Cities and dense urban areas are dynamic environments, always adapting to changing circumstances and shocks, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The Vaartkom (or the Canal Bowl in English), a neighbourhood in Leuven, provides an interesting case study, having undergone a drastic transformation in the past two decades from a dilapidated industrial zone to mixed neighbourhood and cultural hotspot. This has introduced renewed and ongoing community dynamics, which inevitably influences the use of public and private space in the neighbourhood, creating new areas for inclusion and exclusion. This threefold transdisciplinary research focuses first on the spatial dynamics on the level of public space under COVID-19 as part of a wider series of neighbourhood dynamics. Second, it dives into the aspect of inclusive environments and third, it uses the transdisciplinary research process to reflect on a meta-level. Employing various methods – such as interviews, site visits, stakeholder and physical mapping exercises, we worked with community members to explore these spatial dynamics. Our findings highlight the conflicting expectations about the present and future use of public space. These opposing opinions reveal the tensions that exist among community members about how public spaces are used and whom they are for. This suggests there are multiple understandings of the Vaartkom. These multiple understandings were drawn from responses collected during a public engagement activity, which were subsequently analysed in a thematic and spatial way. This analysis brought forward influences of a temporal and spatial nature – that is, we acknowledge that the selected locations at which we engaged with community members, and the time of day, played a role in who we reached in the community and the responses we collected. This highlights the degree of awareness and participatory effort required to be truly inclusive. We therefore pro pose that future engagements involve the creation of a "Third Sphere" – a space for open, transparent and neutral dialogue – allowing the opportunity not only to imagine a collective future, but also to build bridges and help community members feel heard and empowered to contribute to the creation of a more inclusive post-COVID-19 environment.
Cities and dense urban areas are dynamic environments, always adapting to changing circumstances and shocks, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Vaartkom, a neighbourhood in Leuven, provides an interesting case-study, having undergone a drastic transformation in the past two decades, from dilapidated industrial zone to residential quarter and cultural hot-spot. This has introduced a demographic shift, which inevitably influences the use of public and private space in the neighbourhood, creating new areas for inclusion and exclusion. Our research focuses on how the use of public space has changed under COVID-19, and how community members envision their neighbourhood in a post-COVID context. We employed various methods – such as interviews, site visits, stakeholder and physical mapping exercises – and worked with the community to identify the different areas of in-and exclusivity. Some findings relate to the conflicting expectations about the use and future of public space and the link between the location of public engagement and the level of inclusiveness. This illustrates the magnitude and consciousness of the effort required to be truly inclusive. Above all, our own understanding of inclusivity broadened significantly over the duration of the project, illustrating the clear advantage of using a transdisciplinary approach in research. Our findings have been summarised in a small video.
Early morning 7:00 a.m. I slam the alarm clock and pull the blanket over my head. Yet, another day in this never-ending lockdown story. "The last COVID-25 related lockdown," policy makers announced. Yeah, right! Nobody seems to know where this COVID-25 virus is heading. I stretch my arms and crawl out of bed. I take a short stroll to the mailbox, the only safe distance I am currently allowed to walk. Going through the post with a hot cup of coffee became one of the highlights in days of screen-based conversations with colleagues, students or research partners. A bright red envelope catches my eye. It has my name carefully written on the front, and is dated on April 6, 2121. Interesting… Would it…? Yes! A ticket for a three-day conference in the year 2121! Let's say, working congresses have just become a little more exciting now that they involve the possibility of time travel! On the agenda: "Pandemic preparedness." Would people in 2121 still struggle with COVID-25? Or perhaps they found out how to best relate to it, and would like to inform us? Anyway, the event is tomorrow (ninetysix years from now), so I should start preparing a bit.
As aresponse to traditional (top‐down) urban planning processes, placemaking engages local citizens in the process of shaping the form, social activity, and meaning of places around them. However, placemaking practices similarly face political challenges regarding inclusion and emplacement. These challenges relate to who participates, facilitation through linguistic discourse, and place engagement itself. Attempting to address these challenges, this article (based on a pilot study) reports on the design and deployment of the StoryMapper, a traveling placemaking interface that uses a participant‐driven “chain of engagement” recruiting process to invite participants to create emplaced “morphings” (i.e., visually produced stories superimposed on public space) to spark dialogue on a digitally facilitated living map. This pilot study took place within a larger placemaking project that engages citizens to share their ideas regarding the reconversion of a community church. Plugging the Storymapper into this larger project, we discuss preliminary findings relating to the role of placemaking facilitators in citizen‐driven recruitment and the role of multimodality in placemaking processes. This pilot study suggests that inclusion should not only be evaluated based on who participates and who does not, but also on how the tool itself, in its capacity to engage participants to visualize complex emplaced ideas, may facilitate inclusion of different publics.
This review is a bricolage of nomadic encounters with Jorge Lucero and colleagues’ (2016) article on ways to engage with collaborative publishing. Lucero presents a Facebook discussion amongst practitioners denouncing the limited power of practitioners in shaping academic discourse. It shows how social media can serve as a platform for inviting the practitioner’s voice into research. The authors illustrate that by using Facebook, practitioners’ unfamiliarity and discomfort with academic standards can be bypassed. It demonstrates metalogue as a conceptual form of writing that disrupts the structure of conversations and challenges the authorial researchers’ voices. A critical note, however, is whether it is beneficial in the long term to consider the academic and social media parts as separate accounts. We argue that collaborative publishing requires collaborative research and writing in the first place. In response to the article, we started a WhatsApp conversation. This enabled us to reflect on the content of the article and experience the use of social media as a collaborative writing method ourselves.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.