8 September – 11 November 2011
Kleinpolder in Beweging is a collective project in collaboration with Geert van Mil, Mette Sterre en Alex Strik and the neighbors of Kleinpolder – commissioned by housing corporation Woonstad Rotterdam.

Kleinpolder or Overschie-Oost is one of the first post war neighborhoods built in Rotterdam. It was designed and constructed in a time marked by huge lacks of housing, building materials and workers. The neighborhood was planned following the ideals of ‘het nieuwe bouwen’, a very utopian, modernist way of building.
Nowadays the apartments belong to the lowest segment of the social housing market – they are small and not very well maintained. A great part of its inhabitants has an immigrant background. Overschie-Oost is one of the neighborhoods marked as ‘problem area’ by the former minister of housing, Ella Vogelaar.
To overcome these problems the municipality of Rotterdam and housing corporations want to differentiate the housing market – the social housing is replaced by less affordable houses for young, promising families and elderly people. Such a gentrification process is often applied in Dutch cities (and cities all over the world). The aim of these processes is to improve the social and economical conditions, but the positive effect of gentrification is widely disputed. A differentiated population doesn’t necessary improve the situation of the underprivileged – only when the causes of impoverishment are taken away, the situation of these people will improve. Gentrification can only dillute the concentration of underprivileged people or move the problems to an other geographic location. A few of the main disadvantages of these gentrification processes is the breakdown of the existing social bounds and grass root initiatives in these neighborhoods and the feeling of displacement among the city residents who are again and again forced to move from one impoverished area to another.
But at the same time the situation in Overschie-Oost (or Kleinpolder) is very complex. The houses are small and not of a very good quality due to the lack of material and workers in the time of construction. Moreover these buildings are on the deconstruction list for over ten years. Most of the residents we spoke to are very eager to leave these houses, but would like to stay in the neighborhood. They are waiting, sometimes for many years, for the fee they will receive when they have to move out.
Against this backdrop we developed our project. First of all we thought it was very important to set up a different kind of conversation – a second voice to the official communication of Woonstad. By bringing 358 boxes to the area, one moving box for every apartment, we tried to make the scale of the city renewal process tangible. These boxes served as building blocks for always changing pavilions in the public space. These pavilions formed a flexible, accessible environment for meetings, games, talks and workshops.



One other tactic we used was to portray the neighbors in their apartments as if they where already long gone. In these pictures the furniture is covered with white sheets and on the couch only a shadow is visible of the apartment’s inhabitant. In order to make these eerie portraits an active element in the conversation, we stuck them on the walls of the apartment blocks.
Surf for more information to the project blog.

