To begin I would just like to commend Avery and Jenn on their wonderful powerpoint and thoughtful presentation on low income housing, and according to Jenn their focus on “form, function and cultural perception.” My initial reaction remains similar to the one I’ve come to over this past week, that it certainly is ambitious and the background study information is there, but looking at their research question, how can you fundamentally determine a base reading for normal and unusual and apply those to the interactions of residents in low income housing? And how can you attribute those things to simply their area of living? I think that now we’ve all abandoned the idea of doing surveys to augment our research so can simply observing low income residents, or conducting interviews produce the results needed? These are questions similar to the ones that I am currently struggling with for my own project, and I feel that they can be somewhat applied to your research as well. However, there are many, many bright spots in your team project, especially since you both seem to have an especially adept and deep knowledge of the area in which you are working to pull from, and the idea of incorporating policy into an observational study will probably work out to the benefit of your research. I wish the best of luck to both of you!
For a refined research question, we wanted to remove the words “Dutch culture” because we talked about how hard that was to define in our midterm meeting, and narrow down our focus, so my new question is
“How does the city of Amsterdam provide space for recreation, and how does the utilization of the space inform the nature of recreation in Amsterdam.”
