Making the neighborhood work
Qualitative research into the creation of and participation in a
complementary social-economic system in Amsterdam East
Masterthesis Urban Sociology
July 2018
University of Amsterdam
Jasper van den Berg, 10280308
Supervisor: Dr. Adeola Enigbokan
Second reader: Dr. Olga Sezneva
Acknowledgements
Writing a master thesis in the discipline of sociology has by been one of the most challenging but also most educational experiences that I have had so far. Thankfully, throughout the process I have build on the shoulders of many, without which this research would not have existed in its current form. First of all, I greatly thank all the respondents, informants and my volunteer colleagues who shared with me their lives, insights and joyful company. Without their valuable contribution to the project I would not have been able to gain the interesting insights presented in this research. Furthermore, I thank my supervisor Dr. Adeola Enigbokan. She has been the most passionate and creative teachers I had in academia. During our meetings she provided me with crucial insights that where indispensable for this thesis but which I will also take with me for other projects ahead. I am also grateful that Dr. Olga Sezneva could be the second reader of this thesis. Impressed by what my colleagues in the thesis seminar have produced, I want to thank them as well for their helpful and joyful company. Especially Tom, with who I could not only discuss my research, but also refresh my mind during our walks (or protests) around the university campus. I am also grateful to all my other friends and especially Axel, Josh and Janniek for their editorial contribution, my mother and father for their careful and intelligent involvement and last but most, my unconditionally supportive boyfriend Job.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements……….…….1 Abstract ……….…..5 Making the neighborhood work………...…..6 1 A World for Workfare
Theoretical consideration ……….….9
2 You’ve Got to Earn a Makkie
Research methods ……….12
3 From a Community Currency to a Participation Voucher………....……….14
3.1 Stigmatizing discourses around the Indische Buurt 3.2 Hope for the abandoned community
3.3 ‘Our own trade- and reward instrument’ 3.4 Visualizing the world of Makkie
3.5 Getting the money rolling 3.6 Makkie as activation instrument 3.7 Conclusion
4 Becoming a Makkie User………....……32
4.1 Tempting techniques of the Makkie world 4.2 The Makkie labor market
4.3 Working for Makkies 4.4 Getting payed
4.5 The Makkie consumption market 4.6 Conclusion
5 Experiences of Benefit-clients ………...……48
5.1 Makkie and its users 5.2 Out of the labor market 5.3 Into voluntary work
5.4 ‘Makkies, huh!? What are Makkies?’ 5.5 ‘It’s just like money but you can’t use it’ 5.6 Being recognized
5.7 Conclusion
6 Conclusion………...……53 References
Abstract: The dismantling of welfare states around the world has shown significant
consequences for marginalized citizens. Simultaneously, urban neighborhoods have become the subject of experimental interventions that aim to make local self-sustaining worlds. These socio-economic developments form the backdrop of this thesis, which investigates the kind worlding drawn from a complementary social-economic project within the context of the Indische Buurt, a stigmatized neighborhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. At the intersection of welfare cuts and internationally shared innovative regeneration programs, a group of professionals within the Indische Buurt imagined to create a community currency project called ‘Samen is het een Makkie’ (translated: ‘together it’s easy’) to support its marginalized inhabitants. Despite the well-intended efforts of highly educated residents, municipal servants and representatives of housing associations to organize an inclusive social-economic system around neighborhood voluntary work, the initiative got picked up differently. Recently it functions as a municipal activation policy instrument that specifically targets benefit-clients to get active in communal work. Interviews with organizing actors and benefit-clients as well as participant observation and discourse analysis investigated the world-making processes around the project and the experiences of its users. Through these methods, this thesis aims to contribute to existing literature on activation policies, complementary social-economic systems and urban world-making.
Making the neighborhood work
‘Offers. Discounts. Help your neighbors! Together it’s easy!’ ,1 encourages the front page of the promotional booklet of ‘Makkie’. Set up as a ‘community currency’ in 2011 by local and international professionals, Samen is het een Makkie (meaning ‘together it’s easy’) aims to stimulate voluntary work in two districts located in the east of Amsterdam, called the Indische Buurt and the Oostelijk Havengebied. The idea behind the initiative is that volunteers get rewarded with one ‘Makkie’ coupon after one hour of neighborhood help. Recently, the municipality of Amsterdam East has been running a pilot campaign to reach people who benefit from social welfare to get involved in the project. Through participating in voluntary work, the municipality of Amsterdam hopes that this will encourage welfare recipients to get involved and hopefully become more likely to re-employ themselves. . If the pilot is perceived ‘a success’ the municipality plans to spread Makkie throughout Amsterdam (Samen is het een Makkie 2018).
From the beginning of 2015, Dutch welfare policy got decentralized from national to the municipal level and focused more on workability and active citizenship (Rijksoverheid 2018). In order to create the social-economic world of this imagined “participation society”, Dutch municipalities are engaging in experimental urban projects to assemble neighborhoods for self-sustainability. The district municipality of Amsterdam East believes that complementary reward systems might play a distinct role in stimulating reciprocity and the strengthening of social relations. The promotion of Makkie, therefore, is a unique example of how local governments respond to the dismantling of the welfare state in times of globalization .
The Netherlands is one of the first extended welfare states that turn to neoliberal policies aimed at encouraging citizens to actively participate in society in order to return something for the support they receive. (Schinkel & van Houdt 2010: 697). Social scientists have already been investigating the impact of these policies on the daily lives of people with a low income. Researchers address several critiques to these policies, especially in relation to mandatory forms of voluntary work (Hurenkamp 2017; Fuller et al 2008; Kampen 2014) and policy instruments that tempt recipients to take part in some form of labor (De Wilde 2015;
Warburton and Smith 2003) that aim to ensure that welfare recipients return something for the support they receive. However, very few researchers addressed how world-making processes aim at creating participatory ideas through a system of local labor and consumption.
It is with this knowledge in mind that this thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of how local actors are involved in developing a social-economic system that revolves around a local currency. In addition, it investigates the experiences that such a currency generates for its users, especially for welfare recipients. The following central research question directs the investigation:
What kind of worlding does Samen is het een Makkie organize in Amsterdam East and how do participants experience its usage?
The following sub-questions can be added to this:
a) Which actors are involved in creating Samen is het een Makkie and how is the system implemented in Amsterdam East?
b) What does it mean to become a Makkie user?
c) How are benefit-clients involved in Samen is het een Makkie and what are their experiences with the local reward system?
After discussing the primary literature and methodology used throughout this research, answers to the questions formulated above are respectively presented in three main chapters. The third chapter of this thesis portraits the development of the Makkie. In going about the different organizing actors involved over time, it becomes visible which factors influenced the project and contributed to its current form.
Chapter four presents the results of a participant-observation approach to the second subquestion. Drawing on my own experiences as a Makkie volunteer and the fieldtrips made as a part of this research, this section presents a perspective in which the dynamics of the Makkie system is approached from within the contributing community.
The fifth chapter gives the floor to benefit-clients. Showing the different ways in which the makkie has become meaningful for the targeted group, the interviews with users will be addressed to inform how its very usage is understood.
The last section of the research poses an answer to the central question that has guided the research by concluding what kind of worlding Samen is het een Makkie organizes in Amsterdam East and how it is experienced by its benefit-clients.
1.
A world for workfare
Theoretical consideration
Being involved in Makkie means to be involved in a specific social-economic environment. This section turns to social theory to set up a theoretical framework that will enable and underpin the investigation of how this environment is created and what kind of experiences it generates. The upcoming section will thus review relevant literature that will show how a w social order is imagined and created. It will show how the concepts of ‘worlding’ and ‘world-making’ are fruitful in understanding this process of imagination and creation of a specific social order or environment. A good way to start this theoretical review is to turn to the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu who was one of this first to conceptualise this process of imagination and creation. In his famous article Social Space and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu describes these concepts in the following way:
“In every society there are struggles over the production and imposition of the
legitimate vision of the social world via symbolic power. Symbolic power in this sense is a power of ‘world-making’. [...] To change the world is to change the ways of world-making, that is the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced” (1989: 22-23).
World-making thus relates to the very organizing practices derived from peoples vision on how social life.
In addition Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) argue that decision-making processes are driven by the logics of six different ‘worlds’: the ‘inspired world’, the ‘domestic world’, the ‘world of fame’, the ‘civic world’, the ‘market world’, and the ‘industrial world’. In their
terms, a world is an overall interpretational framework through which people make sense of, value and act upon everyday situations. In this thesis I decided to focus on the aspects of market world and civil world. It will become clear that, as a social-economic project, Makkie mostly resonates with these logics. The market world is characterized by trade relations in which transactions take place. The behavior of citizens is driven by the longing for scarce goods in which individual interest is central. Other than the market world, the sphere of the
civil world consists of values that are linked to needs within a community or collective and go beyond personal interest. Connections between citizens are organized in collective systems like a municipality. Within these systems, citizens are conducted to accomplish collectively formulated goals.
The world of Makkie has a specific locality. Namely, Amsterdam East has been the subject of territorial stigmatization for a long time, which will be discussed in the following chapter. Drawing on international knowledge about experimental urban intervention, Makkie aims to improve the neighborhood. Various authors have worked with the concept of ‘assemblage’ as an analytical approach to ‘the labor of making, remaking and unmaking of particular configurations of urbanism’ (McCann et all 2013: 586). This means to study the practices of specific policy and community actors involved in creating new socio-material phenomena within cities that are imagined to contribute to the regeneration of neighborhoods. Stressing the high level of globalization in the present time, McCann et al suggest to include practices of ‘worlding’ (ibid.: 584). This means that cities use international expertise to set up innovative projects that are imagined to benefit the competition within the wider network of interconnected metropolises (ibid.: 586). Therefore, in the investigation of Makkie, the concept of worlding to analyze the way in which it experiments with shaping and preparing the urban environment for a participation society.
Attempts to world neighborhoods with an alternative economic system are unique. Boonstra et al. (2013) have done elaborate research on the specific ideas behind complementary currency systems. The authors describe that the particular motivation to put alternative money systems into practice is that they are imagined to get things done that could not be realized within dominant currency value structures, or there where dominant money systems withdraw (ibid.: 5). Although there are only a few results on the effects of these systems, the promises are that it could activate reciprocity in a community. An alternative coin is imagined to act as a glue to strengthen inclusive social relations.
Drawing on Zelizers (1989) approach to money, however, it can be questioned if Makkie is perceived as a community currency. Zelizer shows that a complicated social valuation of money lies beneath its formal understanding. Her historic investigation into the attitudes towards the American dollar revealed that one currency could have different social and cultural meaning depending on the context. ‘Charity money’, ‘institutional money’, ‘gift
money’ and ‘household money’ are some examples of the ways in which one currency could be interpreted within different social environments. (Zelizer: 370-371).
Calling Makkie a community currency, however, can be criticized. The system nowadays specifically serves as a policy instrument to activate benefit-clients within Amsterdam East. Some critical remarks have already been made concerning policies that emphasize active citizenship. The underlying ideals that come with the new participation policies implicate that one only deserves help when an active participation is offered in return. People who are unable to offer this active participation will be subjected to the implication that they are not worth of help, which on their turn amplifies feelings of shame and guilt. According to Hurenkamp (2017) active citizenship can therefore form problems for people that have to deal with private issues like depression, dept, divorce, low education etcetera. These people struggle with the new perceptions on citizenship in relation to the participation society; they are in need for help, but become more and more embarrassed to ask for it (Hurenkamp 2017: 5).
Moreover, Kampen (2014) has studied Dutch benefit-clients that participate in more or less mandatory voluntary work. He shows that workfare experiments are sensitive and can bring emotional reactions to the participants. The idea of reciprocity does not seem to match the expectations of voluntary workers. In practice, they do not seem to get a job on the labor market and it does not give the societal recognition that is expected. The concepts of ‘mandatory’ and ‘voluntary’ therefore seem unable to be unified. (ibid.: 211). Combining them suggests a relationship in which the transactionary character that is desired by the government, seems to be prioritized over the personal interest of the benefit-client (ibid.: 229). Following Kampen’s investigations, this thesis rounds up by reflecting on the experiences world-making Makkie generates for welfare recipients.
2.
You’ve got to earn a Makkie
Research Methods
Using the theoretical insights presented in the previous section, a qualitative research design with an ethnographic approach (Bryman 2008: 400-434) informed the questions posed in the introduction of this thesis. Examining the various actors involved in Makkie and the way they implement the system in the neighborhood, an archival approach to analyze a variety of selected documents concerning the project has been obtained. A discourse analysis (Silverman 2006: 223-234) on national and local policy documents as well as the promotional letter and a call script to benefit clients informed about government influences and involvement in the project. Online and offline visual and written accounts such as websites, You-Tube videos, booklets, leaflets, posters and the Makkie coupons, informed the research about the involvement of other organizational actors, like experts, regular citizens and (non-)profit organizations. Despite the missing perspective of some unavailable informants, these methods were combined with unstructured interviews with five important stakeholders .2
Together they extended the background knowledge around Makkie that is necessary to inform how the social-economic world around Makkie is created.
Participant observation enabled the possibility to go into the everyday interactions and experiences that are part of being involved in Makkie (Bryman 2008: 410). Therefore, this method has been used to give insights to what it means to become part of the Makkie system and made it possible to view it from an insider's perspective (Hennink et al. 2011). All together I have worked for 34½ hours in three different voluntary jobs and spend 15 Makkies 3
Due to the limited amount of Makkie vacancies I was able to investigate three voluntary environments. Following C. Wright Mills’ (1980) insights, keeping and reflecting on thorough fieldwork diaries and jotted notes on the process of earning and spending of Makkies made it possible to analyze the whole Makkie chain from getting a job to consuming on the Makkie market.
Building on the investigations of ‘naturally occurring’ data, open-ended interviews with benefit-clients that use Makkie have been used to investigate the deeper understanding
2The appendix contains a list of all respondents that participated in this research.
the system generates (Silverman 2006: 109-152). It became clear that there were a lot of Makkie users every Wednesday at ‘The Makkie store’. Visiting the place regularly, as well as others, and using snowball methods (Bryman 2008: 184), made it possible to secure 10 respondents . Leaflets that call for respondents have also been distributed around various4
places within the Indische Buurt . This, unfortunately, did not seem to be an effective method5 and did not result in more interviews. Because of the limited Dutch or English language capacities of some respondents, not every interview reached the wanted level of ‘rapport’ (ibid.: 201). In these cases, using visuals, such as the Makkie leaflets and booklets, was of great help. Analyses of the gathered data followed a method of ‘open coding’ according to ‘grounded theory’, resulting in a variety of concepts and categories that together formed substantive insights of Makkie users (ibid.: 544-545).
4The list of these respondents is also presented in the appendix of this research. 5The appendix presents a copy of the leaflet as well as a translation.
3
From a community currency to a participation voucher
The first chapter of this thesis presents a genealogy of the discourses and actors that shaped where, when and how Samen is het een Makkie came into existence. Experimental intervention programs like Makkie aim to deal with the ascertained problems of stigmatized urban areas and its marginal dwellers within it. Driven by their vision on the world organizing individuals and institutions try reshape the local social-economic environment and create a new kind of world. The goal of this chapter, therefore, is to indicate the various actors involved in creating the project and how they implemented the system in Amsterdam East. Recently the program is also active in a few places in the Oostelijk Havengebied, a neighborhood in the North part of Amsterdam East but the story of Makkie started and developed within the context of the Indische Buurt.3.1 Stigmatizing discourses around the Indische Buurt
Today the municipality of Amsterdam divides its land into 481 ‘buurten’ (neighborhoods), 99 ‘wijken’ (quarters), 23 ‘gebieden’ (areas) and 8 ‘stadsdelen’ (districts) . The Indische Buurt is 6 a neighborhood that belongs to the district of Amsterdam East and lays just outside the canals that surround the historical city center (see image 1). It consists of seven quadrants that were mostly developed between 1900 and 1930 to house the growing number of people that found work in the harbor area at the East side of Amsterdam (the Oostelijk Havengebied) (Dukes 2011).
Around the 1960s the Oostelijk Havengebied gradually lost its function as a harbor and became an abandoned industrial area, which affected the attractiveness of the Indische Buurt (Dukes 2011: 4). Physical decay and suburbanization made the neighborhood fall into poor living conditions. A large assembly of resident groups, local entrepreneurs, communists and squatters demanded a neighborhood
regeneration agenda based on local needs (Sakizlioglu & Uitermark 2014: 1387). As a response to the movement, Amsterdam’s municipality started buying private houses with money from the national government. Following dominant discourse that investing in social housing was the best way to deal with problems in neighborhoods, almost all of the7 purchased houses got replaced with apartments that attracted low-income groups (ibid.: 1379). Until the end of the 20th-century developments kept its focus on creating accommodation for lower income groups resulting in a steep increase of the share of social rent houses, up to 93% by 2000 (Dukes 2011: 4-5). Housing associations became responsible for the management of the new and renovated blocks and gained strong influence in the Indische Buurt.
Meanwhile, the disappearance of more affluent residents continued and between the 1970s and 1980s immigrants from, mostly, Morocco, Turkey and Suriname moved into the neighborhood. Ever since, the Indische Buurt has been a highly multicultural neighborhood. Nowadays the composition of its inhabitants is still characterized by a relatively high number of people with a ‘non-Western migration background’ (49%) (Gebiedsanalyse 2017). However, it also came to be seen as one of the most impoverished parts of Amsterdam (Sakizlioglu & Uitermark 2014). High rates of unemployment and welfare recipients, debts under its residents, language problems and incomes far below the cities average dominated debates in media and academics (Dukes 2011: 5). During the 1990s a stigmatizing spatial discourse had been formed around the neighborhood. It became viewed as an area in which multiple social-economic problems concentrated.
In 2007 the Dutch government launched a national plan that aimed at dealing with the country’s most marginalized neighborhoods. On the basis of 18 indicators , the former 8
Ministry of Housing, Neighborhoods and Integration had examined which Dutch neighborhoods were dealing with the most ‘cumulative problems and backlog’ (Rijksoverheid 2007: 1). This resulted in a list of 40 ‘ Aandachtswijken’ (meaning ‘neighborhoods with special attention’) and one of them was Amsterdam East (ibid.: 3).
7 In the Netherlands the rent of social housing is ruled nationally. The current maximum net rent is set on €710,68 a month
and available to people with a shared year income (children excluded) of maximum €38.798. Source: https://www.woningnetregioamsterdam.nl/Inschrijven
8 National government described the indicators as followed: “1. Income 2. Job 3. Education 4. Small houses 5. Old houses 6.
Cheap houses, 7. Vandalism (‘bedaub of walls’) 8. Vandalism (‘smashed objects’) 9. Social nuisance (‘by neighbors’) 10. Social nuisance (‘by local residents’) 11. Unsafety 12. Satisfaction with house 13. Satisfaction house environment 14. Tendency to move 15. Noise nuisance 16. Pollution 17. Traffic nuisance 18. Traffic safety”
Special attention meant that these neighborhoods got viewed as regions that suffered from problems that could not be solved by local policy alone but needed a national program and funding to improve ‘social-economic status of households, experiences of (social)livability, physical status of houses and physical status according to inhabitants’ (ibid.: 1). On the 11th of July 2007, a partnership between the housing associations active in the Inidsche Buurt (Alliantie, Ymere and Eigen Haard) and the district municipality of Zeebrug signed the 9 ‘Covenant Indische Buurt’. They marked the Indische Buurt as an ‘achterstandswijk’ (meaning ‘a backlog neighborhood’) that needed radical redevelopment towards ‘a vibrant cosmopolitan neighborhood’ (Stadsdeel Zeeburg 2008: 5). The Indische Buurt was identified as a neighborhood that needed more affluent global citizens with international connections to solve local problems.
Sakizlioglu and Uitermark (2014) have investigated the consequences of stigmatizing discourses for regular citizens. They point out that the conceptualization of the Indische Buurt as a ‘vibrant cosmopolitan neighborhood’ is an exclusionary imagination that de-valuates a distinct amount of inhabitants, eliminating the idea that the neighborhood could be upgraded without displacing the residents (ibid.: 1379). This is apparent in the in the fact that, while national and local policymakers started blaming the concentration of social housing for the problems described above, policies of ‘social mixing’ were perceived as the solution. Sakizlioglu and Uitermark characterize this discourse as a shared understanding of local governments and housing associations that ‘there were too many social houses’ in the Indische Buurt and needed ‘a higher share of middle-class native Dutch households’ (ibid: 1379). This discourse aimed to bring down the share of social housing to at least 70%. By targeting regular tenants with moving fees and offering them priority places on waiting lists for a new house, they aimed at creating more room for higher income-groups and inhabitants with a native Dutch background (ibid.: 1379).
To restructure the area, the policy-program Aandachtswijken initially came with significant investments in the Indische Buurt. However, as a response to the global financial crisis of 2007 - 2008 several cutbacks resulted in the end of the program in 2011, five years before its official end date (Olde Hanhof & Zijlstra 2011). With the Aandachtswijken policies disappearing, national and local programs that structurally invested in neighborhoods eroded.
9 From 1990 till 2010 the Indische Buurt was part of a smaller municipal district called Stadsdeel Zeeburg. As a result of a
restructuring of Amsterdam’s districts Stadsdeel Zeeburg, and the Indische Buurt, became part of the current bigger district municipality Stadsdeel Oost.
Furthermore, the ‘own responsibility dogma’ of the new liberal-conservative government resulted in the decentralization of governance from national to local responsibility and a dominant view that citizens should get active in initiatives to keep the neighborhood vital (Tonkens & de Wilde 2013: 35).
The practices in the Indische Buurt are an example of how policymakers, together with housing associations, use the notion of a social mix as a strategy for, what McCann et al. (2013) call, ‘worlding’ the neighborhood. Policy actors collectively aim at assembling the area through ‘socio-material phenomena’ (ibid.: 583) to shape the urban landscape in such a way that it is more resilient for a globalized future (ibid.: 586). As we shall see in the next paragraph, the worlding of the Indische Buurt featured a unique twist in that local citizens internalized social mixing and worlding discourse and started to set up projects themselves in order to prepare the local community for a globalized future.
3.2 Hope for the abandoned community
It is within the context described above that in 2010 a group of highly educated, local entrepreneurs, professionals and representatives of the district municipality of Amsterdam East started forming a neighborhood platform with the name Makasserplein Community 10
(MPC). According to the platform, there were many dwellers around the Makasserplein, a square located in the North-East part of the Indische Buurt, that can be defined as ‘socially vulnerable’ and ‘inadequately independent’ (Buurtproject 2018). The MPC underlines the national and local discourse that they face multiple problems such as poverty, isolation and (mental)handicaps but do not receive the provisions they needed to be included in society. By setting up projects that aim to strengthen the social relations in the neighborhood, the MPC imagines to tackle these problems.
Where McCann et al. (2013) point out how policymakers are driven by strategic regeneration discourses to create local connections with global networks, they seem to lack in addressing the perspective of inhabitants of neighborhoods. Apadurai (2007) however, describes worldmaking processes that are mainly driven by regular citizens. This ‘politics of hope’ is driven by a response to high levels of globalization and the dismantlement of the welfare states (2007: 33). Forming transnational connections between communities is
10 The platform doesn’t exist anymore, but an analyses of websites, you-tube videos, blogs and interviews with members of the MPC provide information about their goals and activities.
imagined to create ‘on the ground’ resilient local neighborhoods. Looking at the practices of the MPC, we can see the several overlapping elements. What however can be stated is that the MPC is driven by the internalized policy discourses but that, now that citizens have to take part in neighborhood initiatives themselves, they turn to a politics of hope.
Footage on the You-Tube blog of the MPC gives insight into how regular citizens are activated enthusiastically to take part in local projects. From the small neighborhood gardens to ambitious regeneration projects based on internationally shared knowledge, it becomes clear that the MPC follows a divergent and experimental approach to urban development. Their practice is evident on the blog-stills presented below. On the first still, we see a member of the Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC) management board . The 11
organization develops models for ‘bottom-up’ urban regeneration. At the other still, we see residents of the Indische Buurt explaining the map of their project to former minister of Housing, Neighborhoods and Integration Ella Vogelaar, who was responsible for the Aandachtsbuurten. The two slides visualize the different roles of various actors in the neighborhood initiatives at that time: while national governments are pulling back, stimulating and watching citizens set up projects in their neighborhoods themselves, residents reach out for experimental international urban development designs to create new local conditions.
’I am here as a member of this planet, talking to your community to be together, strengthen our soul, change our behavior, our thoughts. To change the world, do a better world.’
Image 2: A video message from Iara Pietricovsky de Oliveira ‘to the Indische Buurt’
Source: MPC You-Tube blog
‘This is where the tables will be. We’re going to build a chess game over here, with some reusable tiles.’
Image 3: Video reportage from the MPC on the visit of minister Ella Vogelaar.
Source: MPC You-Tube blog
3.3 ‘Our own trade- and reward instrument’
By the end of 2010, the MPC comes in contact with non-profit organization Qoin . As an 12 international knowledge and support institute, Qoin is specialized in creating alternative currencies for local communities. Inspired by their vision, the MPC starts investigating the possibility of ‘putting our own trade- and reward instrument into practice’. During an interview, Edgar Kampers, research and development employer of Qoin, who by that time was collaborating with the MPC, explains to me why he believes community currencies (CC) are needed. Scrolling through some slides of some of his presentations he tells me:
‘For many years the civil society didn’t organize the things that needed to be done very well. So the government took that responsibility: child care, elderly homes (...) the introduction of the welfare state. At the same time we could do more and
more with technique. So this thing [points to a diagram that illustrates the welfare state] grew and grew. But now we think it’s too expensive and that society is on the move. That means there’s a gap.’
In line with the politics of hope described above, the quote illustrates that as a designer Edgar is triggered by the question: how do we organize welfare tasks without the welfare state? That ‘gap’ does not fill itself, he states. According to him the tasks that were previously organized in collective action, nowadays need to be organized by reciprocity within communities. However, to him, the problem is that there is a lack of reciprocity in urban neighborhoods because there is no medium of allocation to organize this, and Euros do not seem to be able to allocate this.
‘If you want to shape that [reciprocity within urban communities] you need a medium of exchange. The money we have now is very much focussed on competition,
globalization and making a profit. But you cán design coins in a such a way that they are more focussed on networks and collaboration.’
12More information about Qoin and its explanation of Makkie can be found via
Edgar states that dominant money systems like the Euro do not value relations between people from their participation in communal activities but from their participation in globalized market systems. However, marginalized urban dwellers do not fit these principles and therefore cannot pay for their needs for care.
It becomes clear that Edgar is driven by two coherent macro processes: high levels of globalization that affect marginalized urban dwellers and care gaps that results from the dismantling of the welfare state. In their book On justification. Economies of Worth Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) distinguish six different interpretative frameworks on which people base the legitimacy of their actions. They point out that interpretations of the world arise from different experience ‘worlds’ and thereby form basic principles on which people base their actions. In line with their approach, the conception of the CC is characterized by the aim to mix the ‘civil’ world logic with a ‘market world’ logic.
Another member of MPC was Anne Miek Fokkens, ‘coordinator neighborhood policy’ at housing association Eigen Haard (EH). As a part of the covenant mentioned above, she represented the housing associations active in the Indische Buurt. During an interview, I discuss with her the period in which Makkie was launched and the motivation of the housing associations to be involved in this. ‘ And we were really like: wooow!’, says Anne Miek about the moment she first heard about the plan of Qoin to set up a CC in the Indische Buurt. According to her, housing associations are not only interested in ‘the bricks’ but also in ‘everything that happens around it’. In line with the Aandachtsbuurten discourse, EH wanted to play a role in solving the addressed problems of the people they are housing. The issue Anne Miek was much concerned with was ‘shyness to ask’. She imagines that vulnerable people are too shy to ask for help because they have nothing to offer a helper in return. However, the interview made clear that EH was not only driven by a civil world logic but also a market world logic. Anne Miek points out that the Makkie was also seen as an instrument that could be used to stimulate residents to keep public spaces clean and keep an eye on the safety in the streets. As an example, she notes that the housing association was struggling with the height of service costs that had to be paid to clean the landings. Residents could do it themselves, but in practice it turned out it would not be done consistently. So, if they paid the EH service costs, EH could pay cleaners to do it. However, this was a very
contested idea among the residents. According to Anne Miek this is when her manager became enthusiastic about the Makkie as well:
‘Our goals [of Eigen Haard] are clean, unbroken and safe. Well, clean is the story of the landings, unbroken is about people helping each other with chores, that saves us to, and safety has to do with getting to know each other. So those goals, that’s where the Makkie fits. Those are also the goals of Makkie! [claps in her hands, acting like she just fixed something] Arranged!’
What becomes visible in this quote is that Makkie was from the beginning, at least by EH, viewed as an inventive way to organize labor. Labor that would otherwise not be done for financial logic reasons would now be done for Makkies.
In the set up of Makkie the role of the municipality of Amsterdam became crucial. Civil servants worked together with Qoin on an application for an international program called Community Currencies in Action (CCIA). A partnership arose that consisted of ‘a package of support structures to develop initiatives across North West Europe, promoting community currencies as a credible vehicle for achieving positive social, environmental and local economic outcomes.’ (CCIA). The municipality of Amsterdam East and Qoin became ‘pilot partners’ and received over €350.000 within the period 2011-2015 to develop a local currency for the Indische Buurt. The work of Qoin however, Edgar tells me, stayed on a voluntary basis.
Between 2010 and 2011 Samen is het een Makkie became a unique collaborative project between urban professionals operating in the public sector within the Indische Buurt. The image presented below visualizes how several actors are involved in the initiative. In their search for local solutions, the MPC obtained internationally shared practices from Brazil and knowledge platform ‘for creation and innovation in the city’ Pakhuis de Zwijger , about 13
innovative urban development programs. They found connections with the municipality, Qoin, the housing associations in the Indische Buurt and design bureau Studio Teekens. In collaboration with Qoin the municipality found an EU fund and a fund from non-profit organization Stichting Doen. The housing associations contributed with their knowledge about the neighborhood and invested money.
Together they imagined creating a self-sustaining Makkie economy within the Indische Buurt. The project team would serve as a bank to distribute Makkies between voluntary organizations and inhabitants. They could pay each other with Makkies for their participation in neighborhood help. The Makkies could be used to pay neighbors or to obtain goods and services at local entrepreneurs. Makkies could also be returned to the bank in the form of a donation to the project. In their deal with Samen is het een Makkie local entrepreneurs get some Euros back for accepting Makkies. As illustrated in the image below, this is where the Makkie economy leans on the Euro economy.
Image 4: Organizational network of Samen is het een Makkie Source: Created by author
3.4 Visualizing the world of Makkie
When it became clear that the project was going to be feasible, design bureau Studio Teekens got involved. Their job was to create the physical coin itself and promotional material around it. During an interview one of the designers points out that ‘Every designer dreams about that’, referring to the task to create a design for money. It became clear that being the
designer of a coin is not just about creating attractively illustrated leaflets, but about visualizing a community that previously purely exited in the minds of the members of the MPC.
Following Bourdieu (1989) in his famous theory on symbolic power, it becomes clear that the visualization of the ‘community’ of the Indische Buurt in a currency serves as a powerful symbol to precisely produce and reproduce social groups. A visual analysis of the Makkie bills and leaflets reveals how the Makkie is designed to communicate with different ethnic and class groups, bringing them together around a shared financial system. This reflects the social mix discourse mentioned above. Studio Teekens therefore not only dove into the various material aspects of designing value paper but also into the Indische Buurt, in search of symbolic aspects that represent the imagined community of the neighborhood. This resulted in a complete package of posters, flags, photoshoots, letters, gift-coupons, stickers, booklets and, in the epicenter of all, the bills.
During an interview the designer explains ‘We had two bills so we could show two sides of the neighborhood’ (see image 5). The two different buildings on the Makkies represent the imagined progress the Indische Buurt experienced in a time span of a century. The half Makkie contains a picture of the Majellakerk. Build in 1925 it is one of the oldest
Image 5: the complete design of Makkie bills, with Dutch explanations of its symbols. Source: The archive of Studio Teekens
iconic buildings of the Indische Buurt. According to the designer its ‘oriental architecture’ suits the origin of many inhabitants of the neighborhood and therefore symbolizes ‘the past
and the transition of the neighborhood’. Nowadays the Majellakerk houses a big welfare organization, national orchestra Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest and a Makkie supermarket. The Borneohof, on the whole Makkie, is meant to symbolize the neighborhoods future. This iconic building at the end of the Javastraat was finished in 2011 and won the architecture prize the “Amsterdamse nieuwbouwprijs” . The Borneohof recently houses a14 private gym, a coffee shop of coffee chain Coffee Company, a flower store, public library and a balance of rent and privately owned houses. The backside of the bills show the inside of the buildings. The ‘oriental dome’ is presented on the half Makkie, about which the designer has no specific story to tell other than that it reminds him of the plans to destroy the building in the 1990’s. The compilation of doors on the one Makkie, however, also seem to symbolize the triumph of design. The internationally famous Dutch interior designer called Piet Heijn Eek constructed two big walls out of the doors that were previously part of the buildings15 that were demolished to develop the new architectural icon. Drawing on this visual analyses the critical note can be made that the development presented in the bills seems to resemble the standards of ‘the gentrifier’. This is demonstrated by the fact that the blue Makkie is valued most and symbolizes the standards of the people and cultures of the higher income and educated groups.
3.5 Getting the money rolling
The previous sections gave an insight into the ideas and imaginations that drove the organizing actors behind Makkie. However, how did they eventually bring the system into practice? Makkie was officially launched in February 2011. Makkie bills were printed, distributed and promoted among some of the people, activities and organizations that had help requests. A slowly growing amount of local entrepreneurs were encouraged to participate in the project. They each received a sticker stating ‘We accept Makkies’ and offered Makkie users some deals: to the cinema Studio /K, entrance to the swimming pool Flevoparkbad, a meal at neighborhood centers Meevaart or Archipel and eventually also
14 More information can be obtained via:
https://www.amsterdamwoont.nl/nieuwbouwprijs/amsterdamse-nieuwbouwprijs-2012/
Image 6: Map with the distribution of Makkie partners in the Indische Buurt Source: Archive of Studio Teekens
groceries at the chain Albert Heijn. Makkies could be earned by signing up on the website of Makkie and connecting with people or organizations that asked for help. The map presented above shows how the organization physically mapped the system into the Indische Buurt by 2013. Across the neighborhood three information points, nine ‘earning partners’ and twelve ‘spending partners’ had become involved in the CC.
However, as the MPC and the other partners were working on the project, Anne Miek of EH says, it was tough to give a certain attractiveness to the currency. Introducing the system was not enough, it had to be promoted actively to reach out to the various groups they wanted to take part in it. An online marketplace where ‘help askers’ could meet ‘help offerers’ was launched but this did not result in much contact. Therefore, Samen is het een Makkie decided to start working more offline, hanging notes, prompting the concept through a stand at local markets, trying to connect people to one another and organizing neighborhood clean-up days, as can be seen in the pictures presented below. But Anne Miek and Jennifer
also saw that the project got picked up differently than expected. According to them this mainly had to do with spending options they offered. Anne Miek states:
‘What we realized as Makkie organization is that people had the need to really buy things with their Makkies. We noticed this in relation to its usage at Albert Heijn. Many more groceries were paid with it. They realized: I have a low income, well then I will exchange my Makkies and get Euros in return. That is what we saw of course.’
In an attempt to adapt to this, Samen is het een Makkie wanted to work together with more significant volunteer organizations in the neighborhood, but according to another, more recent member of the organization, social worker Jennifer Veltman, these organizations began to be ‘anti-Makkie’. According to her, the arguments were mainly about a fear of losing the voluntary Euro money reward they received already. But inquiry with an outspoken social worker of the big welfare organization Civic revealed ideological problems with Makkie. According to him, the project should not focus on the welfare organizations so much but also on the more affluent people. He states:
‘Makkie only works if you offer it integral. If you make the target group smaller it becomes money for the poor and that doesn’t help anyone.’
The social worker is critiquing Makkie because in his view not everyone participates equally. He is bothered by the fact that the currency is mainly promoted under the low-income groups
Image 7: A Makkie stand at the Makasserplein.
Source: Makkie facebook account
Image 8: Neighborhood clean-up day.
Source: Makkie facebook account
Image 9: A question and offer bord Source: Makkie facebook account
of the Indische Buurt and therefore is not contributing to the ideal he has to treat people equal. In conversation with a religious welfare organization, another argument was mentioned. Namely, that voluntary work should not be paid at all, but be totally unconditional.
3.6 Makkie as activation instrument
While Makkie was trying to find its footing in the Indische Buurt, national reforms of the Dutch welfare system resulted in new laws for welfare recipients . From the first of January 16 2015, the ‘Participation Law’ (PL) replaced the ‘Law on Work and Support’, the ‘Law on Social Work Support’ and the ‘Law on Inability to Work Youth’ (Rijksoverheid 2018). With the PL, the government takes a more strict position towards people's ability to claim income support on the one hand and sharpens the rules for people who benefit from the laws noted above on the other. The aim is to get more people into paid work, including those with a work-related disability (Rijksoverheid 2018).
Local governments were entrusted with the responsibility to realize this new law in practice. This means that municipal institutions have to come up with solutions that stimulate people to participate in the labor market (Rijksoverheid 2018). However, they also have the jurisdiction to decide how strict their programs will be. This makes the question what citizens have to do in return for income support a topic that is contested in the local political arena. In reaction to the PL, the municipality of Amsterdam developed several plans that specifically linked citizen engagement to neighborhood initiatives. One of these plans is ‘ Meedoen Werkt!’ (translated to: ‘taking part works!’) (Gemeente Amsterdam 2015). This new policy program was set up by the municipal department Work, Participation and Income (WPI) and had the goal to reshape labor market reintegration programs for jobless people with income support.
By the time Kampen (2014) was obtaining his study on mandatory volunteer work in The Netherlands, Amsterdam had strict programs that forced benefit-clients into labor market programs. If people did not want to collaborate, they got sanctioned. Meedoen Werkt!
16 Receiving income support from the national government is a right to every legal resident of The Netherlands with the age
of 18 or older, who is not in prison, does not receive other forms of welfare benefit and has an income or capital below €6.020,- when single or €12.040,- when part of a combined households or for pensioners#. However, in The Netherlands
income support also comes with the integration duties to ‘have basic knowledge of or learn the Dutch language’ and ‘take part in activities offered by the municipality to find a job’.
however, presented the new vision of the local government which implied that benefit-clients should not be forced but enticed. By ‘creating new incentives’ the municipality aimed at luring benefit-clients into voluntary work. It is imagined that through these ‘meaningful daytime activities’ benefit-clients could ‘grow into (supervised) work’ to become ‘self-sustaining’ (Gemeente Amsterdam 2015: 1-3). The plan includes five key objectives of which one states: ‘Experiments with new interventions and services’ (Gemeente Amsterdam 2015: 9). Three experimental projects are named, and one of them involves ‘a system of participation vouchers that people with a minimal income can earn with activities in the neighborhood’ (2015: 13).
In the same year ‘Meedoen Werkt!’ was introduced, policy adviser Jet van Rijswijk replaced her former colleague as project leader of Samen is het een Makkie at the municipality of Amsterdam East. During my appointment with her at the local municipal office she stated that ‘At that time alderman Vliegenthart changed the whole system of the WPI. He wanted to try to get the people who sit at home into some form of work’. She confirmed that the way of governing jobless people radically shifted from forcing to enticing and that this shift also created a different view on Makkie. It was no longer imagined to serve as a CC but as a ‘participation voucher’. Not necessary to stimulate reciprocity between all sorts of groups in the Indische Buurt, but to specifically stimulate benefit-clients in their engagement in the neighborhood. It was the last year the CCIA funded Makkie and the municipality now began to finance the project with money from the department of WPI.
To give Makkie its new shape, another experiment was constructed. The district municipality attracted two new employers that came working for Makkie. One from WPI and one from Amsterdam Stadspas. The Stadspas (meaning ‘city card’) is a free personified17 card, provided by the municipality of Amsterdam, which offers various advantages for citizens of Amsterdam who have a low income or reached the age of retirement. Stadspas has over 188.000 users and works together with over 350 organizations. The municipality makes a financial deal with organizations in the sectors recreation, education, entertainment and health, in order to provide users with discounts or free offers. These employers created the ‘Makkie pilot’, a campaign that involved promotional telephone calls to 225 specific welfare users and mail to all 1780 users in the district Indische Buurt and Oostelijk Havengebied. If the pilot is perceived ‘a success’ the municipality plans to spread Makkie throughout
Amsterdam. The recent spending options presented in the Makkie booklet are part of the new ‘Makkie pilot’. Where previously local entrepreneurs donated something themselves, now Stadspas finances most of the costs that local entrepreneurs have when they offer goods or services for Makkies. This makes the composition of offers for Makkie users broader than before.
The image presented below visualizes of the organizing actors involved in Makkie in its recent compilation. While the collaboration with initiators and funds ended, the municipality became one of the most important partners of the project. Two civil servants, respectively from Stadpas and the WPI, became direct employers of the project to put the new experiment in practice. Housing association EH no longer finances the project but supports Samen is het een Makkie by providing a new building for the organization. Feye, one of the last members of the MPC that was involved, had stopped working for Makkie, unfortunately his reason remains unclear. Anne Miek and Jennifer, however, stayed on as freelancer, paid by the municipality. Jennifer became responsible for the contact with voluntary organizations and Anne Miek became responsible for the contact with local entrepreneurs. To help them promote Makkie they attracted two Makkie volunteers.
Image 10: Recent organizational netwerk of Samen is het een Makkie Source: Created by author
3.7 Conclusion
Since the 1970’s the highly multicultural Indische Buurt was stigmatized by residents and policymakers with a discourse that subjected the area as a neighborhood with multiple social-economic problems. In 2007 national and local governments came with plans to redevelop the area from an ‘Aandachtsbuurt’ towards ‘a vibrant cosmopolitan neighborhood’. Assembling the area through social mixing was a specific way in which policymakers and housing associations imagined to world the Indische Buurt. Exclusionary mixing practices aimed at attracting more affluent, global and native-Dutch citizens to solve the perceived problems.
Being triggered by own responsibility rhetoric, residents formed a neighborhood platform under the name Makassarplein Community and got active to organize hope for the local marginalized community of Indische Buurt. As a response to the welfare austerity and globalization, their world making practices can be seen as a combination of what Appadurai (2007) calls a ‘politics of hope’ and internalized worlding policy discourses (McCann et al. 2013). In collaboration with international community currency organization Qoin and national and international funds, the local professionals and municipal and housing association actors developed Samen is het een Makkie. Through a powerful symbolic design (Bourdieu 1989) this community currency aimed to unite market world logics with civil world logics to allocate reciprocity within a self-sustaining complementary market.
From the beginning, the social-economic belief behind Makkie was that neighborhood help is not unconditional: one needs to do something in return for the help he/she receives. In that philosophy, Makkie could serve as an accommodative object of value with a light weight to vulnerable people, when it comes to paying someone for informal labor. At the same time, it was meant to be attractive to groups of higher education and income. Makkie, therefore, mostly seems to be a specific way of organizing labor. Labor that is not done in the constellation of a dismantled welfare state, nor a globalized capitalist market system.
Putting Makkie into practice seemed harder than imagined. In connecting the coin to local entrepreneurs and welfare organizations, the involved actors tried to lure a mixed group of inhabitants to work for and pay with the local currency. However, the money got mainly picked up by lower income groups who used it as extra income. While struggling to get Makkie rolling, an essential shift in the involved actors and practices occurred. International
budget eroded and the district municipality of Amsterdam became the leading financial partner of Makkie. Under the influence of national and local debates on mandatory voluntary work, they came to view the project as a new experimental approach to persuade people with a minimum income to participate in voluntary work within their neighborhood. Not through the imagination of a community currency but a ‘participation voucher’.
4
Becoming a Makkie User
The previous chapter gave a historical perspective on the Indische Buurt and Samen is het een Makkie. What has become clear is that the project has undergone a transition from a community currency to a ‘participation voucher’. While the participation voucher specifically targeted benefit-clients within the Indische Buurt and Oostelijk Havengebied, the project has kept its goal to reach out for ‘neighbors to get active for their neighborhood, help and support each other’ . In this chapter I will present the insights drawn from my participation18 in the project in order to understand what it means to become a Makkie user.
4.1 Tempting techniques of the Makkie world
Building on the design of Studio Teekens the district municipality of Amsterdam used several booklets, leaflets, the website of Makkie, created personal promotional letters and made calls to reach benefit-clients . In search of a voluntary job, I took a closer look at the way19 voluntary tasks are promoted. This gave the insight that luring welfare recipients to get active in voluntary jobs comes with specific tempting techniques.
The strategy illustrates what has been described by De Wilde (2015) as ‘affective citizenship a technology of social cohesion’ (2015: 34). This contains an overall set of images and language that aim at raising specific feelings within, in this case, potential volunteers and thereby recruiting them to work on local social networks. With an overall tone of encouragement, simpleness and joy, the communication of Makkie clearly aims at creating feelings of happiness, inclusiveness and ease to the reader. In the description of voluntary tasks, words like ‘together’, ‘joy’ and ‘easy’ are often used. The voluntary work offered by welfare initiative Life & Style, for instance, is described as ‘Fun with elderly’ and ‘Being cozy together’. At the neighborhood center Archipel ‘there is enough to do and it’s mainly cozy!’ and welfare and integration organization M.O.I suggests: ‘What is easier than earning Makkies with doing groceries for someone else?’. In contribution to this, it stands out that even ideas about good taste are often addressed. At least five initiatives explicitly state that
18As became clear from their website
http://www.makkie.cc/veelgestelde-vragen/
19All of these materials were investigated. Both the call script and the personal letter where obtained via an employer of the
volunteers will work with ‘delicious food,’ and at neighborhood center Meevaart it is even said that ‘Makkers [a Makkie user] can join the table for a delicious 2-course menu’.
This form of activation policy has been criticized by Fuller et al. (2008). They argue that presenting active citizenship as something that is easy and fun for everyone the chance of stigmatization of welfare recipients has only risen (Fuller et al. 2008). It can therefore in fact paradoxically results in a higher threshold to what is perceived in society as ‘good citizenship’ leaving the ones who cannot participate behind as ‘bad citizens’.
Image 11: The front of the most recent Makkie booklet Image 12: The first pages of Makkie job descriptions
Image 13: Promotional photo of Koken met Wafaa on the website of Makkie
Image 14: A background photo of the website of Makkie
Image 15: Promotional photo of Life & Style on the website of Makkie
In their study on the participation of youngsters and low-schooled jobless in labor market activation policies in Australia Warburton and Smith (2003) emphasize the importance for participants to gain learning experiences through the programs. The respondents in their research, however, experienced that most programs are mainly driven by a governance that emphasizes contribution to society rather than providing options to their contribution to personal needs.
Various job descriptions of Makkie do address ideas about progress. Doing voluntary work is often presented as something that contributes to personal development, the development of others and the neighborhood. At the children's cooking club Kinderkookclub one can ‘teach children to cook healthy and nice’, welfare organization Buurthulp Oost mentiones to ‘educate neighborhood citizens to become trust person’ and housing association EH calls inhabitants to come up with ‘nice activities or improvements of your street or porch’. In line with Warburton and Smith (2003), however, it can be concluded as an activation program Makkie that lacks on offering the option of personal development. It therefore carries the counterproductive risk Warburton and Smith remark, that participants can feel ‘alienated’ and even ‘deactivated’ (ibid.: 784).
4.2 The Makkie labor market
In finding my way into the Makkie volunteer market, I used the various gathered materials discussed earlier. Navigating the different possible entrance points (email, phone and personal visits to organizations) enabled the possibility to create an overview of the distribution of 25 organizations and initiatives in the Indische Buurt where Makkies can be earned (see image 16). It clearly shows how the spatial borders of the Makkie labor market are bound to the municipal borders of the Indische Buurt. Only art center CBK located on the West-side of the railway is an exception. For me, this distribution was a welcome spatial factor since I live close to the Indische Buurt. This could, however, form an obstacle to people who face mobility issues.
Investigating the activities mentioned in the promotion of Makkie jobs makes clear that the different jobs roughly contain 11 different, mostly overlapping, tasks (see table 1). Roughly most tasks seem to have a soft character. Care for older people, activities around art and creativity and facilitative tasks are mentioned most. Makkie voluntary work therefore mostly appears to have a robust social character and involves taking care, being creative and hospitable.
Image 16: Map and photos of Makkie employers.
Source: map created and provided by Makkie on http://www.makkie.cc/service/verdienen/ Edits and photo’s created by author.
Table 1
Variation of tasks promoted by Makkie
Mentioned tasks Amount of times mentioned
Care for older people 8
Art and creativity 8
Hosting/facilitating activities (mostly called guestman/woman) 7
Cook/prepare food 6
Chores 5
Administration 5
Children care and education 4
Recycling/sustainability 3
Entertaining 2
Communication and promotion 2
Psychological support 1
Source: created by author
Warburton and Smith (2003) state that limited freedom of choice of voluntary jobs can negatively impact feelings towards communities and the development of being a self-responsible citizen. It has however been shown by Meijs et al. (2005: 112) that broad
economic and cultural circumstances shape perceptions of what is seen as a voluntary task or a paid job. This, therefore, influences the kind of voluntary employment available to the people of the Indische Buurt and Oostelijk Havengebied and can make the geographical limitations of the system problematic.
The Makkie labor market seemed not as easy to enter as it is presented. My approach revealed that entering the world of Makkie indeed showed the limits of space and time, but also more individual aspects like personal interest. It therefore took me some perseverance to get a Makkie job. Visiting several of the locations seemed to be not the most successful way to find a Makkie job. It became clear that some locations did not exist anymore, like youthwork organization Street Smart and welfare and integration organization M.O.I. (see image 16). Other locations were bound to specific opening hours, that sometimes, like the Makkie info point, did not match given information. Phone calls and emails were also not always answered or, in the case of emails, days later. In two instances a response, however, resulted in rejection. Art rental and gallery CBK said to work with a fixed pool of volunteers and youth center Kindervreugd with fixed periods of six months. This made clear that the direction in which the Makkie labor market pushes new volunteers is also shaped by the fact that some jobs are already occupied and others obligate a specific occupational period.
Eventually, phone calls to welfare organization Civic, located in the Majellakerk and Flevopoort and neighborhood center De Meevaart and email contact with the Makkie information point resulted in personal meetings in which I could discuss the possibility of doing voluntary work. Nevertheless, this interestingly led to the uncertainty whether or not I should specifically name my interest in earning Makkies with doing voluntary work. It were the moments where I had to motivate my offer to do voluntary tasks, that gave me the insight that becoming a Makkie user might in fact come with feelings of awkwardness. To me, it felt disrespectful to use a form of market logic to motivate my interest in doing a civil service. In my reflection diary I wrote:
‘It [mentioning my interest in Makkie to a volunteer organization] seems out of place and even cheeky. One does not ask a reward for doing activities that have to do with vulnerable people. It almost feels like stealing from poor people. If a reward is given out of the own movement of the one that received help it’s different but I just feel a bit embarrassed ashamed to ask for it directly.’
