Quand Les Zoziaux
The question
In ZWERM the City of Ghent took on the neighbourhood activation, together with local community groups. Sparrows of Hasselt I then did almost single-handedly, social activation included, and it was exhausting: I attempted too much with too few resources, without any experience in community work. The question here was the reverse: what happens if you hand the intervention to people who do have that craft? How do seasoned socio-cultural workers appropriate an installation like this, and what do they turn it into?
What we made
Culture Schaerbeek carried the project. They structured the neighbourhood networks, each with a network coordinator and four campaign coordinators, they found the participants through their own network, the local press, posters and postcards, and they did the social activation week after week. In co-construction workshops, residents from the various networks helped build the sparrows themselves, using acetone welding, soldering, bolts and glue guns.
The game ran in several languages at once. In Schaerbeek that is not a detail: around eighty per cent of residents have foreign roots, and cultural life there is split between a Dutch-language and a French-language department. Whistling needs no words.
My share was the material and the making of it: five whistling sparrows, four of which went out into the street, and the online platform that tracked whistles per network with a score graph, a map and an activity monitor. Compared to earlier versions I made the sparrows more robust and extended the platform. I ran the co-construction workshops, and beyond that deliberately stayed in the background.
A few weeks before the start, Brussels was hit by the March 2016 attacks. The communal council and the police asked for the project to be cancelled. The organisers held their ground: the need for something like this was higher now than ever.
What came of it
The platform recorded 194,000 whistles, an average of 6,928 a day. In 2017 the project won the public prize of the Matexi Award, which recognises initiatives that bring a neighbourhood together.
More telling than the number is what grew around it. Culture Schaerbeek added game elements I would never have thought of myself: a challenge cup handed to the best performing network every week, golden and bronze bird trophies, weekly campaign themes (meeting, living together, partying, helping each other) and a Warmest Quarter certificate awarded to the network with the finest actions. That certificate shifted the game from whistling to placemaking. The grand prize: a neighbourhood party.
And residents built on it themselves:
- they made the sparrows personal with bunting, birdhouses and decorations
- they promoted whistling with posters, stencils and tape lettering on fences
- schools took the sparrow into class: analysing scores in maths, whistling lessons in music class
- pupils learned vector drawing and had their own bird shapes laser cut at a FabLab
- an engineer built a mobile sparrow on a cart with a battery and a WiFi router, to reach neighbourhoods without one
- and plenty appeared that had nothing to do with technology: soup, pancakes, Moroccan tea, a repair café, street games, street poetry, moss drawings on facades, wishing balloons, a miniature theatre, a dance routine, a radio broadcast
For my PhD this is the closing piece. The intervention was no longer the content but the occasion — an occasion sturdy enough to hang a neighbourhood on. More about that on the research page.