Successful street survey in Rotterdam as part of a study project
During the Excursion week of the Summer Semester 22/23, which took place on May 15–19, the students from the A-Project (i.e., study project of first-year students) A 06 – “Struggle for Place: Community of Rotterdam-Rozenburg between Environmental and Urban Pressures”, led by RAM members Víctor Cobs-Muñoz and Liudmila Slivinskaya, successfully completed a street survey in the sub-municipality of Rozenburg, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
The street survey was based on an adopted methodology borrowed from the Place Standard Tool (PST) framework, on which students worked during two semesters, including conducting a small pilot survey on campus in preparation for the field work. The PST is a tool developed by the Scottish government to facilitate participation and dialogue between planners, public policy makers and communities around a wide range of questions. The PST provides a 14-dimensional graph framework focused on areas for improvement based on the community’s perspective and is grouped around 5 general categories of Movement, Space, Resources, Civic, and Stewardship. The students spent three consecutive days at the central square of Rozenburg and close surroundings, with shifts from 8am to 9pm. They followed a random sampling approach, initiating conversations with all passers-by, which resulted in a representative sample, with well-distributed age groups and genders, indicating a low risk of bias. The survey featured English and Dutch versions to help overcome the language barrier for the German-speaking students in the Dutch-speaking environment. In addition, QR-code printouts were distributed in post boxes around neighbourhoods, inviting people to participate in the survey online. As a result, the students collected 343 on-site and 25 online responses, accounting for approximately 3% of Rozenburg’s population (estimated 12,455 as of 2022) actively involved in the surveying process. The success of the field work, along with other methods used by the students in the course of the project, allowed the group to conduct an in-depth analysis of how residents of Rozenburg perceive their place and surroundings, achieving not only learning outcomes required by the module, but a genuine contribution to the topic they explored.
The final disputation for the project successfully took place on Friday, June 21. We congratulate A-Project students Jan Bauer, Leon Dering, Elizaveta Gergo, Henrik Heising, Tobias Lichter, Nils Lutz, Jonas Scherer, Vanessa Stöcker, and tutor Chalil Dietrich, for their outstanding work, creativity, and commitment.