Wednesday 9th June 2021
19.00-21.00 @ VARIA (Gouwstraat 3)
The starting moment to build a grassroots curriculum for and by cultural workers, neighbours, students and residents to collectively learn, unlearn and develop strategies to resist gentrification within our communities.
Our curriculum unfolds, grows and develops through our gatherings. We acknowledge the complexities and intersecting struggles that are layered within the term ‘gentrification’ and whilst we do not want to oversimplify, we would like to find clear tactics to resist it.
We all have something to share and something to learn. We brought our concerns, questions, stories and experiences to start mapping our complicity and entanglement in the process of gentrification.
Trying to build a collective definition of gentrification led us into a web of struggles and resistance. How does gentrification work? Is it reversible? What to do about our own complicity? How to find the resistance energising? How to take collective action?
At the end, a neighbour came to speak to us. She questioned who we were, why we don’t speak Dutch and why we are trying to bring her neighbourhood ‘culture’ when she has culture already. It raised questions of how art projects and spaces can connect more to neighbours and neighbourhoods and value culture that already exists and thrives. How do we resist being an island, how do we become more radically hospitable?
Resources / Links:
- Bond Precaire Woonvormen (BPW) is een vereniging die strijd voor het recht op wonen en de stad.
- Recht op de Stad Het betere plan voor wonen in Rotterdam.
- Leana Boven: SPATIAL INJUSTICE IN ROTTERDAM:PAST AND PRESENT PRACTICES OF RACIAL VIOLENCE INFLICTED UPON CERTAIN RACIALIZED BODIES THROUGH THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
- Leefbarometer: National tool to monitor “the quality of life in all inhabited districts, neighborhoods and streets in the Netherlands.
- Rotterdamwet: A policy which gives the municipality the right to control who can live in certain streets in neighbourhoods based on income, criminal record etc.
- The Hague Gentrification Map projectÂ