Inaugural address Machiel van Dorst: Welkom in mijn buurt!

What exactly is a neighbourhood? This inaugural address will be about people's well-being, but also about the neighbourhood as a social or physical construct. From the perspective of the individual, 'neighbourhood' is a non-ambiguous concept. For a resident, the neighbourhood is the living environment she or he uses, recognises and could name in a cognitive map. This is where I live. A neighbourhood can actually be a neighbourhood section, such as a building block, a complex residential building, as well as a village or other assembly. A neighbourhood can also be a free place, a kampong or a trailer park. Here we immediately see the entanglement between social and physical environment. The neighbourhood can be defined as a place, but it is just as much a social construct. From an urban planning perspective, the neighbourhood is also about composition, morphology, scale and boundaries. Let's bring these perspectives together, ultimately the neighbourhood is the most important scale level when it comes to social cohesion, child-friendly and socially safe design and for combating loneliness, movement poverty or anonymity. The liveable neighbourhood is the step towards prevention, the most important development in health and well-being.

This inaugural address will be delivered in Dutch.