On Friday 11 September we filled Opek in Leuven for 1st Floor, a sold-out conference about data, mobility and public space. It was also Telraam's fifth birthday, which seemed like a good excuse to invite eight people who think hard about streets & neighbourhoods. Els Vandenbroeck (Mobiel 21) and Wouter Florizoone (Telraam) guided us through the morning.
A brief account of our 1st Floor conference morning. If one thread ran through all of it, it was this: data earns you a seat at the table, but it does not win the argument.
The gap that the whole day kept returning to was on screen within five minutes: citizens collect and interpret data on one side, a messy public debate happens on the other, and the trip between them is rarely smooth. Tom Goosse from UGent offered three questions that get asked of citizen science data. Is it credible (quality, method, standards)? Is it relevant (timely, practical, applicable)? Is it legitimate (fair, representative, accountable)? Looking at cases like CurieuzeNeuzen, ExpAIR and Plastic Spotter, his point was that projects spend most of their energy on credibility, because that is what earns recognition from administrations. Relevance demands real institutional integration. And legitimacy is where the political argument actually happens: whose interests does this measurement represent? For a company that sells sensors, a usefully uncomfortable start.
A book came with this one, Samen ruimte maken / Making Space Together, and with it the distinction between the ville, the built city, and the cité, the city as it is lived. Jiska Gysels, from the Antwerp based socio-spatial research and urban planning consultancy Endeavour, was honest about the friction: not everyone has the time or energy to show up, so representation skews, and neighbourhood movements have agendas of their own. The counter-moves are unglamorous. Stretch the process, move it out of the town hall and into the street, drop the jargon, schedule around working parents, and close the loop by carrying individual worries back to the mobility service so people see their input land. She then pushed past the familiar Arnstein ladder toward four strategies that actually shift who holds the pen: co-design, co-production, co-commission and co-creation.
Michiel Van Balen
Miss Miyagi makes the argument by building the building. De Hoorn, started by seven local entrepreneurs in a former brewery. Hal 5, built and financed by its own neighbourhood through winwinleningen, now holding a food court, a social grocery, a movement hall and a fair share of Leuven's weekend. Then Stadsmakersfonds, a cooperative investment fund taking that model to six more sites. The method is a triple diamond of diverging stakeholder phases and converging expert phases, with several full scenarios built explicitly as prototypes meant to be knocked down. In the Q&A he was blunt about the politics: participation runs on trust and on people being willing to hand over power, and a derelict building that catches fire can quietly become a political opportunity. There is no success formula. The ambition is to show enough real examples that "that cannot be done" stops being a valid answer. Making places that matter (pdf)
One hundred (!) slides to turn us all into little designers, and then a silence. The NLB blocks are a tactile system built with a speech therapist after his own father developed aphasia, so people with aphasia have something physical to communicate with. Then the lesson from a patented furniture system that failed: a design has to clear four bars at once, being human, makeable, genuinely useful and viable, and his was priced wrong against the assembly effort it demanded. He closed with Jeronimo, a buggy for adventurous children with disabilities: observation, 60,000 views, 70 families, the discovery that existing buggies fail on rough terrain and that the shops selling them are often inaccessible, then prototypes, iterations, and first units sold.
A village is not a small city. That thesis lands hard in a room full of urban thinkers, and it carries the whole Toolbox Dorpenbouw that Karl Catteeuw brought along. A village works differently and needs its own spatial language, with the village itself as the frame of reference. The toolbox reads villages by settlement pattern, archetype and metamorphosis, then offers building blocks for landscape, mobility, village life and making the village together. Two things stuck with us. Talk about bike zones rather than bike streets, because it means fewer signs and a simpler situation, and turn the bebouwde kom into a bewoonde kom where the speed limit is the speed of a cyclist. And, quoting Greet De Block: if you want to encourage encounter, ask why girls, newcomers or older people drop out. Nearly every village has a kickabout field near home, while ballet is organised somewhere far away.
Lior Steinberg
Lior Steinberg ran the most interactive slot of the morning. A QR code on the screen, single words collected from the audience, and generated images of what a street could look like. Predictably, everyone wants more green. His warning: generative AI is not neutral. It runs on statistical prediction, so the prompt language changes the output, and the same request in Dutch can produce a green, inclusive streetscape while the English version drifts toward dystopian science fiction. He ended somewhere unexpected for a room that sells and studies data. After ten years of trying to resolve street-level conflicts through participation, he has concluded that data alone rarely dissolves long-standing resistance. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to close the street to cars for three months and let the experience make the argument.
Eva Van Eenoo from VUB Cosmopolis gave the talk that reframed the day. Who are we missing in the existing data? Absence in the data is not the same as absence of demand for mobility. The trips that never happen leave no trace in any counter. She demonstrated it with an Amsterdam case where a fixed bus line was replaced by demand responsive transit. The summary table looks like a triumph on mileage, cost, CO2 and satisfaction. Monthly ridership went from 1,718 to 478. Which numbers get highlighted is itself a policy choice.
From there to mobility justice and recognitional justice, and to the fieldwork: a survey of social housing tenants in Ghent and Meetjesland that explicitly asked about unrealised trips. Getting responses meant mailings, social workers, approaching people in parks and service centres, and eventually ringing doorbells. Her lessons were refreshingly practical. Budget for translation, or bring a translator. Expect it to be slow. Respondents are perfectly able to name their own problems. And running the survey in person not only guarantees a properly completed one, it shows you how far you as a researcher sit from the people you are studying.
To close, Els turned the microphone on Kris Vanherle, using a bingo card of the stories Telraam has collected since 2021 instead of a list of questions. The Pioneers, the first counters ever mounted on a window. Van 9 tot 99, which really is the age range of the people running them. Het voederbakje, for everyone who has ever looked at a device and seen a bird feeder. And then Pineutstraat, data peaks, a murder investigation, the BBC and the prime minister's office. One square had no title at all, just three question marks and a photo. We are working on something, and we are not announcing it yet. That square stayed pleasantly unresolved.
The expo market ran all morning, with stands from Ledlite, Citizen Dialog Kit, Cegeka, Movias, Xenomatix, Blue-Bike, Nazka, Public Space Uitgeverij and Scivil, and of course our own. Then lunch, and cake, because five years is worth a candle five candles. Afterwards a handful of participants joined us on an informal Telraam Safari through the neighbourhood, looking at real devices on real windows, which is honestly where most of our best conversations happen anyway.
IMG_7589.jpeg4.34 MBThanks to our speakers, to everyone who came, and to the five years that got us here. See you next time on the first floor !
