The community centre simply existed. People came there. The physiotherapist from a few streets over sometimes had a coffee between patients. The children’s choir rehearsed there. The Moroccan neighbour brought soup when someone was ill. A municipal youth coach held office hours. Nobody could capture the sum of what happened there in a result indicator. No problem was being solved and no indication was being issued. There was only, in the words of a volunteer who had been coming there for twenty years, “a neighbourhood being held together”. The community centre has closed. The district has since made greater claims on Wmo arrangements, social work, and youth care. No one connects the dots.

What makes the cuts to third places so difficult to reverse is that, within each individual policy column, they are rational. A municipality that scraps community-centre work improves its financial indicators. A housing corporation that removes a meeting room from a complex lowers its operating costs. A religious denomination that divests a building can meet its pension obligations to its retired ministers. Every decision is defensible within the framework in which it is taken. What none of those frameworks weighs is what disappears when third places fall below a certain density. That is not a cost line in any budget. It is an absence on a different ledger, one no one closes.

The hofje as a lost typology

If the Netherlands has one architectural-organisational invention to its name that the world envies, it is the hofje. A cluster of small dwellings around a shared courtyard, founded by a citizen or by a church, governed by its own board, intended for people who were individually vulnerable but capable of functioning collectively: single elderly women, widows, people without family. The oldest still functioning hofje, the Bakenesserkamer in Haarlem, dates from 1395. In the seventeenth century Haarlem alone counted forty hofjes. Today twenty-two are still in operation in Haarlem. In the Netherlands as a whole, more than two hundred hofjes have been preserved, with the largest concentrations in Amsterdam, Leiden, Haarlem, and Alkmaar.⁹

The typology was not sentimental but instrumental. A hofje solved a precisely defined problem: how do you house people who can no longer fully care for themselves in a way that does not isolate or institutionalise them? The answer was small autonomous dwellings around a shared space, at a density that makes chance encounter inevitable, with a board that enforced the minimal conditions of cohabitation. The space did the work that institutions otherwise had to perform. A hofje cottage in Haarlem delivered, for a fraction of what the residential-care home later cost, a form of elderly housing that recent academic research still concludes to be the most ideal living form for older people.¹⁰

Between 1955 and 1985 these typologies were largely abandoned in Dutch housing policy. The residential-care home took their place. The hofje was repurposed, refurbished for a different audience, or, in student towns, handed over to students with the announcement that the hofje atmosphere, to put it carefully, was in decline. The institutional logic changed. Housing became an individual matter, care a professional service, and meeting a leisure activity. What the hofje combined in a single architectural figure was uncoupled into three separate policy columns, each with its own line of accountability.

Over the past fifteen years the hofje typology has tentatively returned. The Spaarndammerhart in Amsterdam, the so-called knarrenhoven developed by Peter Prak for older people who wish to form a community, a number of collective private commissioning projects in Leiden and Utrecht: they show that the typology works technically and is wanted. Stichting Knarrenhof reports in 2025 eleven completed hofjes with around four hundred and fifty residents, and a waiting list that grew between 2022 and 2025 from thirty thousand to nearly sixty thousand registrations.¹¹ What these projects also show is that the prevailing policy architecture is not equipped to facilitate them. A knarrenhof falls formally outside the Long-Term Care Act, outside the senior-housing category of the housing corporation, outside ordinary owners’ association management, and outside the standard positions of a municipal housing department. Each hofje is fought through as an exception, not as the standard variant of a typology that has proved itself over six centuries.

Here the reverberation touches an institutional peculiarity. The Netherlands has a housing shortage that every debate accepts as urgent and large. At the same time, the Netherlands has loneliness figures that prompt serious concern in every column of public health. And the Netherlands has an ageing trend that every projection to 2040 marks as inescapable. The hofje typology is an elegant answer to all three at once. The fact that it is not part of the standard response, but is treated repeatedly as a niche variant, is telling. The institutional architecture of housing, care, and welfare does not recognise what it can in fact see.

The portico without a meeting place

In postwar Dutch housing a typology has come to dominate that is, in its own way, the inverse of the hofje. The straight portico with four or eight dwellings per stairwell, the gallery flat with twenty identical doors along an open balcony, the terraced house with a private garden and a boundary fence, the woonerf typology of the 1970s that took traffic off the street but brought no functional meeting space in return. Each of these typologies delivers dwellings at a density and price that were defensible within the postwar agenda. What none of them supplies as standard is a space between the private domain of the dwelling and the public domain of the street where residents can encounter each other as residents of this building, this street, or this stairwell.

The difference with a hofje is not romance. It is a measurable difference in the frequency and quality of weak-tie contact. A hofje resident sees six to ten fellow residents per day in passing across the courtyard. A gallery-flat resident can let days or weeks pass without seeing a neighbour. The difference does not lie in the resident. It lies in the design. Spatial architecture determines whether weak-tie contact occurs incidentally and frequently or whether it must be entirely staged to occur at all.

Mark Granovetter showed in 1973 in The Strength of Weak Ties that it is precisely these weak-tie contacts, not strong family bonds or friendships, that carry a person’s social and economic functioning. Loose contacts give access to work, information, help, an important referral, or a spontaneous offer to do something. A typology that systematically undermines weak ties does not only undermine sociability. It undermines its residents’ access to the informal economy of society.

In the current Dutch housing-construction agenda, this dimension is rarely weighted. A developer assessed in a tender on square metres per euro has no incentive to include shared space. A housing corporation assessed on operating performance has no incentive to add management-intensive meeting functions. A municipality required to fill a housing quota has no instrument with which to enforce typological diversity. The result is that in the districts now being delivered in Almere-Pampus, in Haarlemmermeer, in Lansingerland, and in Groningen-Meerstad, the portico and block typology is the standard, with an efficiency logic that makes sense in the short term and builds an institutional loneliness factory in the long term.

What Dutch research shows about typology and encounter

The claim that housing typology shapes encounter and social capital is easily dismissed in policy debates as anecdotal. Yet the Dutch empirical record is considerably firmer than the policy discourse suggests. It has simply not been brought together in a way that lets it carry through to the housing-construction agenda.

TNO concluded in its 2025 paper Spatial Design for Social Cohesion that nearly half of Dutch adults feel lonely and that social cohesion in the Netherlands rates only a 6.5 nationally.¹² The institute links this finding sharply to the built environment. Social connection, TNO argues on the basis of international meta-analyses, is a stronger health determinant than not smoking, exercise, or air quality. The report operationalises Talja Blokland-Potters’ notion of public familiarity: the light, spontaneous, repeated contact that arises in public space when wide pavements, multiple entrances, comfortable seating, and mixed functions are available. The conditions in which TNO concretises this read as an operational checklist: the Delft kerb, pavements at least two metres wide, evening lighting, plinths with mixed functions, low vacancy, comfortable seating in the right places. This is not ornament. It is infrastructure that none of the current national housing-construction norms enforces.

The quantitative underpinning comes above all from a research line at Utrecht University and the Vrije Universiteit, grounded in the Survey on the Social Networks of the Dutch and in WoON data. Mohnen, Groenewegen, Völker, and Flap showed in 2011 in Social Science & Medicine, on a sample of sixty-one thousand respondents in three thousand two hundred Dutch neighbourhoods, that neighbourhood social capital is positively associated with self-reported health, and most strongly so in urban areas.¹³ Völker, Flap, and Lindenberg distilled in 2007 in the European Sociological Review that local communities arise under four conditions: more meeting places in the neighbourhood, residents motivated to invest locally, few external relationships drawing attention away, and mutual interdependence among neighbours.¹⁴ Mollenhorst signalled in 2015 a paradox that is central to this paper: between 2007 and 2013, immediate neighbours became more important in the personal networks of Dutch citizens, especially for practical help, while actual contact frequency continued to decline.¹⁵ Demand for the local fabric has therefore risen. Supply has fallen.

Tineke Lupi qualified in her 2008 IJburg study the picture that high density automatically produces anonymity. Two thirds of pioneers identified with the neighbourhood, provided that programme, mixed population, and public space were present.¹⁶ At the scale of the collective, Darinka Czischke and the generation of collaborative-housing researchers at TU Delft provide comparable evidence. Startblok Riekerhaven in Amsterdam, with more than five hundred residents of whom half are status holders and half Dutch starters, shows how shared architectural arrangements build social bridges between groups that would not encounter each other in the conventional housing market.¹⁷ For the hofje typology, finally, Stichting Knarrenhof reports a resident-satisfaction score of 8.6 in its first hofje in Zwolle. INBO, the architectural firm that designed several Knarrenhoven, evaluated that residents are less lonely and call less frequently on regular care or informal care, an outcome the firm attributes to the combination of the archetypal hofje form, room for encounter, and the certainty that support is nearby. Independent peer-reviewed effect evaluation is, as yet, lacking. The order of magnitude of latent demand, with a waiting list of nearly sixty thousand registrations, is nevertheless unmistakable.

What the literature as a whole shows, then, is no automatic relation between form and connection, but a set of conditions: meeting places, legible transitional space, proximity, a scale that allows mutual interdependence. Against that stands what is empirically missing. A direct quantitative comparison between Dutch hofjes, porticoes, gallery flats, and single-family homes on standardised outcome measures of encounter frequency, social capital, and health has never been carried out systematically in the Netherlands. The claim that “typology generates encounter” is in the Netherlands plausibly underpinned, not systematically tested. That is no reason for restraint. It is a reason to stop building as if typology did not matter, and at the same time to embed the empirical gap institutionally. A research programme that, over five years, links the typological footprint of a district to care consumption, loneliness, early school leaving, and labour-market participation would deliver the evidentiary basis on which the housing-construction agenda now structurally bypasses.

The car as solvent

On the second side of the dwelling, beyond the private domain, lies public space. Here the second typological shift was completed. Between 1960 and 2000, Dutch public space was reorganised for car traffic. The wide pavement gave way to the narrow pavement with a parking strip. The shopping street with passersby within walking distance gave way to the industrial estate on the ring road and the regional shopping centre. The schoolyard that doubled as an incidental gathering point for waiting parents gave way to the kiss-and-ride zone. The Danish urbanist Jan Gehl has documented exhaustively how these choices shape the social life of a district almost completely. A street where people walk sees other people. A street where people drive sees no one.

For those who are less mobile, and that is a growing share of an ageing population, car-centred public space is a double exclusion. Not only can the elderly resident no longer reach the third place that lies a drive away; the public space between the home and the recycling bin is also no longer a space of encounter but a transit zone between vehicles. The example case at the start of this paper is no incident. It is what the prevailing district typology, in combination with the prevailing mobility architecture, produces.

Here too the reverberation coincides with institutional logic. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the provincial road authorities, the municipal traffic engineers, and the residents’ associations each have their own set of KPIs for throughput, parking norms, road safety, and accessibility. None of those KPIs measures the presence of incidental contact. The variable does not exist in the accountability traffic and therefore cannot be optimised. What is not measured cannot be governed, and what is not governed disappears. Public space as social fabric is exactly that: not measured, not governed, gone.

In an interim assignment at a municipality of more than one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, a striking natural experiment occurred around 2022. A traffic order on a long arterial road replaced parking strips with wider pavements and low seating elements. The order was issued on grounds of cycling safety, not on any social consideration. A year after implementation, observation and conversations with shopkeepers showed that the street had developed perceptibly busier daily walking contact, with more older people remaining in the street for longer, more brief conversations in front of shop doors, and a measurable rise in turnover at the three cafés and bakeries on this street. None of this effect had been intended. It was a side-effect of a traffic-engineering decision that no municipal column had been monitoring as such. An honest evaluation would acknowledge that during that year the street did more for loneliness policy than the local Eén-tegen-Eenzaamheid coalition meeting did over the same period. But no one tallied the result.

The commercialisation of what we used to do for each other

In the same decades in which the spatial fabric was undone, a second movement was completed. What was earlier done unpaid, mutually, and informally between people, has been taken over by professional service providers who charge for it. Childcare went from a rotation among grandmothers, neighbours, and youth associations to a regulated sector with inspection, training requirements, and cost centres. Informal care became home care, with indications, product codes, and procurement. Odd jobs for the neighbour became online platform services. Shopping for those who could not do it themselves became delivery services. Sports lessons for the child became professionalised club sport with certified trainers and corresponding price tags. The church choir disappeared and the singing school took its place.

Each of these shifts has, on its own merits, defensible advantages. Professional childcare is safer and pedagogically better grounded than ad-hoc minding by the neighbour. Indicated home care guarantees a quality that informal care by an exhausted spouse cannot. A certified football coach gives better instruction than a volunteering father. But the price of this professionalisation, in terms of the social fabric, has been structurally underestimated. What falls away is reciprocity. A neighbour who minds the children creates an obligation she can call in within a different register. Professional childcare creates no obligation. It delivers a service for a price and goes home. The economic transaction renders the reciprocal relationship superfluous. What remains is a set of consumer relationships with service providers and no network of fellow human beings to whom one is in any way indebted.

On top of this lies a distributional effect. What was earlier accessible to everyone via the informal economy of the social fabric is, in the marketised version, only accessible to those who can pay. The child of low-income parents no longer takes sports lessons because the football club has replaced volunteers with paid trainers and the membership fee has tripled. The single elderly person without a Long-Term Care indication but without family no longer receives help with shopping because the neighbours are under the same time pressure as he is and no one is in the habit of calling each other in any longer. The poor neighbourhood loses a double layer: the old informal reciprocity has gone and the new marketised service is unaffordable. This is what sociologists call the social-exclusion effects of professionalisation, and what is booked in each policy column separately as quality improvement and in no column whatsoever as social-fabric erosion.

In the social domain this paradox is routinely visible. A municipality procures, for a few hundred thousand euros per year, a welfare organisation to “strengthen neighbourhood networks”. That same municipality has, in the ten years prior, cut budgets for community-centre work, preschools, volunteer support, and library branches. The net investment in informal social infrastructure is sharply negative. The welfare organisation is then expected to reproduce the missing fabric through visits, coffee mornings, and neighbourhood conversations. The effect is, of course, limited. A fabric eroded by ten years of institutional decisions is not restored by a two-year project. What does emerge is a professional sector of loneliness-fighters whose existence rests on the absence they cannot remedy.

The owners’ association as a sleeping stewardship instrument

Anyone reading Dutch apartment law as institutional design for collective management discovers a paradox. On paper, Book 5 BW Title 9 has, since 1972, supplied all the elements of what public administration calls stewardship: shared responsibility, legal personality, an assembly as the highest organ, a mandatory reserve fund, a multi-year maintenance plan, a collective liability structure. In practice this instrumentation lies largely dormant, and that is precisely why it is relevant for a paper on the vanishing fabric: this is not something to be built up, but something that can be activated.

The scale is substantial. As of 1 January 2022, according to Statistics Netherlands and the Land Registry, the Netherlands counted one hundred and sixty-one thousand active Verenigingen van Eigenaars, of which one hundred and thirty-five thousand contain at least one dwelling, jointly responsible for roughly 1.4 million dwellings, almost one fifth of the total Dutch housing stock.¹⁸ By number, the VvE is therefore the largest collective management structure in the country, larger than the holdings of any individual housing corporation. At the same time the regime carries structural design flaws, of which five are decisive here.

First, the small-VvE problem. Almost half of all VvEs comprise three or fewer apartment rights, around eighty per cent five or fewer. The Atlas Research/WODC evaluation Sustainably United (2024) shows that this category lags. In the smallest group, forty to fifty per cent have a multi-year maintenance plan and a reserve fund, while in larger VvEs both percentages exceed ninety.¹⁹ The statutory model is built on the association format with a board, an audit committee, and an annual general meeting, an unequal burden for four households. The Model Regulation for Small VvEs of 2021 acknowledges the issue, but applies only to new splittings.

Second, the fragmentation of Model Regulations. Since 1972, the Royal Dutch Notarial Association has published five successive Model Regulations: 1973, 1983, 1992, 2006, 2017, plus a specific model for small VvEs in 2021. New models do not, however, automatically apply to existing splittings. A VvE established in 1985 under Model Regulation 1983 remains bound to it unless the deed of subdivision is amended by a four-fifths majority on the basis of article 5:139 BW. Dutch apartment law therefore functions as a patchwork of five simultaneously valid regulations. The Working Group Modernisation of Apartment Law Netherlands, chaired by Mertens, has been arguing since 1997 for an Order in Council under which an updated minimum framework would apply by operation of law to all existing VvEs, on the model of the general binding force given to collective labour agreements. To date, this has not been realised.²⁰

Third, the dualism between property law and association law. The VvE is at once a property-law community and an association-law cooperation. Mertens called this in 1994 in WPNR “for outsiders entirely opaque”. As a result: annulment of decisions runs via petition to the cantonal judge (article 5:130 BW), nullity via summons to the civil court (article 5:129 in conjunction with 2:14 BW). Decisions on easements or rights of superficies, exactly what collective sustainability via solar panels or district heating requires, demand unanimity from all individual owners, even though management in principle proceeds by majority vote. For stewardship this is prohibitive.

Fourth, a sustainability deficit. Only two per cent of VvEs applied for the SVVE subsidy in 2025, despite a sevenfold increase in the available budget since 2017.²¹ Lead times for sustainability decisions range from three years in active VvEs to seven to ten years in dormant ones. Qualified majorities, often two thirds or three quarters, and quorum requirements explain a large share of this. The forthcoming amendment of Book 5 BW, expected mid-2026, lowers the threshold to fifty per cent plus one without quorum for sustainability decisions, but leaves the broader stewardship architecture untouched.

Fifth, dormant VvEs and an enforcement deficit. In 2010 only thirty-seven thousand of one hundred and eighteen thousand VvEs were registered with the Chamber of Commerce. Later figures are better, but registration discipline remains fragile. The municipal instruments from the 2011 authorisation proposal, convening an assembly under article 5:127a BW, ordering a maintenance plan under 12d Housing Act, and substitute authorisation under 5:121(4) BW, are rarely used in practice. The “serious threat” threshold in articles 1a and 1b Housing Act is high, municipal capacity is limited, and these instruments still depend on a majority within the VvE.

Internationally, the Dutch regime is an outlier. Germany, since the WEG Reform of 2020, recognises subjective entitlements to disabled access, charging points, fibre, and since 2024 to individual solar panels under § 20 WEG. A certified manager, the zertifizierter Verwalter with an IHK exam, is mandatory under § 26a WEG. France has, since Loi ALUR (2014) and Loi Climat (2021), imposed a mandatory fonds de travaux and a ten-year Plan Pluriannuel de Travaux, with sanctions including the nullity of the syndic’s mandate. New South Wales in Australia makes sustainability, since 2025-26, a compulsory agenda item at every annual general meeting and renders by-laws prohibiting solar panels null and void by operation of law.²²

The deeper observation is that Dutch VvE law has permitted stewardship legally, but has not made it active anywhere. Membership is qualitative and compulsory under article 5:125(2) BW. Unlike the housing cooperative under article 18a Housing Act of 2015, collective management is not chosen. As a result, residents do not feel themselves to be stewards but consumers of a service. To this is added an undervaluation of collective worth. The reserve-fund regime of half a per cent of rebuilding value is a minimum, not an activating norm; it does not align with the actual replacement cycles of boilers, roofs, or lifts.

For municipal secretaries, ABD officials, and public-administration scholars this is a fundamental observation. The VvE offers, by scale, a greater stewardship capacity than any municipal citizen initiative whatsoever. One hundred and thirty-five thousand existing associations, 1.4 million dwellings, a statutory meeting structure, a mandatory maintenance plan, a legal personality that can borrow money. That this capacity is asleep amid regulations that are between three and eight decades old is not a technical shortcoming. It is an institutional choice that can be undone: by an Order in Council giving the most recent Model Regulation effect by operation of law, by mandatory certification of managers on the German model, by subjective entitlements to sustainability, and by a standardised ten-year-plan format with sanctions on the French or Australian model. This is the kind of intervention that requires no new institution and significantly enlarges the country’s existing collective management capacity.

Eén tegen Eenzaamheid as a symbolic answer to interdepartmental production

The Ministry of Health’s Eén tegen Eenzaamheid (One Against Loneliness) action programme is, in policy-analytical terms, a paradoxical programme. Since March 2018, first targeting those aged 75 and over, and since 2022 all age groups, it aims through campaigns, local coalitions, and a Scientific Advisory Committee to restore a sense of belonging and mattering among the nearly half of the adult population that feels lonely. As of October 2024, more than eighty per cent of municipalities are signed up. The programme team consolidated knowledge, local coalitions took shape, the taboo was lowered. For the follow-up period 2026-2028, State Secretary Pouw-Verweij allocated 4.9 million euros in December 2025, an amount that is itself telling.²³

At the same time, parallel policy streams at the Ministries of the Interior, of Infrastructure and Water Management, of Education, Culture, and Science, and within the Ministry of Health itself, systematically produce the structural conditions for social isolation. Anja Machielse, professor at the University of Humanistic Studies and, tellingly, chair of the programme’s Scientific Advisory Committee, formulated the diagnosis in her valedictory lecture of October 2023: in government policy, loneliness is framed in individual terms, while it is also a question of whether or not one functions within a social system.²⁴ Theo van Tilburg, the most authoritative Dutch loneliness researcher with thirty years of LASA cohort data, added that the complexity of the problem is underestimated, that interventions are poorly designed, and that too much is expected of the individual.²⁵ LASA data also show that the prevalence of loneliness has remained roughly constant over thirty years, with no “epidemic” of the kind suggested by the policy discourse. What has changed is the institutional absence of compensatory infrastructure.

Interdepartmental production can be read across four fields.

In housing, the Ministry of the Interior steers, through the National Housing and Building Agenda of March 2022, towards 900,000 dwellings by 2030, of which 600,000 affordable.²⁶ The agenda contains norms on number, affordability, and distribution (thirty per cent social rent per municipality), but none on the typological quality of encounter. Services within walking distance, life-course resilience, hofje forms, communal outdoor space, and plinths with semi-public functions remain unregulated. The Scientific Council for Government Policy signalled in May 2025 in Humanity and Climate that spatial (re-)development must combine physical and social resilience, and stated explicitly: “Invest in social infrastructure for the sake of societal resilience: combine, in the spatial (re-)development of inhabited areas, ambitions in the field of physical safety and societal resilience.”²⁷ A recommendation absent from the production agenda of the Ministry of the Interior. The VINEX experience of two decades ago, in which social-functional quality was subordinate to production figures, threatens to recur on a larger scale.

In mobility, the Long-Term Programme for Infrastructure, Spatial Planning, and Transport carries an in-built preference for projects that resolve “bottlenecks” via the National Market and Capacity Analysis, a system that allows regions with abundant asphalt to generate new traffic and thereby new bottlenecks. For loneliness policy this is unexpectedly relevant. Proximity of services within walking distance is a first-order determinant of incidental encounter, of the weak ties that Granovetter identified in 1973 as social glue. Car-centred plans, driven by central budget and parking norms, undermine that glue.

In the cultural field, the Public Library System Act came into force in 2015 without a duty of care for municipalities. Between 2010 and 2014, public-library staffing shrank by twenty-four per cent. The number of main library branches fell from one thousand and seventy-three in January 2012 to seven hundred and eighty-two in June 2016, a loss of nearly three hundred branches in four years.²⁸ Only with the Asscher motion of 2018, three million euros for twelve municipalities without a library, and the SPUK regulation of 2023-2024, sixty-seven million euros for forty-two new branches and two hundred and forty-five strengthened locations, has this trend been arrested. The forthcoming bill with an explicit duty of care is a recovery measure after thirteen years of erosion. The Ministry of Health programme names libraries as partners without organising structural funding for them.

In municipal-fund policy, the so-called opschalingskorting (consolidation cut) was imposed from 2015, an incentive to mergers that the government soon dropped, while the cut remained. BDO calculated in 2025 that two hundred and thirty out of three hundred and forty-two municipalities will not balance their 2026 budgets, despite the increase in the 2025 Spring Memorandum.²⁹ The combination of decentralisation without resources and open-ended schemes leads, according to Maarten Allers of Groningen University and the COELO, to attrition of precisely the welfare infrastructure on which the Ministry of Health approach rests. Welfare, social work, and library branches are the first cuts a municipal budget makes when the municipal fund tightens.

The sharpest contradiction lies within the Ministry of Health itself. The Wmo decentralisation of 2015 was accompanied by a twenty-five per cent cut on guidance and aids, and in some sources up to forty per cent on domestic help; in 2015 alone, 465 million euros was cut from the social domain. Erik Gerritsen, then secretary-general of the Ministry of Health, calls it ill-advised in retrospect to have linked a budget cut to decentralisation.³⁰ The flat-rate Wmo contribution introduced in 2019 and 2020 raised the volume of applications; the 2025 coalition agreement scraps domestic help as of 2029 as a Wmo bespoke service, with a withdrawal of 1.01 billion euros from the municipal fund.³¹ In doing so the professional canary in the mine for social isolation among older people is being removed once again, at precisely the moment when the Ministry of Health programme asks volunteers for “a small gesture”.

The governance asymmetry is therefore untenable. The Ministry of Health acts as problem-owner of a phenomenon that is co-produced by the Ministries of the Interior, Education, Infrastructure, and itself, with a follow-up budget of 4.9 million euros for two years. An amount that, even nominally, offers no counterweight to the 1.01 billion euros being withdrawn from the social domain in 2029. Jet Bussemaker, chair of the Council for Public Health and Society, does not call for a reorganisation of departments but for “much stronger interdepartmental steering”.³² The Council itself stated in January 2026 in Healthily Connected that social connectedness as a health factor has effects comparable to fifteen cigarettes per day. For municipal secretaries, ABD officials, and public-administration scholars the strategic conclusion is unavoidable: as long as the Interior’s housing typology, Infrastructure’s mobility, Education’s library infrastructure, and Health’s Wmo financing are not aligned with the prevention discourse in an integrated way, the programme remains a symbolic operation atop a production structure that reproduces the problem.

What other countries do differently

Internationally, the Netherlands stands out in two respects. First, it aligns itself with what may be called the Anglo-Pacific psycho-social paradigm: the United Kingdom with A Connected Society (2018), Japan with the Loneliness Act (2023), South Korea with Seoul’s Lonely Death programme, Australia with Ending Loneliness Together. These countries treat loneliness primarily as a psycho-social problem, with awareness campaigns, social prescribing, and local coalitions. The effect sizes of such interventions are modest: meta-analyses by Cattan, Holt-Lunstad, and more recently Birken find pooled Hedges’ g values around -0.4 for cognitive-behavioural interventions, lower for group-based ones. Second, the Netherlands ignores the Northern European infrastructure tradition. Denmark has had a tradition of bofællesskab since the 1970s and of seniorbofællesskab over the past two decades, with around one hundred and fifty intergenerational and two hundred and fifty senior cohousing projects. Sweden developed the kollektivhus model. Germany has had a federal Mehrgenerationenhaus programme since 2008, with more than five hundred recognised houses. Switzerland has constitutionally anchored housing cooperatives; in Zürich, fourteen per cent of the housing stock is cooperative.

Singapore offers the sharpest contrast. The Action Plan for Successful Ageing and the follow-on Age Well SG programme combine more than three billion Singapore dollars with typology as a policy instrument: two hundred and twenty Active Ageing Centres in 2025, the Kampung Admiralty as a vertical hofje, Community Care Apartments with integrated care. The choice to address loneliness through the built environment is there explicit and budgeted on a scale not comparable to the Dutch 4.9 million euros for two years. Given the Dutch housing shortage that compels new construction, it is striking that the Ministry of Health programme makes no link with the Ministry of the Interior on housing, where the long-term lever lies. Anyone reading the Danish, Swiss, or Singaporean model sees what the Netherlands does not attempt: typology as instrument, not as aesthetic preference.

The diagnosis: fabric as institutional outcome

The three earlier papers in this series have described three different reverberations, each with its own mechanical logic. The Silent Expropriation described how fiscal and regulatory fragmentation simultaneously redraws the ownership structure across seven sectors without anyone summing the result. The Citizen Without Recourse described how the Dutch rule of law functions formally in every link and becomes materially inaccessible to those without legal means. The Pressure on the Weakest described how budget fragmentation between columns produces perverse incentives that land selectively on those least able to organise counter-power. The vanishing fabric follows the same logic, and at the same time in a different register.

Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle asks, of every public question, where the tension lies: in public value, in operational capacity, or in political legitimacy. In the case of the social fabric the tension lies in all three corners at once, in a specific way. The public value of a functioning social fabric can be quantified in terms of mortality, healthcare costs, crime, early school leaving, and labour-market participation, but is not measured as a target variable in any policy column. The operational capacity to maintain or restore the fabric is fragmented across housing, mobility, welfare, healthcare, education, religion, and hospitality, with no single actor able to see the coherence. The political legitimacy for protecting the fabric is low because the benefits are diffuse and the costs concentrated. An alderman who keeps space available for a hofje typology has a measurable cost item and no measurable benefit.

Under that tension the architecture produces an outcome no one wanted. It is precisely the pattern that Dissociated Organisations diagnosed as institutional dissociation. Not malice, not incompetence, not moral impoverishment. Design that adds up to something formulated as a goal in no individual decision. The retired woman who walks alone to the recycling bin on a Tuesday morning is not the victim of bad people. She is the outcome of a spatial planning regime, a mobility policy, a welfare retrenchment, and a housing-construction agenda each of which was rational within its own framework.

What additionally makes this case difficult to correct is that it cannot be attributed to an individual or an organisation. A childcare-allowance affair has culprits, in the sense that actions can be identified, people heard, and reparations determined. A vanished social fabric has no culprit. It is an absence where something used to be, and responsibility for that absence is dispersed across so many actors and decades that, in practice, it belongs to no one. Legal language has no instrument for this. Political language equally not. And yet it has measurable consequences for the health, lifespan, and well-being of a large part of the Dutch population.

What an action perspective requires

The action perspective on this reverberation is different from those for the previous three. For The Silent Expropriation one could argue for a systemic impact assessment, for The Citizen Without Recourse for an extended proportionality test and an accounting-officer function, for The Pressure on the Weakest for integral domain accountability and a duty to compensate. These are targeted institutional changes. The social fabric does not lend itself to repair through a single statutory amendment. A targeted combination of interventions, however, grafted onto the four areas where the fabric is woven or destroyed, can turn the tide.

Hofje typology as standard, not as exception. In the municipal housing-construction agenda it is possible, for a fixed share, say fifteen per cent of annual production, to impose a typological requirement that favours hofje, knarrenhof, and collective private commissioning forms over block and portico typologies. This can be done through land issuance, through tender conditions, and through a corporation performance agreement. It costs nothing in terms of square metres delivered. It only redistributes which square metres go where, with a different effect on the fabric. The empirical underpinning, the Utrecht network research, Lupi’s IJburg work, the TNO paper on public familiarity, and the international mirror of Singapore, Denmark, and Switzerland is in place; what is missing is the administrative courage to treat typology as an enforceable norm.

Third places as a public service with functional density. The infrastructure of third places requires a minimum density per district, comparable to the way schools and play areas are planned. A municipal welfare framework that holds at least one low-threshold open meeting space per thousand inhabitants, with a management structure that allows unplanned presence rather than treating the execution of indicated trajectories as the main goal, is institutionally feasible and financially much cheaper than the welfare trajectories that compensate for its absence. What is required is a different kind of policy agreement, not more money. For the library infrastructure, a duty of care is being prepared in draft form; for community-centre work, it is still wholly absent.

Management at workable scale: the functional VvE. A serious upgrade of VvE practice, as set out above, is one of the cheapest ways in which Dutch government can activate stewardship capacity. It requires no new system, but: an Order in Council giving an up-to-date Model Regulation effect across the existing stock, statutory certification of managers on the German model, a standardised ten-year-plan format with sanctions on the French or Australian model, and a subjective entitlement to sustainability for individual owners. This is exactly what the Keystone pillar of House of Viridian scales internationally: Dutch stewardship principles as the keystone of a different kind of building management, precisely because the Dutch system has more legal architecture for it than elsewhere, provided that architecture is activated.

Mobility and services redesigned on the encounter criterion. The public space and service level of a district can be designed explicitly on the variable that is currently not measured: how many unplanned contacts per day, between non-housemates, the average resident has. This is not an abstract ambition. Jan Gehl developed the measurement instruments. The variable can be monitored through observation and surveys, and can then serve as a design criterion in public space, in services planning, and in mobility policy. A district that scores well on this criterion also performs better on other variables, from safety to early school leaving and care consumption. The yield is measurable. What is missing is the administrative incentive to measure it as such.

None of these interventions calls for new institutions. They call for the revaluation of existing typologies, the reintroduction of planning and welfare norms quietly abolished over the past four decades, and a set of design criteria for public space that treats unplanned contact as a governable variable. The combined costs are lower than the welfare, healthcare, and mortality costs of the vanished fabric. And they are financeable in a different way than through the Ministry of Health programme, namely by reallocating existing budgets at the Ministries of the Interior, Infrastructure, and Education towards typological, spatial, and infrastructural forms that actually weave the fabric.

What this means for the Statecraft series

The vanishing fabric differs from the three earlier reverberations on one important point. In The Silent Expropriation, The Citizen Without Recourse, and The Pressure on the Weakest, the victim was identifiable: the private landlord who sells his property, the citizen lost in the procedural links, the client falling between the domains. With the vanishing fabric, the victim is less identifiable because it is everyone, and therefore no one. A weakened social fabric affects all, but no individual experiences it in a form that can be traced to a single agency. That is why the mechanism could continue for so long without political correction. The victim cannot present itself, because the victim does not know itself as one.

At the same time, this is also the reverberation whose repair is the least polarising. No one is opposed in principle to social fabric. No political party campaigns against encounter, third places, or hofjes. What blocks repair is no party-political resistance. It is institutional inertia and the absence of an actor who appropriates this variable. That makes repair, paradoxically, both harder and easier. Harder because there is no political energy facing the administrative logic that caused the erosion. Easier because repair, if it is shaped, meets little resistance once the first results become visible.

The bridge to Allemaal Ontheemd lies here in plain sight. That book describes at the human layer what this paper describes at the institutional layer: the experience of not belonging in a world in which old forms of safety have disappeared and new ones have not yet been adequately built. What does not need to be added here is the sociological diagnosis of Tönnies, Putnam, Sennett, and Bellah. That is set out in detail in Allemaal Ontheemd. What this Statecraft paper adds is that uprootedness is not only a cultural or psychological category. It is the outcome of institutional design choices that were rational in each individual case and, in their accumulation, have produced a society in which a growing share of the population no longer has the minimal infrastructure for social functioning.

The bridge to the sixth Viridian pillar, Keystone, is methodological. What the Dutch VvE practice in its better instances shows is that resident self-government at workable scale is possible and delivers significantly more than externally organised alternatives. The Keystone perspective casts this as the keystone of a broader model of building management that combines collective responsibility with individual sovereignty. For the Dutch context this means that an upgrade of VvE practice, coupled with a typological reorientation of housing construction and a revaluation of third places in public space, can yield an infrastructure in which the social fabric can again carry itself. Not as a nostalgic 1395 hofje, but as a typologically reworked, legally underpinned, financially sustainable contemporary form.

In the architecture of the Handbook De Richting van de Beweging, this diagnosis returns in the chapter on public value as touchstone, where the Strategic Triangle is worked out for tasks in which value is diffuse and costs concentrated. The methodological conclusion of that chapter is that this kind of task requires a different intervention-colour spectrum than the prevailing blue planning approach: a combination of green learning, white self-organisation, and yellow political positioning, with the blue framework as support and not as the principal register. For the social fabric this is the design register par excellence. Not planning to combat loneliness through an action programme with a coalition and a toolkit, but redesigning typological, spatial, and administrative conditions so that the fabric weaves itself again. The difference is large. The first produces a sector. The second produces a society.

The next three papers

The next paper in this series, Blind to a Known Future, addresses the first signature of the documented reverberations: the structural failure of Dutch government in the face of futures it has long known about. The demographic projection of 4.7 million people aged 65 and over by 2040 has been available in virtually unchanged form at Statistics Netherlands, the Social and Cultural Planning Office, and the Scientific Council for Government Policy since 2010. What is described in this fabric paper as gravity, an ageing population in an institutional architecture that does not serve it, gains a temporal dimension there. The paper after that, Lagging Behind the Speed, addresses the second signature: the gap between exogenous technological, ecological, and geopolitical developments and institutional reaction speed. The Frozen Zeitgeist closes the series as a synthesis essay, with the summarising thesis that the accumulation of five reverberations and two signatures has produced a collective scepticism towards administrative movement itself. The two signature papers and the synthesis essay deliver the room for movement in which the redesigns proposed here can take place.

What this paper contributes, and what the previous three could not contribute, is the recognition that the reverberation of institutional dissociation also lands at the most fundamental layer of human cohesion: the layer where people meet each other without reason, where reciprocity is woven, where the difference between resident and neighbour comes into being. At that layer, the same pattern can be recognised that operates in the ownership structure, in legal status, and in budget allocation. And at that layer, institutional correction is perhaps the most urgent, because it touches the minimal precondition for everything that government and society can do together.

Colophon

The Vanishing Fabric is the fifth paper in the Statecraft series Reverberation, which documents how the institutional dissociation of the Dutch executive government, diagnosed in earlier Statecraft papers, lands in the private lives of citizens. Earlier instalments addressed physical space (The Illusion of Capacity), the ownership structure (The Silent Expropriation), legal status (The Citizen Without Recourse), and cost-shifting between budget holders (The Pressure on the Weakest). The series continues with two signature papers and a synthesis essay, and is published in parallel with the Handbook De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation, 2026).

Author. Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in Dutch government. He has worked as cluster director, quartermaster, and programme manager at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and at regional cooperation bodies, with a focus on the social domain, the physical domain, and recovery operations. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public execution. Reactions and counter-arguments are welcome at the Statecraft platform via House of Viridian.

Version. 2.0, April 2026.

Publisher. House of Viridian OÜ, Tallinn / Lisbon. Statecraft is the fourth of seven pillars within the House of Viridian ecosystem. The sixth pillar, Keystone, internationally scales Dutch stewardship principles for collective building management and forms the institutional complement of the upgrade of Dutch VvE practice proposed in this paper.

Footnotes

¹ The comparison with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day derives from Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review,” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 7 (2010); odds ratio 1.50 for stronger social relationships. The specific 29 per cent increase in mortality risk for social isolation derives from the follow-up paper: Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson, “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 2 (2015): 227-237. There: OR 1.29 for social isolation, OR 1.26 for loneliness, OR 1.32 for living alone.

² WHO Commission on Social Connection, “Social Connection Linked to Improved Health and Reduced Risk of Early Death,” global report, 30 June 2025.

³ Statistics Netherlands, “10 per cent of those aged 15 and over severely lonely in 2024,” press release 25 September 2025, based on the Social Cohesion and Well-being Survey. Available via cbs.nl. The annual update for 2025 was added to table 85766NED on 20 March 2026.

⁴ Adult and Senior Health Monitor 2024, GGDs, Statistics Netherlands, and RIVM (publication date 17 June 2025), based on the De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale among 454,000 respondents. By municipality, the share of severely lonely adults aged 18 and over varies from 5.5 to 20.5 per cent.

⁵ Statistics Netherlands, “Developments in associational life,” Statistical Trends, December 2025, based on the Social Cohesion and Well-being Survey. Comparison 2012-2014 (70 per cent) to 2023-2024 (62 per cent) in association membership. The decline among 25 to 35-year-olds and the lowest income group is significantly steeper.

⁶ Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), with subsequent confirmations through the documentary Join or Die (2024) and the Harvard cycle of 2025 on social capital and loneliness.

⁷ Statistics Netherlands, “More restaurants and catering, fewer cafés,” press release 23 October 2024. Chamber of Commerce figures via ANP, January 2025: in 2024 alone, the number of cafés fell by 280 to nearly 11,000 (the largest decline since the pandemic). Rabobank Sector Forecast Leisure 2025: between 2020 and 2024, the number of café locations fell by 18.9 per cent.

⁸ Figures based on Donatus / Reformatorisch Dagblad, “The more than 4,400 Dutch churches are worth 4.1 billion euros; in the coming years 1,800 are to close” (2024), in combination with KASKI counts for the RC Church Province and the registration desk of the Programme for the Future of Religious Heritage. The Reliwiki/PTRE database, launched in December 2025, is the designated primary source for later updates.

⁹ Estimates based on Amsterdam Monumentenstad (“approx. 200 hofjes in the Netherlands, most of them in North and South Holland”), Stichting Hofjes in Haarlem (22 active hofjes, against a 17th-century maximum of 40), Holland Historisch Tijdschrift (Leiden 35, Gouda 7, Delft 4), and the interactive database hofjesvannederland.nl, which documents over 163 hofjes.

¹⁰ The reference to the hofje as “the most ideal living form for older people” according to recent academic research comes from the canon-history page of the Hof van Wouw, hofvanwouw.nl. The observation aligns with international literature on housing forms for older people that combine autonomy with collectivity.

¹¹ The Spaarndammerhart in Amsterdam (2021, Korthtielens and Marcel Lok); knarrenhoven on the concept of Peter Prak; Woonfabriek Leiden (2016, Gaaga architecten). Resident-satisfaction Aahof Zwolle (8.6) and waiting-list figures (30,000 in 2022 rising to about 60,000 in 2025) according to publications by Stichting Knarrenhof; INBO evaluation via inbo.com/nl/projects. The waiting list refers to registrations and is not independently verified.

¹² J. Pronk, S. van Kempen, J. Dijkstra, and M. van der Klauw, Spatial Design for Social Cohesion (TNO 2025 P10290, Healthy Living Environment). The report states that 49 per cent of Dutch adults feel lonely and that social cohesion in the Netherlands rates a 6.5 nationally; it elaborates the concept of public familiarity drawing on Talja Blokland-Potters (UvA, Community as Urban Practice, 2017). See also Stadszaken, “How spatial design can contribute to social cohesion.”

¹³ Sigrun Mohnen, Peter Groenewegen, Beate Völker, and Henk Flap, “Neighborhood social capital and individual health,” Social Science & Medicine 72(5), 2011: 660-667. Multilevel analysis on WoON 2006 with 61,235 respondents in 3,273 neighbourhoods.

¹⁴ Beate Völker, Henk Flap, and Siegwart Lindenberg, “When Are Neighbourhoods Communities? Community in Dutch Neighbourhoods,” European Sociological Review 23(1), 2007: 99-114. Compare Beate Völker and Henk Flap, “Sixteen Million Neighbors,” Urban Affairs Review 43(2), 2007: 256-284.

¹⁵ Gerald Mollenhorst, “Neighbour Relations in the Netherlands: New Developments,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 106(1), 2015: 110-119.

¹⁶ Tineke Lupi, Buiten wonen in de stad: De place making van IJburg (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008).

¹⁷ Darinka Czischke and Carla J. Huisman, “Integration through Collaborative Housing? Dutch Starters and Refugees Forming Self-Managing Communities in Amsterdam,” Urban Planning 3(4), 2018: 156-165. Compare Darinka Czischke (ed.), Together: Towards Collaborative Living (Delft: TU Delft OPEN Books, 2023), and the Vidi project InCommon (NWO 2025-2030).

¹⁸ Statistics Netherlands in cooperation with the Land Registry, “Numbers and characteristics of Verenigingen van Eigenaren 2022,” CBS Additional Statistical Services (2023). On 1 January 2022 the Netherlands counted 161,000 active VvEs, of which 135,000 contain at least one dwelling, representing approximately 1.4 million dwellings or 18 per cent of the housing stock.

¹⁹ Atlas Research, Sustainably United. Evaluation of the Improvement Functioning VvEs Act, commissioned by WODC (September 2024). Confirms the discrepancy between small and large VvEs in the holding of multi-year maintenance plans and reserve funds.

²⁰ A.A. van Velten and R.F.H. Mertens, “Model Regulations on subdivision into apartment rights,” Weekblad voor Privaatrecht, Notariaat en Registratie 6132 (1994) and 6254 (1997). Mertens reiterates the Order-in-Council argument in Asser/Mertens-Van Velten 5-IV Eigendom en beperkte rechten (Deventer: Wolters Kluwer, later editions).

²¹ National Programme Local Heat Transition (NPLW), “Sustainability of VvE buildings becomes easier” (March 2026), based on Volkshuisvesting Nederland data. SVVE expenditure rose from 2.4 million euros in 2017 to 36.5 million euros in 2025; in 2025 only 2 per cent of VvEs applied for the subsidy.

²² Wohnungseigentumsgesetz (WEG Reform 2020), Bundesgesetzblatt 2020 I, 2187, in force 1 December 2020; certification of Verwalter under § 26a WEG. Loi ALUR (Law no. 2014-366) art. 47 and Loi Climat et Résilience (Law no. 2021-1104). NSW Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 as amended by the Strata Schemes Legislation Amendment Act 2025 (NSW), in force 1 July 2025, with additional sustainability provisions from 2026.

²³ Government of the Netherlands, “Broad social movement against loneliness: results 2025 and follow-up steps 2026,” press release 16 December 2025. Compare the Parliamentary letter on the follow-up Eén tegen Eenzaamheid 2022-2025 (TK 2022Z18800, 28 September 2022) and HHM Bureau, Third-phase ex durante evaluation of the Eén tegen Eenzaamheid programme (October 2021).

²⁴ Anja Machielse, Afvallers en afhakers: Over eenzaamheid, sociaal isolement en een weerbare samenleving (Dropouts and disengaged: On loneliness, social isolation and a resilient society), valedictory lecture, University of Humanistic Studies, 11 October 2023. See also De kracht van eenzaamheid (Amsterdam: Boom, 2025).

²⁵ Theo van Tilburg, “Lessons learned after 35 years of loneliness research,” Beste-ID 2024; compare LASA publications via lasa-vu.nl.

²⁶ Ministry of the Interior, National Housing and Building Agenda, Parliamentary letter 11 March 2022.

²⁷ Scientific Council for Government Policy, Humanity and Climate. The power of social infrastructure in adaptation, WRR Report 112 (The Hague, 19 May 2025; presented to government on 22 May 2025), recommendation 3.

²⁸ Royal Library, Library Statistics 2024 (Klaren & Schrijen). Numbers of main branches: 1,073 (January 2012), 782 (June 2016), 767 main branches plus 145 service points (2024). Staffing figures via Bnetwerk, “Cuts in the library sector.”

²⁹ BDO Branchemonitor Gemeenten 2025; compare VNG, “Municipalities falling into a financial ravine”; Wiardi Beckman Stichting, “Ravine year 2026.”

³⁰ Erik Gerritsen, quoted in Binnenlands Bestuur, “10 years of Wmo 2015: ‘much was unclear in the early years’” (2025).

³¹ Coalition agreement 2025 and VNG response, compare Binnenlands Bestuur, “Coalition: scrap domestic help as a Wmo provision” and “Withdrawal of more than 1 billion from the municipal fund ‘premature’.” The proposed scrapping in 2029 entails a withdrawal of 1.01 billion euros from the municipal fund.

³² Jet Bussemaker, quoted in Movisie, “Jet Bussemaker wants to return to the heart of the welfare state” (2024). Council for Public Health and Society, Healthily Connected, advice January 2026.