Done!

                                       

Aaaannndd we're done. Exactly 6 minutes after the deadline, but still. This is kind of what our desks looked like all this time. We're proud of what we've accomplished. After weeks of hard work this is our paper: "Implications of Property-led Wealth Creation: A case study of Het Eilandje, Antwerp and Kop van Zuid, Rotterdam", existing of 30 pages. Enjoy!

The Wealth-Creation group.

Only 9 days left..

Time is running out! We have 9 days before our report on property-led wealth creation has to be handed in. That's why we met up tonight to discuss the final outline of our paper. Because we are writing this paper with five people, we need to have a good coordination of who is responsible for what. First of all, our paper is going to look like this:

Introduction: aim and hypothesis

What is property-led wealth creation exactly?

Description of case study 1: Antwerp, and of Case Study 2: Rotterdam

The results of our research gathered from literature and field trips

Conclusion: What project yielded better results and why?

The introduction will be written by Sophie, 't Eilandje area will be described by Lisa and Levi and Jacqueline and Irene will take care of Rotterdam-Zuid. We expect to have our parts done by Monday, so we can go over them on Tuesday and if necessary finalize them on Wednesday. We'll keep you posted!

Kop van Zuid

    
On Wednesday we visited Rotterdam for the second part of our project. It was in many ways a more convenient day than the day we spent in Antwerp. The weather was nice, we knew what we had to do and one of our group members was familiar with the neighbourhood that we were investigating. The project in Kop van Zuid has been finished for some years now and the difference with the still developing Eilandje area in Antwerpen couldn’t have been bigger. 

Update 26 March

Here's a small update on the progress of our work.
Three weeks ago we went to Antwerp for some fieldwork in our area: Eilandje. It was a very useful and productive day. We mainly walked around and talked to a lot of people there; semi-structured interviews. This helped us form an idea about the regeneration project in the Eilandje area. The average opinion of the people there was that the restructuring took long, but that it would be for the better in the end. We found out some pretty interesting things about how supply and demand can drive up the costs of land by talking to a real estate agent. All in all it was a good day.

This Wednesday we will visit the Kop van Zuid area in Rotterdam, to compare the restructuring programme there to the one in Antwerp.

Today we finished our literature review. These are the sources that we are planning to use so far:

Research Plan

For tomorrows lecture we were supposed to have set up the official research plan. The topic of our research will be "property-led wealth creation" in the areas Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam and Eilandje in Antwerpen. We hereby present you our research plan. 

Results Pilot Study Middelburg

As we promised, here are the results from our pilot study in Middelburg.

This pilot study is an experiment to become familiar with research methods in urban geography. The subject is the change our university college made in the urban geography of Middelburg since it was established. Roosevelt Academy (RA), was founded in Middelburg in 2004. This was a new phenomenon in Zeeland. The city of Middelburg is not too big; an estimated 50000 people live there. The fact that now 600 students - all with their typical lifestyle - would be around for most of the year, must have had some kind of impact on in the community of this city. We decided to research the change in the economic geography. Therefore the hypothesis of our research was: The revenues of lunchrooms in Middelburg have increased since RA was established. We conducted interviews with the owners of two popular and small lunchrooms: Ko D'ooooor and Crostini's. The interviews and the conclusions we drew from them are to be read below.

Pilot Study: the set up.

Today in class we got the opportunity to set up our pilot research project. The assignment is to conduct a mini research based on this question: to what extent has the social, economic or urban geography of Middelburg changed since the establishment of Roosevelt Academy there?

Our group, that will later in the semester focus on property-led wealth creation, has chosen to conduct a research on the economic change in Middelburg since the establishment of RA. We have chosen to narrow this down to the change that lunchrooms in the city have experienced over the last 8 years.

The set up of our research is as follows:
1. Hypothesis: The revenues of lunchrooms in Middelburg have increased since RA was established.
2. Research subjects: lunchrooms Crostini's, Ko D'oooor and maybe A Domani (we're doubting about the latter because it is a business with more than one branch in the city, whereas the first two are run by a single person).
3. The planning so far:
- ask the lunchrooms for participation on Monday
- conduct interviews on Tuesday
- analyze the results on Wednesday
- present on Thursday

The results of our pilot research will be published here on Wednesday or Thursday.