26-01-2021 // SHARABLE

Even though we hand in our shareable as a tangible project, we also post the content on the blog so the shareable is accessible to everyone.

INTRODUCTION 

The city of Eindhoven is growing and has ambitions to transform the Brainport area into an internationally interesting junction with its unique TDK profile. TDK stands for Tech, Design and Knowledge; a rare combination of core qualities that form the specific skill set of the city. It comes naturally that the area within the central ring of the city evolves with these ambitions. There are a lot of areas in (re)development and the Emmasingelkwadrant is one of them. The municipality drew up a vision document with guidelines for the future of the neighborhood. Apart from the vast creation of high-rise huising, the most drastic change in the plans is the creation of a central park in the area.

 

However, there is one big obstacle. 

When the Philips company left the terrain, most of the ground was sold to real estate developers while the municipality took a much smaller piece of the pie. Nonetheless, the developers have to follow the vision document from the municipality. Therefore, the involved parties are in negotiation about the permits and developments while they have been doing so for years already.

 

As a result, the area looks and feels neglected. It is home to both newly built buildings and the ruins of older buildings. The whole offers a contrasting view. Especially the public space is a sad mixture of parking lots, an empty square and a dry field. According to a research conducted by NUL ZES, a social design bureau from Eindhoven, the initiated park should function as a park to the city and a garden for the neighborhood (2019). The municipality expects the park to positively transform the complete living experience of the public space in the area. However, in the meantime, the area looks bad and attracts people that cause nuisance for the local residents which have become impatient by the long run-up towards the planned developments.

 

According to the municipality, it is time to act.

In the run up to the planned development projects, the municipality wants to make the stakeholders excited for the future plans. They envision co-creation could lead to different use of the public space even before it looks the part. At this moment, the space is not being used and it ought to offer a lot of opportunities.

 

THE STARTING POINT

Even though the technically challenging situation in the area was all but positive, the municipality clearly desired a positive approach towards the project aiming at creating ‘a positive buzz’ in the area. They wanted to build towards a lively and attractive city center for people with various backgrounds. It influenced us to start thinking about how we could work accordingly. We thought about big research questions such as:

1. How can we convert the nuisance in the area around the Lichtplein into something positive in the long term? 

2. How can we improve the general living experience in the public space of the Emmasingelkwadrant in the run-up to the development projects?

 

These dreamy words and desires of the municipality worked motivating for us, but were hard to relate to the current situation in the area. This definitely demanded an open attitude towards the project from us in order to really examine the situation. Luckily, we were determined to first try and understand the situation in the neighborhood from the perspective of the locals.

UNDERSTANDING

Often, the municipality would use fancy terms around the desire of creating an active neighborhood in which dazzling activities are happening all throughout the year. Activities preferably organized by inhabitants. Meanwhile, there are technical experts helping the inhabitants of the area with whatever the municipality finds important. Nevertheless, the preconditions for inhabitants to start taking social initiative were not met. By going in conversation with the locals, we have found out that most of them stand quite a passive attitude towards social initiative as they worry about more essential matters. Over the past years, inhabitants have been poorly informed about the situation in the area, dreaming of a beautiful park while the municipality has not been visibly active. The buildup frustration about issues regarding the trash, deficient maintenance and nuisance caused by unwelcome strangers has resulted in a lack of trust towards the municipality.

Nevertheless, we have also experienced that many people have interesting ideas about the future of the district. They often do not know where to start and state to wait for the pandemic to be over or the park to be built. Therefore, we felt we could not effectively create a ‘positive buzz’ in the neighborhood like the municipality initially asked us to do. Instead, we would prefer to regain the trust of the locals by reverting to a more humane vision on the matter and focus on the energy that lives within the neighborhood. In other words, link the municipal goals to the desires of inhabitants and not the other way around. Our role in this process would evolve around facilitating and supporting, rather than organizing specific events.

TRANSFORMING THE NARRATIVE

By listening to the locals, we have noticed how especially people living in the later built housing do not have much contact with other residents, are not organized and have no idea where to go with their ideas, remarks or questions. Furthermore, the area is lacking in widely supported mutual connection. There is not much organized, nor unorganized, contact between residents from different buildings. Accordingly, their desires are often very contrasting, while their needs frequently show overlapping ideas. We think that the neighborhood would benefit from being more connected. 

In consultation with the municipality, we have decided to aim our energy at stimulating lasting connections between inhabitants, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in the area. The voice of a well-represented, united and organized neighborhood is powerful and will be heard. At this point we are in conversation with residents about how we could organize and support a lasting connection. 

We started to work from the following question; How to create a sustainable connection between the different stakeholder perspectives? We want to work on the future of the neighborhood based on the needs of its residents.

 

Right now we are at the point in which we would like to bring different stakeholders together and discuss how we could build towards lasting connection and form a neighborhood community. Sadly, the Covid-19 pandemic forms a big challenge for us as we are not allowed to bring people together in real life. Apart from that, we experience another big challenge; whatever we might want, most of the inhabitants of the Emmasingelkwadrant have been carrying around major frustrations for quite some time now. We have listened to their stories in order to gain a better understanding of the situation in the area. In terms of language, this might have led us to have a more negative conversation then we would need now when we would start reimagining the future of the area. Therefore, we will use ‘Asset Based Community Development theory’ and ‘Rekindling Democracy’ in an attempt to transform the dialogue from frustration towards constructively thinking about long term connection within the community to change the narrative. Even though we are striving towards a more positive and constructive dialogue, it is crucial to make the residents feel supported and listened to. Therefore, we sense that in order to regain the community’s trust, the municipality should not ignore the shortcomings of the area during this process and conversation. 

Why

To empower the locals to have a positive impact on the livability of their neighborhood.

 

How

By exploring the situation in the light of connecting to the perspective of the stakeholders and their capacities.

What

We bring locals together and explore the opportunities of connecting the neighborhood. 

COMMUNITY DESIGN

Community Design is about creating value by designing a group of people and organizations around a certain topic. We bring stakeholders together and facilitate the process of co-creation to solve complex problems. Nevertheless, as comes naturally with trying to solve complex problems, there often is a lot more to it than just bringing people together and facilitating the dialogue. It needs a thorough understanding of the matter and a lot of preparation, time and effort in order to be able to facilitate the process to be constructive and valuable. Designing a community is an ever ongoing process that is impossible to complete in just under half a year. Especially since we were working with inhabitants; stakeholders that take part in the process during their leisure time as they are not professionally involved. 

Therefore, we do now round off this Community Design project without actually bringing the stakeholders together, but our efforts will not go to waste. We have laid the foundation for a neighborhood community by connecting with many different stakeholders and we will follow through with the project commissioned by the municipality of Eindhoven connected to different competences. We will bring those enthusiastic stakeholders together and explore the opportunities.

 

The most important lesson we have learned during this project is that as a community designer, you are not responsible for getting the result desired by the commissioner of the project. Your sole responsibility as a community designer is to get the best out of the people that want to be involved in the process. This is what we tried to do and what we will keep on doing until the end of the process. In a way, the commissioner is always part of the community you are trying to build and will definitely benefit from getting the best out of the people involved. As Aristotle once said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In other words, when individual parts are connected together to form one entity, they are worth more than if the parts were in silos... Community Design.

PERFORMATORY

At Performatory, we are all about Transformative Social Innovation, which we describe as follows: Transformative Social Innovation is about improving the social interaction between people in such a way that they embrace or come up with new ideas, perspectives or solutions. Innovations that tackle social, environmental, economic and/or cultural challenges (PERFORMATORY, n.d.).
A social innovator connects people and organizations around a certain topic. He or she facilitates the process of co- designing and co-creating and knows how to stimulate this process, based on knowledge and experiences. 

In a more technical sense, TRANSIT describes Transformative Social Innovation as “The process of challenging, altering, or replacing the dominance of existing institutions in a specific social and material context. SI initiatives and networks are understood as the key collective actors that instigate TSI processes’’. TRANSIT has taught us that in order to challenge dominant existing institutions (systems) you have to work with them rather than against them. Metaphorically seen, we cannot welcome the new without guiding out the old. We have been trying to connect people and organizations around the Emmasingelkwadrant, but in order to be able to do so, it is important to understand the complex situation of the issue and the various perspectives of the stakeholders (Haxeltine, Pel, Dumitru, Avelino, Kemp, Bauler, Kunze, Dorland, Wittmayer and Søgaard Jørgensen, 2017).

In the case of the Emmasingelkwadrant project, we have learned that in a way, the locals have become victims of the systems that the state has created in order to make sense of urban development. Considering the theory of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas (1981) about the existence of a division between the lifeworld and system world, we could say that in case of the Emmasingelkwadrant, the lifeworld has become victim to the systemic world. According to Habermas, people function in a shared lifeworld. In this world they speak, share with others and strike up friendships. This lifeworld is based on communicative rationality. Besides it, there are systems, such as state and market, based upon instrumental rationality. Problems emerge where systems ‘colonise’ the lifeworld and force it into inappropriate goal-means logics (Habermas, 1981). 

The municipality asked us to create a ‘positive buzz’ in the lifeworld in order to relieve the residents’ struggles with the system world. Quite the task. Nevertheless we do think that the solution for the issues with the system world lies in the life world. Instead of challenging issues within neighborhoods with technical approaches, we prefer listening to the locals and exploring opportunities together. We plea for a more humane vision in these complex situations. Focus on the opportunities without acknowledging the shortcomings in the area. We plea to step back into the lifeworld without ignoring the system world, which cannot rule. That is what we continuously try to do at Performatory and what we will bring in the continuation of the project for the municipality of Eindhoven.

REFERENCES

Habermas, J. (1981). Systeemwereld & Leefwereld. Retrieved January 23, 2021, from http://dehefboom.org/systeemwereld-en-leefwereld/

Haxeltine, A., Pel,B., Dumitru, A., Avelino, F., Kemp, R., Bauler, T., Kunze, I., Dorland, J., Wittmayer, J. and Søgaard Jørgensen, M. (2017). Towards a TSI theory: a relational framework and 12 propositions. Retrieved January 23, 2021, from http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/content/original/Book%20covers/Local%20PDFs/286a%20TRANSIT_WorkingPaper_TowardsTSItheory%20AH161217.pdf 

PERFORMATORY. (n.d.). What is Transformative Social Innovation?. Retrieved January 23, 2021, from http://www.performatory.nl/education/

Scheepers, R. & Van Asseldonk, A. (2019). de beleving van het toekomstige victoriapark. Retrieved january 23, 2021, from https://www.scheepersenrenee.nl/victoriapark