Objectives

One of the two Dutch pilots involved collaboration between the citizens residing in social housings and the municipal service providers on improving the life quality by tailored waste cleaning services.

The neighborhood Plantsoen in the municipality of Nieuwegein consists of four apartment buildings (social housing), each with 90 households. When the apartments were built in the 1960s, it was an attractive neighbourhood. The families living there now are often of low social-economic status. This determines the vulnerability of the households and of the neighbourhood as a whole. For many years, the neighbourhood has been facing multiple problems concerning lack of participation, integration and social cohesion.

 “Old school“ support or interventions have not lead to change in the past years, no matter what the intensity of the intervention was. The approach “Neighbourhood”, (a plan from a multi-disciplinary steering group) has the ambition to heighten the quality of life and physical surroundings in a sustainable way.

In the door-to-door talks (visiting already more than half of the households), one of the main matters of discontent was found the amount of litter in the neighbourhood. 100 % of the inhabitants mentioned this as first priority. Knowing this, the municipality has intensified cleaning and garbage pick-up in 2018. To no avail however, shortly after all has been cleaned up, there is new rubbish. Some inhabitants don’t feel any responsibility to contribute to a clean environment.

To create sustainable change reciprocity and participation in some decisions about the neighbourhood were now recognized as necessary. The pilot was started aiming for co-creation with concerned citizens about reducing or banishing waste with new twist called the “Approach Neighbourhood”. The reason for focusing on waste is the perceived local impact of promoting responsibility for the living environment.  

All households in the neighbourhood are – in the end – target group but the pilot started with a small group of households hoping that in the process of co-creation this group will expand. All involved parties (municipality, housing corporation, youth work, social work, police) were introduced the co-creation approach with the aim to shift their approach towards involving also target groups for successful improvements in the neighbourhood.

Learnings

• Co-creation is not easy: it asks many skills from professionals as well as from the service users. It cannot be expected, that all people possess these skills, at least without proper training to the method. Communication is essential in co-creation.
• Offline communication needs to be quite structured; online communication is in this pilot non-existent. Even teaching the participants the ethics of fair communication is key to maintain conversation and make people want to engage in further joint activities.
• Collaboration between professionals and inhabitants is the very key to success: Do we all understand the terminology in the same way when we talk about co-creation?

Read more about the pilot at the Cosie project homepage

Questions for self-reflection

When reading and listening to the video – what was really new in the approach to identifying and solving acute problems of the neighbourhood?

Was it all about the waste problem or rather more?