Wrapping up: looking back at CoNECT in the Netherlands...

The three-year CoNECT project is coming to an end and, although our engagement continues, it is a good moment to look back and capture some highlights from our actions and outputs in one place...

Following on from our work on the living map of community initiatives, we focused on the uniquely Dutch phenomenon of the 'buurthuiskamer' or neighborhood living room, spending a year following four such spaces, observing and participating in their everyday practices, and conducting twenty semi-structured interviews with initiators, participants and stakeholders. As part of embedding this work and making it meaningful to the community, we helped co-produce (in collaboration with Philippa Driest of KIOSK Rotterdam) a riso-printed newspaper for Huis van de Toekomst, documenting their projects, profiling their participants, and discussing local issues. All editions of the newspaper can be read on the HvdT website.

Based on this research, we developed a nuanced understanding of how 'resilience' is cultivated not only as a way of surviving present-day struggles and adapting to a changing world, but also imagining and implementing more pleasurable, sustainable, desirable community life. As prefigurative practices, they are small pockets where ordinary communities are able to practice everyday life the way they want, beyond the conventions of the market, the welfare state, and individualist consumer society. We have presented and discussed our findings at multiple academic conferences and public forums:

• 'Spaces of Resilience: a typology of places and practices in two Dutch cities' presented at the conference ‘Repurposing Places for Social and Environmental Resilience’, University of East London, March 2023

• 'Viable Futures in the Everyday: neighborhood living rooms as imagination infrastructure' presented at the digital conference ‘Global Cultures, Local Spaces’, organized by AMPS (Architecture, Media, Photography, Society), December 2023.

• 'Prefiguring (un)just transitions? Niches, experiments and everyday practices in Rotterdam' presented at the International Conference on Urban Affairs: ‘Cities on the Edge’, New York, April 2024

• 'Prefiguring viable futures in the everyday' presented at the International Geographical Congress, Dublin, August 2024

• ‘Neighborhood Living Rooms as Prefigurative Experiments’ presented at Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, as part of the public colloquium ‘Art as a verb: the circuit of commons’, February 2025 

• research paper 'Prefiguring the caring city: everyday practices and postcapitalist possibility' presented at the AESOP Young Academics meeting ‘Circular Cities and Regions: Planning for Sustainable Social and Inclusive Communities’, Hannover, March 2025. This paper has subsequently been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Urban Planning (open access, forthcoming summer 2025)

• project summary presented at 'Action Research Bucharest: alternative models of cultural infrastructure', CINETIC, Bucharest, April 2025

Working with TU/e Masters students in architecture and urbanism, and using the CoNECT living map as starting point, we developed the student exhibition ‘Tomorrow Together: Reimagining Everyday Practices’. This was exhibited at De Fabriek in Eindhoven (June 2024), in updated form at Casa Vertigo, TU/e (Oct-Dec 2024), and finally at the CoNECT closing symposium at CINETIC, Bucharest (April 2025). We also organized several hybrid webinars, all of which can be seen on our YouTube playlist:

• webinar on ‘Transformative Learning’, March 2024

• webinar on 'Urban Commons and Collective Action', June 2024

• webinar and public symposium ‘Design Pedagogies for a Post-Growth Future’, December 2024

In September 2025, we will build further on our research by hosting a two-day research symposium around the theme of 'Prefiguring Hopeful Futures' in collaboration with the AESOP thematic group 'Public Spaces and Urban Cultures' and local partners in Eindhoven.

Finally, it is important to us that our work does not only speak to an academic audience, but also has wider public impact - and does so beyond the official end date of the project. That's why we used our findings as the basis for a series of meetings and workshops with the Gemeente Eindhoven, the Urban Development Initiative, and representatives of several 'buurthuiskamers' around Eindhoven. This was a way to show the value of these initiatives to policymakers, and to argue for their support and inclusion in the city's innovation agenda and large-scale densification strategy. We also made an effort to catalyze more contact, cooperation and exchange between the communities themselves, many of whom faced similar struggles but did so in isolation. Finally, we have produced a 'policy and practice' working document around neighborhood living rooms as the basis for an ongoing conversation with the city as a way to make sure our findings can be incorporated into the city's recently adopted 'buurtontmoetingsbeleid' ('neighborhood meeting-places policy'). We hope to continue this impactful work well beyond the end of CoNECT.