Steps of the project and the methods applied
In a first phase, we took a field trip in order to get a better sense of the local community's interaction with their surroundings. We came to the conclusion that, besides the newly rehabilitated main square and the spaces between the housing blocks, the inner garden areas were in their vast majority deserted and unused. Because the demographic balance of the neighbourhood has changed so much (the younger population decreased enormously compared to the elderly one), many of the once functional play-grounds built in the common gardens of each housing block were dilapidated. The common gardens were abandoned. We could tell that they are hardly ever being used by the height of the grass, the neglected vegetation and the lack of benches.
After a careful evaluation, the group became aware of the neighbourhood's huge potential at many levels, agreeing that the local people could take more advantage of its spaces and infrastructures. We decided then to make use of the interior gardens as a privileged space for social encounters, communication and for the building a sense of community. Keeping in mind crucial key words such as empowerment and sustainability, we figured that these spaces could be brought back to life through the direct involvement and participation of the inhabitants.
In the second phase we brainstormed and decided to propose an event for the community. This would be a story telling and community theatre performance, which would take place in the gardens during Spring and Summer. The preparation work for this event would constitute a long process during which we would try to develop a strong relationship with the community.
The aim of the project is to actively involve and engage the locals. This would be obtained through practices from the fields of cultural anthropology, cultural mediation, cultural management, humanitarian action, architecture and community theatre. We organised ourselves into smaller groups according to the previously mentioned fields of study. Each smaller group consisting of two or three persons worked separately. We joined and debated our ideas later on. We set up a project structure of six steps as a result. Figure 1. shows the methods we connected to each phase.
The steps of the project and the applied methods
Steps of the project Methods
Step 1. Initiating relationships with the local community, building up connections
between locals and professionals Cultural mediation
Step 2. Engaging the locals to share their life-stories, memories and experiences in
the neighbourhood through interviews. Cultural anthropology
Step 3. Preparing and organising the story-telling event/ managing the community
theatre. Cultural events management
Step 4. Building the supporting infrastructure for the event, in collaboration with
local people, event organisers, community theatre professionals and the architect. Architecture Step 5. Creating the event with the help of community theatre professionals. Community theatre
Step 6. Evaluation of the impact of the project. Cultural mediation and Cultural Anthropology
By Ana Reina
Presentation of the applied methods Cultural mediation
The main task of the cultural mediator or facilitator,would be to set up a dialogue between the involved parts of the project, namely between the members of the local community and the different professionals. The cultural mediator plays a key role at every level of the project.
He or she, as a guide to the whole process, will be in charge of organising meetings, workshops and individual consultancy where locals and professionals will have the possibility to make their points of view, set forth their values and ideas, debate, manage conflicts and finally reach a compromise. It is his or her job to inform and communicate with both sides. The mediator has to maintain a neutral position in the process of the mediation of the different values and opinions. She can suggest or advise different paths of reconciliation in case of conflict or misunderstanding. Some important aspects that the cultural mediator should take in notice before the project starts include:
Historical research, getting to know the local context where the project will take place, ie. a good background knowledge of the place, the people and their specific social relations.
Finding out the main sources of conflict that involved the community in the recent past. Revealing the specific theoretical standpoints of the involved professional fields.
The evaluation of the project would also fall under the responsibility of the cultural mediator. The reflections on the feedback and experiences of the community members who participated in the process could serve as a basis for a continuation of the initiative. Hopefully the inhabitants of the neighbourhood will feel this event as something which belongs to them and will organise it themselves as a local grass-roots activity without needing external stimuli.
Ethnography/Anthropology
Traditionally, anthropological research is characterised by a long contact with the cultural phenomena of a specific context, using a panoply of social scientific research strategies. This combination of techniques promotes a deep contact with the cultural space, allowing the researcher to gradually obtain the trust of the community.
Through this, he/ she accesses a network of connected complex themes by his/ her personal experience and observations, collecting information through multiple conversations, contacts and personal experiences with the informants. One aims to achieve an ethnographic narrative, which will feeds the architectural hardware of this built environment with human values, activities and desires. (Rapoport, 1994: 236).
The use of ethnographic strategies as a method to collect and understand the cultural urban context of the space is of great importance in this project. This field of research, connected with historical research, will promote a holistic background for the development of the creative part of the project. The chosen ethnographical methodology for this project is connected with its goal: to collect and organise a body of life episodes and stories told by the inhabitants of Uránváros, which later on will be used by theatre professionals and the community in order to create an event of story-telling and community theatre.
Consequently we are talking about applied anthropology, not of an academic research. Here we use ethnography/ anthropology as a tool for applied creative outputs. This line of interpretation is not new, we can point to the work of interpretive designers (Veverka, 2011) and visual anthropologists (Strong and Wilder, 2009) as an example. With this in mind, the proposed method is to conduct semi-structured interviews, starting with personal acquaintances of the research team, and later on applying the snowball effect, where informants point out to the researcher other informants, allowing for smoother introductions and trusting relationships.
A list of themes was created as a guide for conversation with the informants (see the list below). We were not looking to speak about every theme with every interviewee. These themes are merely a base for conversation and memory stimulation. We were looking for an average of 1hr interviews but the contacts might be shorter or much longer depending on the moment and the interest of the sources.
By Diána Jandala and Enikő Demény
By Hugo Morango
Furthermore, we are not looking for historically accurate stories, but for memories, subjective as they always are. These memories which are the composite material for the collective memory and sociabilities of Uránváros will be the basis for creative communication, theatre in this case, and as such will promote an experience, both emotive and intellectual. We are looking for facts which live more in the intangible culture context, than in an historical one. As Malinovski stresses “while his sources (of the anthropologist) are no doubt easily accessible, but also supremely elusive and complex; they are not embodied in fixed, material documents, but in the behaviour and in the memory of living men.” This material, profoundly rich with human experience and values, is a very strong tool for developing creative activities, as its contents and concepts are already created and combined, allowing the creative designer to focus on the interpretation and message, rather than start from ground zero2
Leading topics of the interview to stimulate memories Childhood • games, ways of playing,
• spaces of playing
• school experience Teenager until marriage • school or work social life
• cultural places
• trends
Adult life • marriage - partner meeting
• daily work
• market and shopping"
• sociabilities – neighbours
• entertainment after the fall of communism and the closing of the mines
• health issues concerning the uranium mine in the 90ʼs The experience of the
European Capitals of Culture year
•
•
what changes happened during that year - likes and dislikes affected the neighborhood? how do you see the city after it?
did you take part in the events in the quarter?
• did you take part in the events outside the quarter?
Cultural management/ Story-telling and theater event management Location of the event: Pécs city – Uránváros neighborhood
Duration of the event: 3 days – Friday, Saturday, Sunday Time frame: from 7 pm until 8:30 pm
Duration of the performance: 6 stories per night. 15 minutes per story. A total of 18 stories.
2 MALINOVSKI, Bronislaw (1997). Os argonautas do Pacífico Ocidental. Ethnologica, nova série no6-8.
Lisboa: Edições Cosmos
RAPOPORT, Amos (1994). Spatial organization and the built environment. Companion encyclopedia of Anthropology.
London: Routledge
STRONG, Mary; WILDER, Laena (2009). Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work. Dallas: University of Texas Press
VEVERKA, John A (2011). The Interpretive Training Handbook: Strategies, Tips, Handouts and Practical Learning Experiences for Teaching Interpretation to Others. Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc
By Enikő Demény and Hugo Morango
By Emilia Robescu and Victor Király
In order to involve the community and to show the history of Uránváros, we propose a combination of story-telling and dramatisation. We selected three public gardens within the neighbourhood for the performances. A performance platform (3x5 meters) will be set-up in these. When the performances end, the platforms will be used as public spaces, as for example a place where people can meet and socialise. We will use the local environment and even the people attending the event, to set up the performances. For example, if in one performance we need a wall, it will be formed by people from the audience.
The participants of the theatre plays will be local actors from the Theatre of Pécs and community members.
The local actors will provide small workshops to the community before the event, in order to prepare for the performances (advice for acting and help with the rehearsals). We think that people who live in the blocks nearby the gardens should be the target group of the community performers.
In total there are going to be 18 stories collected from and performed by the community.
The stories are going to be collected from amongst 3 generations:
The first generation is the people who moved to Uránváros at the beginning of its construction (1950 – 1960).
The second generation is the adults who were born here between 1960 – 1980. The third generation is the youngsters that were born in Uránváros after 1990.
A suggested framework for the performance could be the following: Six people sitting at a table, having family dinner and presenting their stories in accordance withy the three chosen time periods. During each person’s story-telling, photos from their family albums will be projected and some parts of their stories will be acted out as well.
We thought of involving volunteers in organising the event. The volunteering action benefits the organisers (by involving more people from the community) and also the volunteers (who gain experience, build social relations, learn about organising events and about the performing arts).
We propose to use traditional ways of promoting the event, such as leaflets, posters and public and social media. The focus for the marketing campaign will be the high-schools and kindergartens, because children can motivate their parents and grandparents to participate in the activities. Moreover, more creative and unusual activities could be used for promoting the event like flash mobs, bicycle riding half-marathon with children and parents, or we can conduct a brain storming with students at school.
Architecture
How can architecture help in the revitalisation of the community? Architecture aims to revitalise old housing estates in order to create new public spaces, a center for the everyday-life of each neighbourhood through a sensitive treatment of the spaces. People have to be the centre of these kind of projects. The designed physical setting and elements of publicly shared spaces like parks, public squares should make communication easy and natural between the locals. The main aspects that have to be taken into consideration during the design process include: a detailed physical and social analysis of the site, provision for diversity of use and interaction, ensuring the viability of the project
By Anastasia Rousopoulou
Design plan of the performance setting Conclusion
Uránváros, an housing estate built during socialism, in the Western part of Pécs, Hungary, underwent profound transformations, being today a very different place- culturally (fewer initiatives and hosting places), socio-demographically (aged population) and economically - from what it was in the past.
Using the combined expertises of Co-operation and Development, Architecture, Cultural Mediation, Cultural Management, Interpretive Design, Anthropology, Marketing and History, we aim to create a self-sustainable story-telling event, with the hope that the community will learn new skills and take into their own hands the organisation of future similar events.
This multidisciplinary project aims to raise awareness, inside the Uránváros community, of the importance of one's cultural heritage, as something to be celebrated and shared with members of the local and outer communities.
Their cultural heritage will be invoked through personal memories, as the composite material of the collective identity and sociabilities of the neighbourhood. From these memories we will develop forms of creative communication, theatre in this case, with the intention of promoting a common social experience, both emotive and intellectual, with the active participatory engagement of the local community.
By Enikö Demeny and Hugo Morango