What makes a place feel like home?
Taking Strijp-S as its starting point, the project asks: What would make a space feel like home? How do we inhabit urban and increasingly gentrified areas? And how do we respond to the forces that push people away from public spaces?
Rather than attempting to answer these questions ourselves, we invite the public to explore them with us. During Dutch Design Week, we will organise a series of three participatory workshops centered around noticing, notating, and collaborating.
How do we put these in practice?
The first workshop is a photo-walk, encouraging participants to move through Strijp-S, slow down, observe their surroundings, and photograph details that contribute to their experience of the neighbourhood. The second explores different forms of notation—writing, drawing, and other forms of inscription—as ways of translating personal feelings and observations into physical traces.
The material generated through these workshops, together with archival material, will become the basis for a third workshop focused on collective publication-making. Participants will then work with these generated material, in order to create their own small publications. These individual works will become part of a collectively produced library of zines: an evolving, experiential archive of Strijp-S.
A design-less design.
At the centre of the project is an interest in co-creation.. We do not want to speak for the people who inhabit the neighbourhood, but create a space where they can contribute to its narrative. We see ourselves as facilitators rather than curators, allowing the project to develop through the experiences and interpretations of its participants.
Ultimately, Whose [Space] Is It Anyway? asks how we might collectively reconsider our relationship to the spaces we inhabit—and how public space can become a place of belonging.
