Nicky Pouw (Governance and Inclusive Development, CUS, UvA) & Hebe Verrest (Governance and Inclusive Development, CUS, UvA), with research assistance by Jennifer van Beek (Research Master Urban Studies, UvA)
Contemporary cities are confronted with the challenge of creating inclusive and sustainable communities under conditions of mounting and compounding social, economic, cultural, environmental and spatial inequalities. In attempts to better understand and address this challenge, scholars and urban professionals are looking for new sets of wellbeing criteria- beyond a narrow set of economic growth indicators - to value city performance and reflect ambitions for a new urban paradigm (Gupta et al., 2015; Pouw, 2020). The City Doughnut (Raworth, 2020), and the Brede Welvaartsmonitor (OIS, 2020) are recent examples of indices aiming to capture a broader understanding of the quality of urban life. However, such alternative indices often find restricted or contested usage in urban policy and governance (e.g. Uitermark 2014). One reason for this is the mismatch between the wellbeing perspective expressed through the available data and the perspective that is lived and experienced at the level of communities, households and individual residents (Curtis et al., 2020).
This project aims to address this issue by bringing a household and community-level perspective on wellbeing in conversation with that expressed at municipal level. It aims at a. understanding wellbeing as lived and perceived by households and community groups in an ontwikkelbuurt (Venserpolder) in Amsterdam; and b. analysing the extent to which this perspective matches (or not) the data and instruments that are collected and used at city-level to present urban wellbeing. The research design adopts a sequential qualitative design, consisting of interviews with residents of Venserpolder (n=15), key informants (n=5) and participatory methods with community groups in Venserpolder to develop a local perspective on well being, and analysis of existing primary and/or secondary datasets (see Table A.3 in Annex) to identify gaps and similarities. In this project we work together with Fearless City, Najah Aouaki (urban strategist) and community groups in Venserpolder.