Holding Space for the Fringe: Reflections on The Sinking Fringe, a housing documentary

On 6 November 2025, Mirte Jepma and Amal Barre, researchers from the GPIO Department at the University of Amsterdam, hosted a special documentary screening event showcasing Mirte’s ongoing research on housing justice and participatory urban planning.

The Sinking Fringe (2025) is a Dutch documentary directed by Mirte Jepma that captures the final months of Baaibuurt West, a small neighbourhood on Amsterdam’s Zeeburgereiland. The 56-minute film follows the area’s residents — artists, students, and free spirits — through the six months leading up to the demolition of their homes in early 2025.

All images are stills from the documentary.

Once a vibrant enclave known for creativity, community and ecological care, Baaibuurt West became a casualty of the city’s redevelopment plans. The Municipality of Amsterdam intends to redevelop the area to build 1,800 new housing units on the site, which requires raising the land by seven metres with sand, an act that destroys the existing green infrastructure and housing communities.

The film alludes to both the mounting pressure on Amsterdam’s remaining “free spaces” and to the literal sinking of the soil in this particular corner of Amsterdam, caused by an ancient waterway – the Oergeul – that eroded the first sand layer, making conventional construction prohibitively costly. The map below illustrates the course of the Oergeul and the location of Baaibuurt West.

A collision with the machinery of urban renewal

At its core, The Sinking Fringe explores what happens when an alternative community grounded in inclusion and creativity collides with the machinery of urban renewal. The camera lingers on the daily life of residents as they navigate uncertainty — some packing their belongings, others organising and resisting. In collaboration with experts, the community of Baaibuurt West developed an alternative proposal for the area, one that accommodates the planned 1,800 housing units without demolishing existing homes, displacing residents, or destroying the area’s natural environment.

The film is as much about people as it is about place, asking how we can make room for diverse ways of living within an increasingly dense and expensive city. It also raises unsettling questions about progress and belonging: How can a city that celebrates and prides itself on diversity, inclusivity and ecological responsibility choose to erase this neighbourhood?

Thematically, the documentary engages with housing justice, community resilience, and the politics of space. It situates Amsterdam’s housing crisis within a broader global trend in which creative and low-income communities are gradually pushed out by rising land values and large-scale redevelopment projects. Baaibuurt West emerges as a symbol of resistance, a space that dared to live otherwise. Rather than romanticising alternative communities, the film foregrounds genuine solidarity, care, and shared purpose that sustained life for over fifty years in Baaibuurt West.

Stylistically, the film adopts an intimate, observational approach. Mirte Jepma’s background as a housing researcher at the University of Amsterdam informs the film’s sensitivity to both structural inequality and emotional nuance. Viewers witness not only the dismantling of homes but also the unravelling of a social fabric — conversations over communal dinners, laughter amid chaos and uncertainty, and quiet moments of grief as demolition day draws near.

What kind of city are we building when we erase its fringes?

The Sinking Fringe ultimately serves as both a documentary record and a moral reflection. It chronicles a community at the edge of disappearance while posing a broader question: what kind of city are we building when we erase its fringes? In the end, the film is not just about losing a neighbourhood — it’s about losing a vision of how we might live together differently and the people’s power to challenge top-down planning regimes.

Commentary from Amal Barre

One thing that struck me about The Sinking Fringe is it’s quietness, its pacing, its sound, and the way it lingers on daily rhythms. The film captures both the tenderness and temporality of life at Baaibuurt West, holding space for a community already in the process of fading. The opening scene, where residents hold a funeral for the community, crystalizes that feeling: it’s both performative and profoundly real.

I first learned about Baaibuurt West through Mirte about a year ago, when we began talking as researchers and filmmakers about how to bring film into our academic work. Through those conversations, I started to see connections between what was happening here and the displacement I study in Des Moines, Iowa, the ways urban renewal, redevelopment, and speculative pressures shape who gets to live where.

What stays with me is the shared fragility of life on the margins, the ways temporary contracts and provisional arrangements make space for relational, creative, and resilient ways of living, even while leaving communities vulnerable to erasure. Baaibuurt West reminds us that fragility and resilience coexist: it shows us how care, solidarity, and shared purpose can flourish for decades, only to be threatened when land is repurposed for other, sometimes speculative interests.

The film also underscores a larger point: both planning and filmmaking are acts of world-making. They determine what is seen, what fades from memory, and what is preserved. And through the life of a place, they influence what is built, what is torn, and the lives that unfold within these cycles. In this sense, Baaibuurt West isn’t only a document of loss; it’s a record of care and possibility. It asks us to consider what it means when our imaginations, as Mark Fisher and Farank Miraftab suggest, are enclosed, when doors to alternative ways of living, flourishing, and imagining the city are physically and figuratively closed.

The Sinking Fringe (2025) invites us to hold onto these relationships, memories, and possibilities, even as the space disappears. It challenges us to reflect on the stories we tell and the cities we help create. And to ask: what is lost when we fail to notice or value the fringes, the minor, the vibrant communities on the edges, making space for alternative living guided by collective world-making? Who are we currently not going space on our collective maps of the future cities?

Film credits

Directed by Mirte Jepma
Produced by Tucano Frames
Film team: Alberto Morbelli, Director of Photography; Benjamin Vanderveen, Editor; Marijn van der Eyden, production; and Emiel Martens, post-production.