The five stations were picked in the first Living Pasts class, and this choice was mostly based on first impressions. We walked around the Neude and walked towards places that looked like they had an interesting story behind them. Somewhere along the line, we decided to connect all these buildings through the five senses. We believed this would be an effective way to connect different stories in a somewhat playful and unexpected way — which will hold the attention of our consumers; the international students wanting to get to know the city they will be studying in.
We divided the stations amongst ourselves, Anna researched De Liefde’s Centraal Apotheek, Woortman’s Drogisterij and De Beurs, while Nayra researched the public restroom and the case of the missing benches. Anna researched the stations by using the archives as a starting point which could inform the type of secondary sources she could look into. These archival materials were mostly either photographs and a whole lot of newspaper advertisements or articles. The secondary sources derived from this included Dutch articles and books that were either written specifically about Utrecht or the Neude, or that were written about a societal occurrence that could be related to the stations found in the Neude. She combined these sources to create a (hopefully) interesting walking tour.
For Nayra the research came with some hurdles, mainly because of the language barrier. Because she is not fluent in Dutch, she had to search for secondary literature in English. Much is written about public restrooms in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the literature only covers the United States and Great Britain. First, she found out the Dutch term for urinals, “de krul”, “plaskruis” and “urinoir” and googled it. This way she found a lot of interesting articles focusing on the contemporary issue of the unjust distribution between public restroom for men and women. When she used the same terminology to find more historical insights in the Utrecht Archives, she got almost nothing. At some point, she looked again through Moesman’s pictures and suddenly recognized a public restroom in one of the photos. The metadata called that building ‘retiradegebouwtje’, an unusual term. When she looked up ‘retiradegebouw’, she found the draft of the restroom and the name of the architect. A great find! In order to contextualize the construction of the ‘retirade’ she looked into secondary literature about the late 1850s till 1900 in the Netherlands, that focus on health movements and sanitation. All of them were in Dutch. Historian E.S. Houwaart wrote an entire book about the hygienists movement. In Dutch. Fortunately, a review from his book that also contains a summary of his most important arguments, could be found in English. This way she found out about the background stories of the Dutch Health Committees. She found great archival material about the meetings from the first Health Committee of Utrecht. Of course, they were all in Dutch and handwritten. Apart from giving herself a crash course in Dutch late 19th century history, she also tried to read through Dutch documents. It worked well enough to serve her purpose, which was to substantiate her storytelling with historical material.
For the last station, she chose a different approach. Saving herself the trouble to go through Dutch archival material, she remembered Mary Bouquet’s talk about observing people’s actions. Everytime she crossed the Neude, she stopped to observe changes. She made notes of them, took photos, and tried to contextualize them with articles she found about urban development in the Netherlands.
Noticeably, we had very different approaches which resulted in slightly different outcomes when it came to presenting the stations. However, we found both outcomes valuable and decided to keep both perspectives without sacrificing the other. For this reason, the author of each station has been made known to the user.
To be sure that this tour will speak to our target audience, Anna wrote in a certain way: She directly addressed the students at some points and tried to explain as many things and as to the point as possible. She also tried to engage them by speaking of a wide variety of topics, such as architecture, medical history and economics. She supposed that would interest all students, no matter their majors.
Nayra addressed them in a direct way, too. She tried to mold the information so it is coherent and engaging. She also interposed questions to keep the audience’s attention alive and giving some additional food for thought. As this tour is from students to students, the aim was not to preach knowledge in an encyclopedic way to them, but to learn about the place in a friendly way.
We think this walking tour would be fantastic after, or as part of, the introduction week. As students should not just be introduced to the university that they will be studying at, but also to the place they are likely to pass by often and/or see their friends at; The Neude. And thus, we envisioned this tour as a guided tour that would take place on site. The website we made for this tour acts only as a surrogate to this — the very reason for making the website rested upon its ability to make the content, such as the 360 images and the map, interactive.
Another aim of the tour was to make the students aware of the way in which infrastructure and architecture influences how we move through a city. There is much more hidden behind the cold stones and plain sights. Neude is the only non-accidental square. Throughout its history people shaped it according to their needs. That is the potential of open spaces: they work like an open ground, ready to be molded; market, tournament, execution place, temporary cemetery, parking spot, junction of commuting flows, and place of consumption. The tour should not only be an informative event, it should represent the starting point for the future students to build a connection with the city and think critically about possibilities to ‘own’ it.
On the website, we represented time through textual form and archival materials. However, we believe there would be a way to represent time better. This could be done through a time slider that would allow the user to literally ‘slide through time’. At every point in time, there would be an image, like paintings, pictures, images derived from old maps, to represent what the Neude looked like in the past. Or, interactive 360 images could be derived from these same pictorial sources, which would allow the user to envision the place as well as space.
We also represented place and space mainly through archival materials, maps, photos and 360 images. However, especially space could be represented better by implementing old maps of the Neude. For example, when talking about an occurrence in the 1700s, adding a map from that time period could be very useful.
For future research, we would thus propose a presentation focused on interactivity and pictorial representations throughout time. Besides this, we would like to focus on telling the story of the Neude through the people that lived there. Such has already been done a little in this tour, but we would really love to expand on that idea.