Conflicts in the neighborhood

Introduction

The neighborhood is deeply interesting and had received waves of attention from urban planners, sociologists and the like. In this blog I will explain the conflicts that I have identified between individuals, groups of people in the neighborhood Klarendal.

Diametricism

I found a relatively simple way to categorize these conflicts by first describing the very specific point of friction, debate and displeasure. Then synthesizing those conflicts into a more generic category and finding the diametric opposites of these more general conflicts. Doing this presents an opportunity to identify the conflicts without getting bogged down in the specificalities of those. Lets just dive into it.

The stoop culture

Diametricism:

Individual function claims <– –> the public function

Description:

People in this neighborhood often have little private space, as the houses and gardens are quite petite. People use the stoop, a meter of space in front of their house and pull it into a semi-private realm. Examples are beautifully planted borders with benches or chairs to sit on. This is quite a harmless example. There are people who take it a step further, and claim a parking space in front of their house to place a small table with chairs, or a kiddie pool for their children to find cooling during a hot summer.

Where:

A higher degree of claiming of the public space happens in streets with small profiles and small houses. Generally, I observe more benches and chairs in front of houses where the function of the street is primarily to provide acces to the front door of the inhabitants of the street. In other words, when the street is locally oriented and so does not have a function in the larger scale traffic system of the neighborhood.

The magic:

The public space becomes more privatised. But in return, the private lives become more public. There is a dialogue between publicness and privateness and a fine line to walk in terms of changing publically decised functions (by the municipality). It is a disordering mechanism which requires dialogue to solve this conflict in opposing views of the function of public space.

Homelessness or: living behind the system of control

Diametricism:

Help the meek <– –> Safety and control

Description:

The homeless and urban poor live in a constant position of precarity. Presently, the homeless are being more or less imported into Arnhem. This happens because other cities and towns have insufficient holding cell capacity. Those who comitted the crime of living in extreme conditions, without a place to call home, are being transported to Arnhem. They are not going to pay for a train ticket home; what even is home for them? In their condition, it is the entire public realm. How inconceivable it is to declare homelessness a crime. Yet our society has done so, without providing adequate resources to uplift these people and get them back on their feet. There can be no criminalization of this condition without an aid-structure.

The homeless live on the street and can find very temporary comfort in De Duif, which is a house for homeless with warm food and drink, including a sleeping dorm. I have been told that the dorm is unsafe. People might be under influence and during sleep one might fall victim to theft. Life on the streets requires one to carry their entire set of belongings with them at all time. There is a permanent risk of loss of personal items.

Life without a home is tough. It is about survival. And so, the behaviour of a homeless person in the public realm is in an entirely different register. The use of public space as a living room is in conflict with home-owning inhabitants of the neighborhood. While there is a wish for more loitering quality in public space, there is a tension between orderly usage of for example public benches and the different perception in use of these amenities by the homeless.

This conflict is particularily difficult to solve. As there is division among neighbors on the solution. One camp beats the homeless away. This position is fed by wounds from the past that are still embodied by the older inhabitants who have lived through the troubles of Klarendal from the 70’s to late 80’s when the neighborhood knew severe urban blight. Examples are crumbling buildings. Long-standing uninhabited buildings which attracted all kinds of criminal activity (mostly narco houses).

On the other side, there are heart warming stories about volunteers who provide direct aid to the homeless. For example, there is a man who has a cart full of hot food and drink, who always shows up in a childrens playground on sunday to give to the homeless. Other people collect old clothes for donation. They find joy in providing this aid but receive opposition from the first group, who feel like the do-gooders are subsidizing homelessness and making the neighborhood more attractive to them.

Sorry, that was a long writeup but I needed to get it off my heart. I spent a day in the homeless shelter and was so moved by the warmth of the volunteers their. Being in the peculiar situation of sitting at a table with some sleeping, and the remainder watching failarmy videos on a big tv screen. It was comforting and so very humane.

Where:

According to the local police officer, there is no particular place where the homeless tend to gather apart from the shelter. But there are places that are more attractive than others. For example secluded places with a bench and greenery around. Public spaces that enable seclusion and privacy.

The magic:

It feels a bit inappropriate to write about the magic of homelessness. But I want to take the opportunity to try anyway, because it touches upon the (differing) interpretation of what order is. And the value of direct action in relation to old wounds carried by a large group of inhabitants.

The presence of the homeless causes a condition of disorder. Which requires dialogue about what the desired order is and how to achieve this. I believe that a productive middle ground can be found in dialogue between the opposing parties.

Gentrification and changing identity

Diametricism: Collective homogenity <– –> diverse communities

Description: Klarendal is in a process of gentrification. This process has been set in motion long ago, during the first wave of urban transformation, where the old, small and insufficiently maintained workers’ houses were replaced by more expensive housing that was unaffordable for the largest part of the neighborhoods population. The housing corporation had to offer this housing to their own employees, which were barely able to afford the rent themselves. This introduced the first group of otherness so to say.

A later driver of gentification is one that was embraced in urban policy and city branding. The infamous Modekwartier which is both loved and despised. Fashion was the visual and economic-spatial means of changing the neighborhoods identity by marketing the authentic working-class culture and adding fashion and creative entrepreneurship to the mix. This development takes place in the context of neoliberalism and fueled by Richard Florida’s Rise of the creative class.

The Modekwartier was always there in a way, but it had to be activated. Students from ArtEZ have been living in Klarendal for a long time because of low rent and proximity to the city centre. The choice to focus on rebranding the neighborhood to fashion lies in the function of aesthetic. The municipality could have elevated all butchers’ shops towards a butchers’ quarter but the aesthetic of butchers would not attract the target group the municipality wanted to see.

In a way the transformation of the neighborhood could be described as making visible a quality that was already present, albeit a specific subset of qualities. Fashion renders Klarendal attractive to the right kind of people. Berry Kessels describes the thought behind this policy in 2014: “you have to claim public space for good people, otherwise the bad people will take it.” Quite something, isn’t it?

Good people and bad people. It reflects a fear for the neighborhood to slip back into darker times. Kessels provides the example that youngsters in hoodies - their mere presence in the public space - gives the good people the perception of insecurity. The answer to this is to marginalize the bad people. Gradually pushing them aside and underrepresenting their interest. I think this is a very hostile move to the perceived misfits. In my youth, I was one of the bad people, simply trying to find my way in the world. There was no dialogue, only judgement towards me. The top-down selection of who is good and who is bad, makes the Modekwartier an exclusionary set of policies aimed at increasing livability for a specific group.

Livability is an interesting subject because it is largely undefined and in the eye of the beholder. Kessels’ definition is along the lines of a lack of insecurity, pleasantness, comfort, an aesthetically pleasing environment. No misfits or bad people. The municipality names better quality tenants as an important means to increase livability. As are functions that attract people from outside the neighborhood, like hip bars and fashion shops. These functions are of no interest to the old Klarendallers. Other interventions would be lowering the stock of social housing to solve problems of poverty. This enforces the hegemony of the middle-upper class.

The municipality does not publically acknowledge the goal of changing the neighborhood’s population. However, this intention speaks from the administration’s actions. For example, in 2008 various documents regarding the neighborhood speak of acquiring higher quality tenants accompanied by spatial actions to make Klarendal more attractive for them. Displacement of original inhabitants is denied by both municipality and housing corporation. However, people of colour have lost 1/3 of their population since 2008 and entrepreneurs are hand-picked by the municipality. Old people are obliged to leave the neighborhood and the housing corporation labels people with mental health issues as problematic. Klarendal has the highest departure rate in comparison to Arnhem’s other neighborhoods.

Neoliberalism is: The unconstrained civil exercise of self interest contributes to a collective social benefit and the private property is the foundation of this self interest ideally exercised in the context of the free market (Hayek, 2012, Williamson, 1975).

This persuit of self interest is in a way in conflict with the working class culture, where mutual aid and direct action are values of importance that shapes individual relations and collective identity.

Where: Concentrated among the Klarendalseweg.

The magic: Gentrification is a hard issue to describe. Some won’t even go as far as to call it an issue. Some say it is a natural movement of the city. I think gentrification has a place in the city. And its effects have to be understood in order to have good gentrification. That is to say, gentrification that helps to increase the spatial quality without enforcing a hegemony on existing inhabitants. Gentrification that increases the connection of different people rather than entrenching existing divisions.

Automobility

Description: