Yakov Lurie — AnthroAction course participant — Team De Meevaart
De Meevaart combines pretty ambitious community-building goals in a neighborhood with residents of very diverse economic/cultural backgrounds. Yet, in its everyday work it focuses on practical, down-to-earth tasks such as “how to bring people together for an event.” After some time we spent struggling with broader formulations of the research question, we narrowed it to: “What shared motivations can we build the ‘Blue Zone’ pioneer group around?” To us and seemingly to the De Meevaart team, at least to Tim, it captured both the ambition of identifying common ground–the shared values–among diverse urban groups and the very practical goal of discovering a format that can bring neighborhood residents together, including those outside the community center. As for the eldwork, the question seemed to be universal enough to make surveys and interviews with people from different cities, which in our case was crucial.
Probably again the universal component of our question. We could make sense of it, because we could try it on ourselves. While making sense of complex De Meevaart and Indische Buurt social tensions (something we tried to do at rst) would clearly be impossible, especially in such short timeframe and with no access to physical field site.
In our case, gathering and analysis were not two separate stages. We continued conducting interviews and surveys while simultaneously revisiting the data. I think it was exactly this iteration that allowed us to adjust to fast ethnography tempos. What was really helpful were discussions with people outside the research team (mentors and De Meevaart staff), as they served as “reality checks”. Also, to be honest, the deadlines and changes in workshop stages were helpful in themselves to push us forward (without them we could still be discussing social complexity, inequality, class differences, gentrication and other very important and very vague things).
In practice, it was mainly the brainstorm session we had during our rst trip to Pardubice. Throwing all the data insights in a pile and extracting ideas that resonated with most of us kind of launched the design imagination. Also, the responsibility of developing a practical solution itself. Unlike in academic research, where the level of personal responsibility usually feels lower.
I do actually believe that the Walkshop format provides a smooth and friendly way to step out of your social comfort zone for a while and explore both the environment you live in and the people you live next to, all while doing something healthy (and it’s free!). What — if not something like this — has the potential to make the community more connected and the neihghborhood life better in general? As for the responsibility of the community center, I think they are responsible to the extent that they set such ambitious (and great) goals as making the neighborhood a better place for so many different people. As long as they are entitling themselves to try, they are responsible for these efforts.
I’m not sure if this is exactly an ethical challenge, but I felt uneasy — especially at rst — doing ethnography with no direct contact to people at Indische Buurt and De Meevaart and with practically zero knowledge of the community (like — “who am I to be doing something for, say, an elderly woman from Morocco who lives in Amsterdam without ver speaking to her or anyone like her?”).
The thing I mentioned before: the responsibility you take for your ideas. And the value of doing something closer to real life (meaning that you can actually check if your work is worth something).
