The Europe Challenge

We all know that European cities are in the midst of a housing crisis. But much less is said about the home crisis. The home crisis is a direct result of the housing crisis. Because as people get pushed out of rented apartments by landlords eager to capitalise on an opportunity to increase the rent, they inevitably find themselves downsizing, living in less-than-ideal conditions because it’s all they can afford. And, as is so common in cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris, apartments are often rearranged to maximise rentable space, losing living rooms and common spaces in the process. Those lucky enough to find housing are much less likely to have found a home.

To make matters worse, public communal spaces are shrinking in direct proportion to the expansion of private communal spaces. Funding cuts, along with developers’ tendency to see ‘space’ as bankable real estate they can turn into offices, means that parks and green spaces are bulldozed for bland office space (we all just want to work from home anyway). If all our communal areas have disappeared, where are we supposed to go?

When I was at university, I had a professor who prided himself on being different. We studied the US rap artist and songwriter Kendrick Lamar as poetry in his lectures, and he cancelled class on the day after a major dance festival in Amsterdam, wink wink. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but one thing really stuck with me: loitering is illegal because in our capitalist society it’s the act of existing without spending money.

This is where libraries come in. Libraries are many things to many people. They provide us with the opportunity to borrow books, yes—but libraries are also the reason why someone who can’t afford essential textbooks go there. They’re a meeting place for the local community. They’re access to the internet. They’re a warm space on a cold day. They’re one of the few remaining places where you can spend time without spending money.

Libraries can’t solve our housing crisis, but they can help solve our home crisis

Libraries exist in a sort of vacuum: they’re liminal zones stuck in time, but not in any specific time. They’re just there. Imagine a photo of an empty library. There might be some computers in the corner of some libraries, but beyond that, there’s nothing in the photo that would indicate when or where it was taken. Providing, of course, that you can’t zoom in to see what language the books are written in. A public library in a small town in Germany won’t look very different from a public library in a small town in Italy. And a public library in 2024 won’t look unlike a public library in 1993. This makes libraries the ideal third place.

The term ‘third place’ is from Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place, which he defines as ‘not home and not work, but instead one of the physical settings that have throughout history encouraged a sense of warmth, conviviality, and that special kind of human sustenance we call community’. Throughout history, humans have gathered to share ideas, discuss topics of common interest, and to foster community. The Greeks had the agora; the Romans had the forum. Southern European towns have their piazzas and plazas, but they’ve evolved into more of a place that you pass through rather than a destination in their own right.

In Northern Europe, our outdoor squares are only used for three months of the year—even that’s a stretch—in some particularly rainy cities you’re lucky to get three weeks of good weather. Luckily, libraries are here for us once again. While they aren’t necessarily the first place you’ll go for town gossip (local Facebook groups will be more helpful for that), they remain somewhere you can go where you can spend time without judgement, take a seat, and have a chat with a passing librarian if you’re in the mood—much like your home.

Libraries have long been popular with the homeless for this very reason. While this raises pertinent questions about the government’s ability (and willingness) to provide adequate shelter for the neediest in society, let’s park that conversation for another time, and instead consider what makes libraries such an enticing space for everyone, no matter their social status. Libraries are warm and dry. Libraries are everywhere. Libraries are spaces free of judgement. There’s no see-and-be-seen energy. You can’t get a souvenir tote bag that you can parade around as proof of your intellect. You can’t even play the ‘oh, you haven’t read it? I loved it, I’ll lend it to you’ trick designed to make your friends feel culturally inferior. As far as libraries are concerned, you just borrow a book, read it, and then give it back.

Even as books morph into something of an unlikely social symbol (Have you read the latest from the media’s new literary darling? Is your ‘to be read’ pile Instagrammable enough?), libraries remain steadfastly inclusive and welcoming.

Books can’t house us, but they can provide a home of sorts. Nora Ephron writes that ‘reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real’. Cultural history is peppered with tales of people who beat life’s bad odds by escaping into books—even the fictional Matilda Wormwood (in the book “Matilda” by Roald Dahl) used books as a form of escape until Miss Honey showed up.

Libraries are many things to many people. They’re a one-way ticket, an airport check-in lounge, a time machine. They’re access to a scorching summer’s day in Italy (André Acieman’s Call Me by Your Name), to high society in 1930s Paris (Irène Némirovsky’s Le Bal), to frosty Scandinavia (Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book). Some might argue that funding cuts that affect libraries are unavoidable. That funding health services must take priority. But aren’t libraries spaces that nurture us, that provide us with community, that give the elderly and new parents opportunities to meet? In other words, aren’t libraries a health service?

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About the Author

Phoebe Dodds (b. 1996) is a writer based between Amsterdam and London. She has written for Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, Stylist, the Guardian and Startups Magazine amongst others. Her work has been featured in publications like Vogue Business, Cosmo and Forbes, and she guest lectures at universities including the London College of Fashion and the University of the Arts London.