Wildemanbuurt, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Source: Desire site experience and future plans, AAU, page 26-

The Wildemanbuurt is a post-war social housing neighbourhood of poor quality, built in the 1950s, and situated in the Nieuw-West area of Amsterdam. Initially, the area attracted residents seeking spacious living within a green environment. 

In the 1970s it saw a demographic shift, becoming predominantly inhabited by immigrants of non-western origin. 

Currently, it accommodates approximately 5,000 residents, mostly big families with a notable proportion of elderly (around 12%) and young inhabitants (around 40% under 30 years old).

Wildemanbuurt in Amsterdam, Netherlands is a neighbourhood often depicted negatively. However, inhabitants are determined to change this narrative. The Desire project is powered by the energy of this community.

“We try to work with what is there and nurture good ideas, foster new relationships. In the end, it's really about agency and working together to create a new neighbourhood from a place of trust,” says Rosalie Bak, Community Builder and Social Designer for the Desire partner Stichting Samenwonen-Samenleven.

Have a look at the Desire film (2024) and meet also the youngsters from Young Osdorp United that are making videos and photography to tell great stories from the area.

Wildemanbuurt faces various challenges such as a relatively high crime rate and prevalent poverty among its residents. Many residents feel a sense of neglect from municipal and social housing authorities, due to unfulfilled promises and plans made over the years.

Since 2023, the redevelopment of the neighbourhood is in progress. Some of the apartment blocks have been demolished. It is not transparent what will happen to the space and to the people that will have to move out.

Some citizen dialogues were scheduled by the municipality and the housing corporations to engage in a dialogue with local citizens about future housing and the living environment in general. The situation is complicated and dominated by strong opposite opinions, intransparency on goals and planning on the parts from the municipality, and a situation where various groups are not represented equally.

As a result, one significant challenge in Wildeman is the deeply rooted and mutual distrust between citizens and formal institutions, including the municipality. Furthermore, within the community itself, various groups harbour distrust towards each other, leading to a reluctance to communicate or collaborate.

Relationships and conflicts are strained, and external pressures, such as area development plans, poverty, lack of opportunities, and limited space, exacerbate this tension.

The redevelopment of housing is accompanied by the redevelopment of public spaces, aligning with both sustainable development goals and social objectives. Various social issues, including poverty, health, and waste management, are intertwined in Wildeman. Addressing these challenges requires integrated approaches, which pose a significant challenge for formal institutions due to their compartmentalised nature. However, residents living amidst these issues inherently understand their interconnectedness.

Therefore, the primary inquiry arises:

- How can residents of Wildeman take on leadership and ownership in shaping the
neighbourhood's development for the forthcoming decades?

- What strategies can facilitate this?

To achieve this, the project partners, The Beach and Samenwonen-Samenleven (SW-SL), collaborate with citizens and local authorities, devising strategies for creating environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive spaces and processes within the community.

There are several initiatives in the Wildeman neighbourhood, organised by local organisations and/or citizens. One such initiative is WeShare7, where residents and organisations collaborate on projects to strengthen the neighbourhood. 

In the larger New-West area, the ‘Kracht van New-West’ initiative was started, which is an informal platform of civic initiatives that aims to bridge the gap between top-down policies and citizen
engagement.

It includes residents' councils, meet & match events, and a civic design community to empower citizens and connect them with policymaking processes, injecting the latter with bottom-up input. This initiative works with the ‘National Plan Together New-West’, a top-down national program aimed at long-term transitions in sustainability, housing, and education.

Watch this beautiful document about extraordinary people in Wildemanbuurt, Amsterdam! The video was made for the closing conference for the Desire project September 2024 by Y.O.U. (Young Osdorp United), the ODG Peaceful Neighbourhood (Design- and Do Group Peaceful Neighbourhood). The youngsters interviewed all the other ODGs, asking: “What are you proud of?”

The Desire project in Wildeman follows the principles of belonging and movement, striving to foster community through design activities that bring diverse residents together and empower individuals with the resources needed to drive positive change in their community.

The aim is to cultivate a neighbourhood that is co-created, reflecting the values and aspirations of all its residents.

The project launched in November 2022, with events to explore neighbourhood issues together with the residents. As a result, various resident-led thematic working groups were formed, called ‘Design & Do groups’ (ODG), named, for example, ‘Green & Happy’, ‘Healthy Connections’, and ‘Neighborhood economy’. The ‘Green and Happy’ ODG works to revitalise a community garden with resident and occasional municipal collaboration.

The ‘Tea Garden’ ODG transformed a grey area into a green meeting space to foster collaboration among stakeholders. The ‘Healthy Connections’ ODG aims to shift from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’ mentality, hosting a ‘Health Café’ and launching a local newspaper.

Another ODG, called ‘Peaceful Neighborhood’, invited the youth organisation ‘Y.O.U.’ (Young Osdorp United) to collaborate with local residents in creating a more social, sustainable, and safe neighbourhood. In April 2023, a meeting was organised to outline a civic design process as a framework for collaboration among the ODGs.

Notably, every activity that is running within the ODG’s generated new ideas and initiatives, raising questions about how all these spin offs can be supported. Wildeman is now initiating a green coalition that includes local residents, community initiatives, the municipality, and housing cooperatives. They aim for this coalition to be recognized as a vital initiative within the neighbourhood. In addition to numerous human-centred projects, Wildeman is also exploring how to address non-human concerns.

Specifically, they are looking to connect with initiatives in the Netherlands that focus on these issues, such as ‘Zoöp,’ an organisational model designed to facilitate cooperation between human and non-human life, safeguarding the interests of all forms of life.

Story

Creating social and inclusive housing in Amsterdam: By co-creating with residents from all walks of life, our partners can create visions for an equitable and sustainable future; one that is not just for the few, but includes everyone. - All Desire partners visited Wildemanbuurt in Amsterdam in May 2023. Read more

The Beach and SW-SL is considered a (living) civic design tool in itself, actively facilitating collaborative efforts among stakeholders. Beyond simply sharing knowledge, networks, and expertise, the project partners provide practical co-design tools and organise workshops to support the co-design process within Wildeman. This support takes various forms, such as equipping the group with the necessary co-design capacities, or initiating concrete sharing moments among existing organisations in the area. 

For example, in April 2023, a meeting was held to introduce the civic design process to the ODGs. During this session, participants engaged in hands-on activities, including tinkering with and assembling six puzzle pieces representing different components of the civic design process.

Midway through the project, some ODGs expressed a need for reflection, a more democratic distribution of funds, and a desire to be heard more effectively. The project partners also recognized the need to re-establish trust and collaboration among various groups. 

To address this, an ODG exchange session was organised during a dinner in a neutral space, designed with both practical and emotional aims. 

The practical aims focused on increasing understanding and alignment regarding future plans, summarising plans through mapping and drawing activities, and incorporating reflections and insights from previous workshops, emphasising the importance of a flexible agenda, taking turns, timing, and maintaining quietude. The emotional aims strived to foster a positive spirit, pride, and togetherness among participants, with the overall goal of building a deeper sense of community, collaboration, wellbeing, and engagement, ensuring all voices were heard and valued. 

The session began with participants sitting in a circle, where each ODG had five minutes to present their progress using a format of their choice. Following the presentations, participants contributed their thoughts on successes, improvements, concerns, and opportunities using sticky notes on a wall-mounted matrix. After a reflective activity and a break, the group reviewed some reflections and concluded with a drawing activity. 

Participants, divided into two groups, created roadmaps outlining their goals for the end of the Desire project and beyond. The outcomes included summaries of the ODG projects and two detailed roadmaps and scenarios outlining long-term visions for Desire and the ODG projects. 

These roadmaps serve as vision documents expressing collective goals such as fostering happiness in the neighbourhood, discovering uniqueness through connectivity, being committed and unified, earning money through initiatives, and strengthening resident ownership to contribute positively to the neighbourhood. Clear follow-up actions were identified, too, including discussing budget redistribution, pitching projects to the Amsterdam municipality, and forming working and action groups to support community wealth-building efforts. 

A unified voice emerged among the individual ODG groups, highlighting the importance of collaboration and developing an umbrella cooperation to encompass multiple initiatives. Enthusiasm was regained among participants, though some frustration regarding budget issues remained, indicating a need for continued attention to this matter.

As a major ongoing issue in Wildeman is the lack of trust, the project partners organised a trust workshop to help rebuild it. The workshop focused on two main questions: 

(1) What can you do to keep others in the group safe?

(2) What can you do to support the people, the neighbourhood, and Amsterdam more? 

Participants collectively established a set of guiding principles, including lovingness, prioritising relationships, reciprocity, genuine curiosity, solidarity, and recognizing individual circumstances. They also defined associated actions such as listening attentively, creating space for each other, protecting one another, advocating for justice, selflessly giving, embracing diversity, acting on intuition, and cherishing collaborative efforts.

Reflections and learnings from the process that strived to empower citizens to take the lead, highlighted the need for a relational approach. 

The Amsterdam project team captured this in a workshop template to be used by other project sites, emphasising the importance of making these workshops context-specific, honouring stakeholders' feelings, consistently asking for feedback on the workshop design, and including both formal and informal remarks from stakeholders.

Another key learning was allowing enough time for participants to connect informally at the beginning of the workshop to prevent delays and a rushed program. The success of the ODGs was attributed to mutual trust, respect, and genuine interest in each other's initiatives. 

Despite the evident will and energy in Wildeman, fostering solidarity and trust among community members remains difficult due to deeply ingrained distrust, and requires time and continuous effort to be achieved. 

As project partners, it is important to demonstrate sincerity through ongoing participation in local initiatives like WeShare and Kracht van Nieuw-West, and collaborating with both local and top-down policy bodies, which helps establish credibility and foster trust. 

Another learning was that unleashing civic power is supported by valuing, involving and working with young people and youth-led initiatives to drive community-led movements. 

Other reflections highlighted that community wealth building entails identifying and nurturing economic activities tailored to the neighbourhood's needs, empowering residents to participate meaningfully in the local economy. In this context, it is considered crucial not to impose practices that may not align with community needs but rather to encourage local entrepreneurship and collaboration while learning from residents.

Finally, an important learning was the need to develop an awareness of different understandings and a unifying vocabulary concerning key concepts, such as desirable change. The project partners explored their different interpretations of these concepts using a table that surfaced the distinct yet interrelated perspectives of SW-SL, The Beach, and Desire/NEB.

Materials and helpful links

Transformation theme: Establish and nurture ownership

Transformation theme: Build and maintain trust

Territorial transformation plan

The territorial transformation plan of the Wildeman neighbourhood unfolds from the experiences of developing self-organising and self-supporting citizens groups, the ODGs (‘Design & Do Groups). At the end of Desire, six ODGs have been established with each their specific identity and core theme. The territorial transformation plan describes the further implementation of this new model for citizens engagement through two specific and well-defined outcomes:

• Citizens Creative Hub - a place ‘owned’ by local citizens strengthening the neighbourhood. This was an expressed need from citizens involved in the ODGs - however, it is an outcome which relates to a more long-term transformation of the Wildeman neighbourhood.

• A Civic Design Community of Practice - a new model for designing with and in a local context. The implementation of this outcome also concerns how efforts might be leveraged and connected to policies, plans and authorities involved in urban planning and transformation of the built environment in the Wildemanbuurt.

The activities described below are concrete examples of actions considered relevant to pursue the implementation of the territorial transformation of the Wilderman neighbourhood building on the outcomes of the Desire activities. 

Behind these activities stand the two involved organisations, The Beach and SamenWonen-SamenLeven. However, it needs to be stated that to be true to the bottom-up approach that characterized the Desire activities at Wilderman it will require a continued listening to and respect for views and expressions of the local ODGs. 

In that sense, the territorial transformation plan represents a living document guiding potential next steps but not excluding that new and different paths will be taken.

The long-term vision

The long-term vision for Wildemanbuurt extends from the ongoing local activities towards creating a thriving community with engagement, pride and nurture for each other and the place. It includes a vision of working with people as experts in their own living environment, a place where interactions unfold based on mutual trust and an ecological way of thinking of the neighbourhood as a place that honours the entanglements and complexities of the neighourbourhood dynamics. Key concepts defining the long-term vision are: Community, health, green, ownership, connections, collaborations, civic design. (ref. Narratives)

The term ‘neighbourhood ecology’ which emerged from activities performed in the Wildeman neighbourhood during the Desire project frames the long-term vision excellently.