Hetwildewonen.nl is a website that is meant for enabling and stimulating a discussion on housing and spatial planning in The Netherlands. In 1998 Carel Weeber wrote a book entitled ‘Het Wilde Wonen’ (Wild Living) that was a plea for a far-reaching deregulation of housing. His call for more differentiation in housing, from invisibly spread housing to mini-clones from Hongkong, has not been left unnoticed. But still not much has happened the last couple of years so it remains of importance to keep this discussion going.

The basis of hetwildewonen.nl is a weblog with regular and relevant newsfeeds. This weblog will also be updated regularly with columns by Carel Weeber. The texts are organized by categories that play an important role in the discussion on ‘het wilde wonen’ and the future of housing in general. Some examples of these categories are: the aesthetics committee, building regulations, state architecture, self-organization and catalogue housing.

The weblog gives the opportunity to comment on these texts and functions therefore as an invitation open to everyone interested in discussing the housing situation in The Netherlands. Hetwildewonen.nl is an open forum that enables people to exchange and discuss ideas on how to open up the housing process in The Netherlands. The site doesn’t aim at proclaiming the ideas of ‘het wilde wonen’ but rather to keep these ideas in a state of continuous development.

But that’s only the beginning. At the moment a series of tools is being developed that will make sure that the democratization of housing in The Netherlands will not remain solely a discussion but will also be actually applicable. Currently a shadow version of Dutch building regulations, a national dormer database and a growing collection of stories about true confrontations with the municipal aesthetics committees are under construction.

Hetwildewonen.nl is an initiative of Carel Weeber, the Maze Corporation, Suite75 and Archined