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Transition Management in Urban Neighbourhoods: The Case of Carnisse, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

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Part of the book series: Future City ((FUCI,volume 11))

Abstract

The case study in this chapter marks a socially disadvantaged community in the South of Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Carnisse. Transition management was applied in Carnisse in the context of decreasing public service provisions, closing of public facilities, high unemployment and crumbling social cohesion to facilitate the self-organisation of inhabitants to address persistent sustainability problems. This chapter illustrates how the process implementation has been influenced by political, institutional and emotional factors related to the place-specific characteristics of urban neighbourhood transitions. While urban neighbourhoods mark opportunities for self-organisation – through for example emotional connectedness – the political playing field can provide support, or restrain it. The transition management application in Carnisse shows several advantages of applying transition management on the scale of an urban community. It provided a new perspective for the development of that community, increased social capital, supported reflexivity on roles and own behaviours and revealed opportunities for self-organisation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Carnisse has the single lowest average income to spend per year in Rotterdam (€ 23.300,– in 2014), it has a relatively old and neglected housing stock, there is a lot of mobility and migration streams in the neighborhood (approximately 55% of the people live less than 5 years in the neighborhood). Carnisse also scores low on different municipal indexes (in regards to safety, social cohesion, and housing).

  2. 2.

    For more information on InContext, please visit www.incontext-fp7.eu or consult the following project documentation: Wittmayer et al. (2011a, b, 2012, 2013a, b, c). The descriptions of the process contained in this chapter build on this project documentation as well as on Wittmayer et al. 2014.

  3. 3.

    For more information on Veerkracht, please visit www.veerkrachtcarnisse.nl or consult the following project documentation: Wittmayer et al. (2014), Van Steenbergen et al. (2013), Van Steenbergen et al. (2013), and Van Steenbergen and Wittmayer (2015).

  4. 4.

    The project ‘Veerkracht Carnisse’ (2011–2015) consisted of a consortium of four partners, all of whom had been involved and worked in their respective domains and with their respective approaches in other neighbourhoods of Rotterdam South. They joined forces based on their shared perspective that neighbourhood development should be more holistic and based on the power of individuals and communities. Due to their non-conventional approaches, it took a negotiation and lobbying process of almost four years before the project was accorded and could start in September 2011. Veerkracht Carnisse translates from Dutch as: Resilience Carnisse.

  5. 5.

    For more information on the ideal-type profile and selection-criteria on frontrunners see Loorbach (2007) and Rotmans and Loorbach (2010).

  6. 6.

    See Jhagroe and van Steenbergen (2014).

  7. 7.

    At first this was refused due to the ownership structure (which is referred to as ‘Rotterdam construction’), where the owner of the building is a different party (in this case the welfare organization) than the owner of the ground (in this case the Municipality of Rotterdam). And to make it more complicated the supervisor of the building was the district municipality Charlois.

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Correspondence to Julia M. Wittmayer .

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Wittmayer, J.M., van Steenbergen, F., Bach, M. (2018). Transition Management in Urban Neighbourhoods: The Case of Carnisse, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In: Frantzeskaki, N., Hölscher, K., Bach, M., Avelino, F. (eds) Co-­creating Sustainable Urban Futures. Future City, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69273-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69273-9_8

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