ABSTRACT
In the Streetstarters project, the studio for futures exploration, Pantopicon, and creative agency, Studio Dott, dedicated themselves to the question of whether and how it would be possible to contribute to the strengthening of social cohesion at street level by means of a design intervention. From the onset of the project, the team was aware that its solution would need to go beyond the various existing street-related activities organised by local authorities and neighbourhood committees. In order to grasp the physical context of the streets as well as to get a better grip on the notion of ‘small encounters’, field research was conducted. The streetview-like facades map–custom made for each participant’s street–provided a particularly strong affordance for people to recount stories, most likely due to the immediate way in which people could recognise ‘their’ street and ‘their’ home making them feel addressed in a personal manner.
