By Cornelia Tippel (ILS Research) and Dennis Zilske (Planerladen)
“With the right methods, you can get into a deep dialogue about supposedly simple topics.”
On 31th March and 1st April, ReROOT’s knowledge-exchange workshop took place in Dortmund-Nordstadt. The workshop was about providing a local final event for the research in Nordstadt and, at the same time, to introduce the ReROOT toolkit – Integration Otherwise Inspiration Kit to the neighbourhood. People from local NGOs and municipal organisations were keen to explore the outcome of the ReROOT project.
On day 1, we started with a recap of the ReROOT process and the platform-building and concluded with the evolution of the toolkit. Tool 4: Identifying unexpected barriers to everyday life tasks initiated vivid discussions of different tasks newcomers individually have to meet, to for instance, attend a language course or a doctor’s appointment: “The tool really opened the black box of what needs to be done to see a doctor in a newcomer situation.” Tool 7: Visualising newcomers’ (interrupted) housing trajectories stimulated reflections of structural constraints, e.g. on the housing market, in getting ahead. Participants vividly engaged in discussions and even shared crime fiction recommendations in which such market processes are made transparent:
“There is a huge gap between precarious and decent accommodation.”
With the introduction of Tool 5: Understanding the arrival infrastructuring work of others and Tool 9: Mapping service gaps and outreach potential, day 2 focused on the institutional perspective – the arrival infrastructuring work of different local actors. Although Nordstadt already provides a multitude of networks, some of the participants did not know each other before and benefitted from the new insights and contacts accompanied by nice Turkish food. Nevertheless, there was a lot of self-reflection and, in some cases, self-criticism. For example, one participant mentioned with regard to his own institution: "Participation in workshops like this one or anti-racism workshops and the like are voluntary for us – they only reach people already open to and aware of these issues. So there is still room for optimisation."
Several participants mentioned that working with the tools had helped them to change their perspective and stated: “I definitely want to share these insights with my team because I think our work could benefit from them!”.
