A city is not only its spaces but also its spirit. The memories of residents of various aspects of the city and its urban spaces and places contributes to that spirit.
It is with this awareness that we developed a survey for locals of Radom (available in Polish) relating to specific aspects of the city and in particular, their memories of these spaces over the years.
This past week, we hosted our first Radom workshop, to facilitate survey distribution at a local senior center.
The group was lively- mainly age 66+ with many memories shared about aspects of specific urban spaces in central Radom.
Some standout themes from the senior locals dialogue were that:
• They miss the old fountains at Plac Konstytucji
• They feel that Radom was much safer in the past and also friendlier
• They observe that a lot of abandoned/destroyed buildings could be put to great use by city government if building owners would cooperate
•They asked the university student workshop hosts to start a movement to make the city better!
Workshop host Magda reflected that ‘I think they really want Radom to change, for the better.’
Workshop participants had three options to complete the survey. 1) Fill in the survey digitally at computers, 2) have workshop hosts digitally transcribe their responses, or 3) complete the survey on paper. 11 out of 12 participants opted to complete the survey on paper.
A big thank you to Magda and Igor, two Department of Philology at the University of Radom students who facilitated the workshop (in Polish) that I had calendared at the Centrum Aktywności Seniorów (Seniors Active Center) and are also digitally transcribing the paper survey input. Thank you to Łukasz Z. for codesigning and translating the survey, and thank you to Ula at the American Corner Radom for connecting me to your interns to support this project.
This is not only community-engaged research in terms of participants but also in terms of the collaborative efforts helping to make it all come alive!
Looking forward to more workshops to engage the community.
~Annika
