It was difficult not to be happy after watching the two short movies that were screened at ISHF – International Social Housing Festival 2023 side event ‘How social housing and community regeneration benefit challenging neighborhoods’. We saw deeply motivated professionals in community projects and we heard citizens and tenants telling how the neighborhood changed for better.
The first movie was presented by Daniel Millor Vela and Neus Maronas , who are program coordinator of the ‘Asertos’ project, to revitalize a run down neighborhood called ‘El Cemeterio’ in Alicante, Spain. Right at the introduction we learned that this area is one of the worst in Alicante. Houses are run down, public space looks like a dump, people’s lives are bad. ‘My life is fighting for my loved ones’ says a woman living in a shed.
Then we saw projects being carried out, with great involvement of the inhabitants. Roofs were repaired. Gardens were planted. People gathered for shared dinners. And it worked, people started being proud of their neighborhood, started helping each other, started working on public spaces and gardens themselves.
“We decided not to focus on solving the problems, but instead on strengthening the qualities that we saw,” says Daniel Millor after screening the movie. ‘In Spain 1/3 of the people live in vulnerable neighborhoods. There are so many resources, there is so much talent in those neighborhoods. We all know the theory behind innovation, it is using the same resources in a different manner to create something better. Here we did the same. We tried to raise awareness among the people of their qualities and to enable them to develop.’ And it worked.
The second movie was about the ‘Bijlmer’ neighborhood, a vast seventies modernist style social housing district in the outskirts of Amsterdam. Rosita Mo-Ajok, Chiara Nykamp and Justin van der Ven represented the housing association ‘Woningstichting Rochdale’. This association is the biggest landlord in the district, and therefore is very present in the people’s lives. The movie makers asked themselves what value social housing providers bring to them and interviewed tenants, neighbors and experts working in the area.
The result was surprisingly positive. Rochdale -in in particular its social workers- were not just regarded as a landlord, but also as the first person to talk to if there is any problem concerning the neighborhood. All interviewees couldn’t imagine that the Bijlmer would be the same if there was no social housing provided by a non-profit association. The area -as they expected- would be more run down, the rents would be much higher, the landlords wouldn’t care as much for the tenants as Rochdale did.
(this article is part of a series of blog articles for the ISHF live blog website, in collaboration with Housing Europe)
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