The segregating and connecting effect of the Henri Dunantpark

Citizen engagement within the community and the city is an important aspect of how our society functions. The connectivity of people within themselves, and with the governing institutions is also one of the main themes of the smart city concept. Online and offline visibility of a community, neighborhood can provide important data to understand the concept. Moreover how the close neighborhoods are related, how they are different from each other is one of the key concepts of this theme.

Throughout our research, we discovered an interesting viewpoint of the Henri Dunant Park. The park is not only located between the Woenselse Heide and Tempel but also reaches towards both ends of Woensel Noord. The Park has different users regarding to different periods of time. Elderly people in the morning and noon, young and middle-aged people with kids in the afternoon until the sunset and the youth use the park during the evening and the night.

With this observation the park behaves as a connector node for all the Woensel area. Refugees, working people, elderly, chilling youth are just the one side of the story. At the same time the users of the park are in a distinctive segregation. It is clear that groups scattered around the park, also scattered through different time periods. It seems that the activities that are taking place in the park can’t eliminate segregation. The elderly are complaining about the youth. Sometimes they even call the police. The youth are divided as well, the people from same neighborhood hang out with each other.

Also from a spatial point of view, the dividing effect of the park in the urban plan becomes visible in the online visibility of the neighborhoods. Starting from this point of view, we researched the neighborhood websites, social media visibility, different visibility in several apps. De temple and Woenselseheide have very similar demographic background, in terms of age, race, income, crime distribution. However the research showed that the visibility of the communities are very different. Woenselseheide have visibility in several platforms including, community forums, activity pages, Facebook, neighborhood websites, WhatsApp groups for several purposes. In their community websites there are extensive information relating to the neighborhood safety, activities, sharing, shopping, and complaints. On the other hand it is not possible to see the same intense online visibility for De Tempel neighborhood. There are few information about the related subjects.

Henri Dunant Park is hosting various different problems and solutions. As a connecting hub for the Woensel, it can be planned again for the breaking the barrier it is creating by its placement in the zone. It can be used as a tool in online communities for interacting people to the area for more uniting activities and then the offline aspect of the connection can be appear in the site, to create solutions and becoming a connecting node of communication in the smart city of Eindhoven.