Society | Revive World

RECONNECT – SOCIETY

We aim to reconnect a divided society.By fighting against a dispersed society we want to reduce loneliness as a negative effect on individuals’ mental and physical wellbeing and support social connectivity.

By seeding a connected culture and designing a communal infrastructure we create possibilities that foster social connections, increase a sense of belonging and provide possibilities for engagement, with respect for each other’s space, privacy and freedom.

DESIGN A CONNECTING INFRASTRUCTURE

Increase site accessibility

Create incremental (semi-)public domain. The project should enable connection to the surrounding context. Projects are designed to be accessed and used by a broader public access for cars must be kept to a minimum to guarantee access to safe and healthy, green areas.

Provide public social meeting space

Study and integrate the socio-cultural ripple effect of projects on their surroundings. Set-up the masterplan and design principles to create and facilitate intentional and chance encounters in the public interior and exterior spaces. Public social meeting space need to benefit the residents and non-residents with the goal of connecting and inclusion.

Build semi-private social meeting space

Design to include a good balance between public (social) space and private / semi-public social meeting space. The design needs to enable identity and enhance a sense of belonging. Create spaces that extend a sense of home and create possibilities for community initiatives.

SEED A CONNECTING CULTURE

Implement community building programmes

Set up a community building programme pre-, during and post construction to build a social fabric that aims to connect people and offer a safe place in their neighbourhood where interpersonal contact is easy. Encourage sustainable thinking, scale-up the sharing economy support local entrepreneurship and avoid waste of space by encouraging and facilitating temporary use.

Allocate connecting culture resources

Assign human, spatial and financial resources for community building. A dedicated budget is allocated to enable and cultivate a connecting culture, both for future residents as well as surrounding and local stakeholders. The stakeholder management plan focuses on two-way communication and ownership.

Coordinate community building activities

Appoint dedicated community builders who coordinate and facilitate the community building process before, during and after construction. This person manages the community building programme, the local stakeholder management action plan, and designs the connected culture framework via partnerships who value sustainable and social thinking.

Susanne Koolhof, Impact Manager at Revive

Our goal is to create caring neighbourhoods where the barriers to meeting and addressing each other are low and the seeds of social values that were planted for behavioural change could grow and develop further in the future.

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The Revive team comprises of 7 dedicated community builders, 4 for residential and 3 for commercial projects.

41%

Only 4% of purchased properties was originally accessible to the public. 41% was redeveloped to open and accessible public community space.

34%

51% of acquired sites were built at time of acquisition. We lowered the built footprint to 34%, creating additional open space.

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Brownfield covenants – essentially agreements made between the Flemish Government and developers – were registered, none have been.

130

Innovating through temporary use, we made 17 closed off sites available to the public, where we hosted over 130 organisations resulting in more than 1.000 events, across social, wellbeing, creative and economical themes. To date, various of these temporary initiatives have evolved into permanent community-connectors.

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Highly connected communities buil around the needs of the residents, visitors and neighbours, with at least 3% of the redevelopment committed to public facilities and services.

Ambitions

Striving to continuously foster connectivity throughout our projects, we defined the following ambitions for the future:

Mapping and measuring community building

Our ambition for community building is clear: we not only want to count the number of events that we organise and initiate, but also better measure and map the effects of our community building initiatives through an objective and in-depth monitoring and evaluation system. This should allow us to learn from our experiences, refine our processes and maximise the impact of our efforts.

Caring neighbourhoods

When possible, we want to evolve to caring neighbourhoods and ecosystems where cross-pollination is paramount. In these neighbourhoods, health and connected neighbourly relationships are central, aimed at building up a social network, solidarity and caring coexistence. These caring neighbourhoods should be participatory and available for everyone.

Cases

Co-housing process guidance - Komet

A vibrant working community – Watt The Firms

Collective green management - Minerve

Co-housing process guidance – Komet

A central part in phase 2 of Revive project Komet (Mechelen, Belgium) features co-housing “Compagnie”. We take our future inhabitants of the cohousing step by step towards living together in the cohousing. While the group is growing, we are paving the road towards sharing a building and putting up a system of collaboration and shared decision making. Further on in the process we will support the group by setting up a good financial management system, a set of household rules for the communal areas, setting up a system of social activities for connecting people.

A vibrant working community – Watt The Firms

Revive project Watt The Firms (Ghent, Belgium) is a pioneering collective office concept. By encouraging interaction and creating shared spaces, it not only promotes a pleasant working environment, but also stimulate cross-pollination between different companies, leading to new opportunities and a feeling of coming home at work. Coordinated by two community managers there is an ongoing programme of community activities, ranging from physical and mental health initiatives to social and educations gatherings and more, all working towards a strong community spirit and network building. The residing companies are innovative and progressive and strive for a sustainable corporate culture where cooperation and mutual support are central.

Collective green management – Minerve

At the Minerve project (Edegem, Belgium) we currently run a pilot project on collective maintenance of public greenery, connecting the Minerve neighbourhood with surrounding streets and the nearby Fort V heritage site. As collective green management often leads to better maintained neighbourhoods and more sustainable green management, we are investigating, together with landscape architect OMGEVING, the municipality of Edegem, a number of Minerve residents and a dedicated Revive team, whether we can develop a joint approach to the green management of the public domain and the collective gardens.