An Introduction to an Intervention in 2035
On a chilly Friday morning in January our team heads towards Rijnsweerd-Noord, a business park in the Eastern part of Utrecht. Our materials are in a typical Dutch bakfiets (carrier tricycle) and excitement fills the air as we come closer to our destination. Over the past months we fell in love with the hidden gems in this seemingly dull area. The arena at the end of the small canal we baptised ‘Venice Boulevard’, is the perfect stage for our intervention. As we use chalkboard paint, no rain means no pain today!
As we are preparing our game of the future, featuring a stylised map of the area and a wooden ‘quote collector’, we can already observe curious people watching from the windows of the surrounding office building. Just before lunchtime, a group of three office workers approach us out of curiosity and promise to come back after their daily lunch walk. Lunchtime is rush hour in these streets, as many office workers leave their office buildings.
we aimed to confront, inspire, trigger and disgust participants
Groups of lunch walkers pass by. We already found out that this is a neighbourhood where ‘arriving on time’, ‘movement’ and ‘functionality’ prevail. Nevertheless, we manage to break the routines of eleven passers-by, grasping their attention and convincing them to take a step into the future: 2035.
We invited participants to step into a chalk map of the area, in the year 2035. A quick introduction and orientation on the map, in which the participants shows us their routes and routines, the participant was then asked to choose from one of three scenarios, in which future developments of the area had been sketched out into extremes, it was either a mixed use area Walhalla, a mono-functional tomb, or a global mobility hub.
Thinking out loud, the participants start to visualise ‘their’ Rijnsweerd-Noord of the future. We encouraged them to think what the new scenario meant for their future daily lives. They were asked questions about the way they would move to and through the neighbourhood, what they would do during their lunch break or in their free time , what they would consume, and where and how they would live. This lead to interesting, quite entertaining and meaningful conversations about ‘what might be’.
With these scenarios we aimed to confront, entice, disgust, inspire, annoy and trigger participants to think about the future of the area, and what its attractiveness would mean to them and their daily lives in the area.
The result is a collection of new ideas, corresponding to certain locations on the map, in which the participants collectively help build a future for the neighbourhood that is (even) more appealing and tailored to their tastes. These ideas were written on wooden plaques, shown in the pictures below. Finally, the ideas have been mapped out into Rijnsweerd-Noord in an interactive map.
