By: Rosa te Velde
On March 29, 30 and 31, the lectorate organized an 'Easter School', led by Tayfun Balçik. The research team, together with a diverse group of residents, activists, and a number of students from the Academy of Architecture, conducted research in Nieuw-West.
"What was it like here, in the so-called ‘ghetto', in the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium? Why did the new residents revolt in 1998? What happened next and what direction should the neighborhood take?"
Aminata introduced the Easterschool with a training in the Inclusivity Pathway Training, which provided an important basis for exploring these questions together. What do we do with the stories we encounter and what do we do with our own story? What do we do with discomfort? So-called 'bad neighborhoods' have seen plenty of white journalists, anthropologists and researchers passing by to get a story. Just because you want the story, you cannot have it.
Tayfun introduced his life story and the long time he had to wait for social housing. His story is the story of many young people in Nieuw-West. Your dreams for the future are on pause. Later that afternoon he took us on a bike tour along the places where he lived.
The next day we talked about the 'riots' of 1998. A table full of books and newspaper articles showed how the so-called 'Moroccan uprising' came into the news and how it was later investigated. Tayfun was there. We all decided to go to Piet Mondriaanplein where a young boy had been roughly arrested at the time. From there we walked to the roundabout that was occupied later that day, in response to the police violence. We stood on the roundabout with the participants and reflected on what took place twenty-six years ago. In the meantime, we viewed the old and new buildings on this currently popular piece of land.
During the story circle later that afternoon, led by Camiël, the participants shared their stories in relation to the stories Tayfun had shared with us.
1) tell a story about the place where you grew up that connects with the subject of gentrification
2) tell a story about the place where you grew up that relates to the happenings from Tayfuns recalling of 1998 and the roundabout where we just were
3) tell a story about meeting/encounter with someone that is not part of the community where you live can be happy can be sad
4) tell a story about what the place where you grew up or where you live stimulates/facilitates different people living / coming together.
In different rounds, the participants shared personal, emotional but also funny stories. The consensus was that we are more connected to each other than we think. One of the participants sent us an email the same evening: “I mainly experienced this day as safe. It is very different from when you have a group of (older) tenants and experts from the municipality or corporations who discuss with each other. We'll fight each other out!"
During the last day, Paulina guided us in making a body-territory mapping, a method from 'communitarian feminism'. This 'map' had as its starting point our own body in relation to the space in which we move. What happens in your body in relation to the space of the city you move in? In this mapping we also discussed not only the beautiful, but also the painful moments in the city.
We concluded the Easterschool with a conversation with writer Abdelkader Benali. We talked to him about 1998, 'around Sloterplas' and the importance of barbecuing as one of the most characteristic, inclusive and uniting structures of Nieuw-West.
On May 8 we are organizing a meeting in Nieuw Metropolis Nieuw-West. Together with the participants and local residents and researchers, we will share the memories we collected during the 'Re-membering Nieuw-West' Easter School and supplement them with even more memoirs from researchers and local residents. What are the gentrified stories? Which memories are in danger of being erased by the replacement of old residents by new residents?
