HNS! Stuttgart

Social Context

In recent years, refugee shelters that have emerged throughout Germany will shape the neighborhood there for a long time to come. However, the accommodations were rarely seen as part of urban development, which means that there are still no answers to numerous challenges. This greatly hinders the integration of refugees, resulting in high costs for the people and the local community. In the Stuttgart project, the Home not Shelter! has been active in a shared accommodation managed by Malteser Hilfsdienst gGmbH since the end of 2017. There, we developed participatory approaches intended to promote integration. Practices of social and intercultural work are combined with methods of participation and social design.

Realization

Home not Shelter! initiates various processes and measures in the socio-spatial context of the refugee accommodation, in which all steps - from the needs analysis to the generation of ideas to planning and implementation - are jointly developed and carried out by all actors. The aim is to create solutions that are based on the needs, knowledge, and experience of the people on site and consistently depend on self-determination and assumption of responsibility.

In the course of a comprehensive social space analysis, the specific challenges to be tackled were initially determined on site. Subsequently, together with various actors, concrete ideas were developed and sketched from this analysis. This led to the first phase of the project, which concentrated almost exclusively on the micro level: The redesign of a common room into a learning and relaxation room. In the second project phase, however, the focus was on the meso level. Regular activities in the district were developed and carried out for and with young people from the accommodation, thus creating connections between the residents of the accommodation along with residents and actors from the district. Most recently, there have been building workshops on adventure playgrounds in the surrounding city district and cooking activities at various locations, which enabled an exchange between residents and the surrounding neighborhood. The formats initiated in this way also enabled new contacts and connections to be established between local stakeholders, who initiated long-term, self-reliant measures to improve the socio-spatial integration of the accommodation in the neighborhood.

Impact

The process and needs-oriented approach enables stable bridges between the communal accommodation and the district. This creates new spaces for interaction and enables the residents of the accommodation to pave paths into the neighborhood and the city. Through the active collaboration between professionals, students from various fields, experts in the accommodation of refugees, and, above all, the residents of the accommodation and their supervisors on site, a network is formed that carries the ideas of the initiative beyond the project context. At the same time, the knowledge gained is reflected in a manner of transferability so that it is available for further projects.

(Text: Hans Sauer Foundation)

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