08-01-2021 // ABCD

  • ABCD

The Christmas Holidays are over, and while we have been working on this project during the holidays as well, it is now time to take action again. We got different reactions to both the sent update and the flyer. In the coming days, we will plan conversations with the people that did respond to the flyer. However, these conversations will have a different approach than the conversations we have had during the first research phase. In the first conversations we wanted to get in touch with different stakeholders from the area, find out what kind of people we are dealing with, experience what is going on in the neighborhood, discover where the needs lie and what we as Community Designers could contribute. Although many stakeholders have identified positive points and opportunities in the area, the emphasis has often been on the negative. We have highlighted these frustrations and pain points in the area among other things in order to make the municipality see the urgency to be visibly active in this area. In this research phase, we no longer want to focus on the frustrations and pain points, but we want to focus more on the positive and explore opportunities together with the stakeholders. We dove deep into Asset Based Community Development in order to see if it could fit and strengthen our project. 

ASSET BASED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT


In the light of the first three chapters of the Wijkontwikkeling op eigen kracht (n.d.), we are evaluating how Asset Based Community Development as a strategy could be relevant for our Community Design project in the Emmasingelkwadrant in Eindhoven, commissioned by the municipality of Eindhoven. The Document consists of 6 parts and this evaluation is based on the first three parts, if the strategy proves to be useful for our project, we will relate to the latter three parts when relevant.

 

Asset Based Community Development is a strategy for volunteer-based areal development. It draws away attention from the negative aspects and problems that occur regularly in a certain district. Instead, it aims at the discovery of qualities, skills, and resources of inhabitants of the area by which more power and effectiveness is obtained by the people of the neighborhood.

 

Within this specific document, our first in-depth acquaintance with the theory, the ABCD method is mostly related to big, disadvantaged neighborhoods with many inhabitants (examples of districts with about 85.000 inhabitants), diverse issues, and a lot of history.

In contrast, the Emmasingelkwadrant is a relatively new, rich, and smaller-scaled district, with only about 1600 households. The two biggest issues are a lack of physical maintenance of the open space (for which inhabitants usually are not directly responsible) and a lack of social cohesion. The latter is quite characteristic for districts that are located in the core of the city’s center. Apart from that, the orientation of issues is relatively narrow.

We have obtained this information during our earlier research in which we tried to understand the situation in the Emmasingelkwadrant from both the perspectives of the municipality and the inhabitants of the district. In order to understand the situation, we had to discover the frustrations of stakeholders which goes against the positive approach of ABCD aimed at a district’s capacities. Nevertheless, we felt that in order to be able to work with the capacities of the area, we first had to understand the origin of the issues in the area. There was no information available to us from prior research on both the perspectives of the municipality and the inhabitants of the area.

 

The ABCD strategy recognizes and locates capacities from within the community and it allows to compare those and find possibilities by filling out visual schematic inventories called asset maps. These maps are used to locate the assets of individuals, neighborhood organizations, and institutions and could definitely help us in our process, especially when gatherings will be organized. Nevertheless, we will not use these maps as were originally mentioned in the document. The main reason for this is the fact that these schemes and techniques are aimed at big scale data collections in neighborhoods that already have established loads of official and unofficial relationships that come with specific assets. The Emmasingelkwadrant is relatively small and organized only per separate building and not as a whole. On the other hand, it is important to understand that we do not think the Emmasingelkwadrant is lacking individual or organized assets to use within the ABCD approach. What is lacking in the Emmasingelkwadrant is that most of the people are not in contact with each other, let alone people from different buildings.

 

The biggest opportunity we see to use an ABCD approach in our project is to change the form of conversation from discussion to constructive dialogue. The people that we are in contact with, tend to use the opportunity to talk about what they experience in the area as negative, while not even thinking about the district’s internal possibilities. Apparently, this asks for a lively imagination. Therefore, the use of ABCD could be interesting in the process of preparing the gatherings that we are planning on organizing in order to talk about how residents can combine their voices/forces on a long-term base and organize themselves to talk constructively about the future or the district. Ideally, we would be able to forehand gather information of the contenders that we could use in these sessions in order to open up their eyes and minds to the broad range of opportunities they have. Meanwhile, this could inspire and draw away attention from the frustrations in the area.


So far, the first three parts of the book have provided enough instructions on how to gather input for capacity research. However, we could use more information on how to deal with that information in terms of creating sustainable interconnection. At this point, we consider to collect and gather insights about the capacities but use the gatherings to explore the capacity research together and create a transformative session that could be able to change the dialogue from negative to positive (Landelijk Samenwerkingsverband Aandachtswijken & Fontys Hogeschool Sociaal Werk Eindhoven, n.d.).


REFERENCES

Landelijk Samenwerkingsverband Aandachtswijken & Fontys Hogeschool Sociaal Werk Eindhoven. (n.d.). Wijkontwikkeling op eigen kracht. Budel, NB: Drukkerij Vos. Retrieved 8 January, 2021, from file:///E:/NHTV/Fourth%20year/Community%20Design/Gemeente%20Eindhoven/Theories/ABCD_2009.pdf

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