20-01-2021 // HOW TO CONTINUE?

• ABCD as strategy

• Rekindling Democracy

• Demarcation

This week we planned the last three conversations for this project. The first conversation this week was with Mike. He lives in the Regentekwartier and has always been amazed at the overdue maintenance in this part of the center. Mike thinks you can't expect much from the people who live in this area; mainly seniors and expats do live here who are most likely not open to being actively involved. Many things have been promised to the inhabitants of this area, which has not been fulfilled. This makes people passive towards taking initiative’’He is, however, willing to actively contribute ideas and think about the possibilities, including social initiative. We also spoke with Atul, who is originally from India and works as a technical leader-electronics for Philips. He notices that hardly anyone in the neighborhood knows each other. He would like to see that differently; a connected neighborhood can ultimately achieve much more together. He does not want to talk about what is not good in the neighborhood, but rather wants to look for solutions. The last conversation was with Marly. Marly works as a sports director for the municipality of Eindhoven. Marly came in contact with us through Eric, the area coordinator. It is great to see that more and more people know where to find us and that other people refer people to us. Marly is looking for a connection in the field of sports. Although we do not specifically focus on this, we have agreed to keep each other informed when something interesting happens.

The fact that these are the last conversations, for now, does not mean that we will ignore the people who would still like to talk to us, but it does mean that we will no longer elaborate on those conversations for this project. We have spoken to many people, gathered a lot of information and it is time to build on the input gained. As mentioned before, we are heading towards the completion of this project for Community Design, but we will continue with this project for other competencies. Because we have already thought about our next steps, we would like to explain this briefly on the basis of the book Rekindling Democracy and the document Wijkontwikkeling op eigen kracht.

ABCD AS (FUTURE) STRATEGY

Each neighborhood consists of a unique combination of qualities that can be built on in the future. In order to obtain a complete overview of these qualities, we started in this final project phase with an inventory of the possibilities in the area and the willingness of stakeholders to contribute to improving the livability. Through the various conversations in both the first and the second round, we have discovered a large and rich variety of individual capacities in the neighborhood, which are not yet used and reflected upon. 

Our first conversations were with companies and organizations in the area. These institutions and businesses are the most visible and form the formal infrastructure of the district. It is essential to involve these companies and organizations in improving the livability in the neighborhood. Making an inventory of the assets of these organizations is probably easier than the inventory of the assets of individual residents. However, it is a challenge for us to evoke a sense of responsibility for the neighborhood in these organizations and also to ensure residents enter into a different relationship with these organizations. Building relationships is of great importance: between residents, between residents and businesses, and other organizations and institutions. Residents, organizations, businesses, and institutions together form the capacity base of each neighborhood.

The focus on the assets in this area does not mean that the Emmasingelkwadrant would not need external financial assistance. Actually, it means that external help will be much more effective if the residents themselves actively participate and can determine where that extra help should be spent. The deployment of the district's assets is an absolute condition, but this alone is not enough to tackle the challenges in the area. The starting point for improving the neighborhood is based on what is there and not on the problems and shortcomings. Nevertheless, we will focus on an inward-looking development strategy; we first look at what the residents, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders can achieve, but do not exclude external forces. This strongly inward-looking attention is simply intended to emphasize the many possibilities that exist in a neighborhood.

The capability study is a method that we may be using to map out the capabilities of the stakeholders in the neighborhood. It is a method to determine what residents can contribute to neighborhood development. This research consists of four parts: personal skills, skills developed as a volunteer, entrepreneurship, and personal data. We used KUMU to map the stakeholders and to save the first personal data. In this way, we can easily come into contact with all stakeholders who want to contribute to improving livability and want to discover the possibilities together. Further information can be added if it is useful for the follow-up process. An example is mapping the capacities of a specific stakeholder (Landelijk Samenwerkingsverband Aandachtswijken & Fontys Hogeschool Sociaal Werk Eindhoven, n.d.).

Link KUMU: https://kumu.io/jesseulrich/placemaking-emmasingelkwadrant

REKINDLING DEMOCRACY

Cormac Russel describes in his book Rekindling Democracy: A Professional’s Guide to Working in Citizen Space (2020) that 'helping' can cause unintended damage. Do we want to 'help' the people in the Emmasingelkwadrant, or do we take a less-traveled path? A fundamental premise of the book is the idea that the traditional way of helping can be redefined. Traditional "helping" usually tends to come from sympathy, or responsibility as duty or burden, not from empathy. Three dominant styles of helping are presented:

1.       Doing things TO individuals and / or their communities

2.       Doing things FOR individuals / communities

3.       Doing things WITH individuals / communities

The first two are top-down institutional and service-oriented approaches, which usually predominate. If citizen-centered democracy is to flourish, we must create new space for bottom-up, citizen-led action for the things that are done collectively, not just WITH cooperating citizens and agencies, but BY citizens acting as co-creators, mutual creators, and co-producers with their neighbors. This is the lower right image, the BY space, a domain more about curiosity and discovery than traditional helping. Here the citizens are in charge; They don’t have a say, they have the primary say and they are the main producers of any output. In other words, the BY space is where things are done that citizens as a collective must do.

We can only understand where external collaboration is justified by committing to the improvement and discovery of the BY space - what citizens can do and achieve themselves, together. This flourishes not through the growth of top-down services, but by the enhancement of freedom for all from the grassroots up. How can we support the appropriate growth of the BY space, led by the citizens of the Emmasingelkwadrant?

PRINCIPLE TWO

Rekindling Democracy discusses seven principles of authentic community building that efforts to promote collective citizen co-creation and cooperation in small local places. Although all seven principles are interesting for our follow-up process, we would like to elaborate on principle two. Residents cannot know what they need from outside their neighborhood until they first know what they have in their neighborhood. Principle two focuses on connecting, mobilizing, and identifying the existing capacities of a neighborhood, by supporting citizens to build collective strength and create connections to actually tackle (frustrating) situations. Every neighborhood is bustling with activities, capacities, and resources, but these are often not recognized. We do not want to be seen as 'helpers' who look for what is wrong in a neighborhood as a starting point, but instead, we want to be genuinely curious about the possibilities in the neighborhood and want to support the residents in making the invisible visible together.

This journey of discovery can be powerful, and we want to try to facilitate that process as Community Designers. Because the discovery of local sources alone changes little; having a list of assets is not necessarily an action step. Further and deeper research is needed to understand how the different assets that have been discovered can be more productively linked together. Deepening the connection between individual capacities, the strength and resources of associations and institutions, the potential of the environment, and the richness of local cultures is not a one-off exercise to collect data. It is a continuous process of building relationships. We want to invite stakeholders to make the invisible visible and to create interdependence. Through the gatherings that we are going to organize, we want to challenge residents and other stakeholders to find their way to interdependence from the beginning, by starting new conversations, which in turn leads to new discoveries and connections. Discovering and connecting is time-consuming. However, we are striving towards sustainable community development, so a time-consuming route like this is essential to achieve an optimal outcome.

DEMARCATION

There is a reason that we have not yet organized a stakeholder meeting in this project. Making the invisible visible is a starting point, but not an action step in itself. It is a fundamental step and it is where a community discovers and highlights its capabilities so that any outside support is relevant to the local context. Without taking the time to build this interconnectedness and trust in a place, unintended consequences can arise. This is often instigated by well-intentioned external agencies. Think of the displacement and/or stifling of local inventions.

Making the invisible visible is a deliberate and collective act of building and increasing power. Citizens build power through mutual trust and connection through action. The connection and trust are missing in the Emmasingelkwadrant. That is why we first looked at what is going on in the neighborhood, who would like to be part of a connected neighborhood, and who dares to embark on this 'journey of discovery' with us. We had to start from scratch, as the project takes place in a neighborhood where only a few people were already formally connected. We have now come to a point where we can start looking at how we can bring together all the interested stakeholders we have spoken to. By doing this, we hope stakeholders will realize that much (though not all) of what they need to make a change is within reach. This is not to suggest that a community has everything it needs internally, but that they cannot know what is needed from external actors until they discover what they have internally. The neighborhood must realize that what the community has locally is of far greater value than most recognize. Once a community understands what the neighborhood has within, and in turn what it needs from the outside, they confidently take up a powerful political space from where they can begin to leverage significant change for the future.

REFERENCES

Landelijk Samenwerkingsverband Aandachtswijken & Fontys Hogeschool Sociaal Werk Eindhoven. (n.d.). Wijkontwikkeling op eigen kracht. Budel, NB: Drukkerij Vos. Retrieved 13 January, 2020, from file:///E:/NHTV/Fourth%20year/Community%20Design/Gemeente%20Eindhoven/Theories/ABCD_2009.pdf

Russel, C. (2020). Rekindling Democracy: A Professional’s Guide to Working in Citizen Space. Pacific Northwest: Cascade Books