Elke Plovie en Sam Pless: Zorgzame Buurten

Many people care for each other, and this is increasingly happening as a 'caring neighborhood'. Spontaneous neighbourly help and neighbourhood committees are actively engaged in caring 'bottom-up', but the government also stimulates 'top-down' the development of caring neighbourhoods. Projects and experiments of various kinds are underway in many Flemish cities and municipalities.

Based on the results of the practice-oriented scientific research entitled 'Caring Neighborhoods [Zorgzame Buurten]*', Elke Plovie and Sam Pless, both researchers at UCLL, go deeper into the challenges of providing care together in a neighborhood. They will link these challenges to a few works in the exhibition and enter into a debate on the Flemish policy on caring neighbourhoods. The curator of the exhibition, Karen Verschooren, will provide a brief introduction based on her research into the meaning and role of empathy today.

*In the practice-based scientific study 'Caring Neighbourhoods', researchers identified a number of key challenges in the development of care-oriented neighbourhoods, based on interviews with 23 practices in Flanders and Brussels:the collaboration with various formal and informal actors, the role of volunteers and the importance of reciprocity, making vulnerability public, participative working, and human existence as a human right.

With these issues they returned to work in two caring neighborhoods.