The Scouting Exercise
Why it is important
The Scouting Exercise is a crucial phase in the building of The Reef, both in terms of time spent and in keeping up morale. As Mark reported, exploring the city together and picturing yourself in a given place can be a great experience for the entire group and enhance cohesion. Also, the area that we end up living in will clearly be a decisive factor in terms of attracting new members and ensuring wellbeing for the entire group.
In order to not waste time and make sure everybody knows what to look for, this post regroups the most important elements of the Scouting Exercise.
The basics
Our underlying criteria when choosing a site can be found in the Blueprint 1.0 section “Where do we want to live” (page 11/12).
Interesting maps on (noise) pollution, flood risk, distance from parks and public transport and much more can be found in this post (the maps themselves are saved here). You might also want to look at the Saint Vide database in case one of those buildings is in your scouting area.
The exercise
For now (May 2023), we are only scouting the following part of the west of Brussels (because of property prices and group size):
In this table people can put which zone(s) they want to scout. Please regularly check which zones are still looking for scouters!
“On the ground”
To prepare for the exercise, we found it useful to look at (or even print) the model fiche (to get an idea of what parameters to look for) and at the specific section of land on google earth to already look for areas of interest (and potentially measure them).
What to look for: empty areas, ex-industrial sites, places that seem abandoned of at least 1500m².
When going scouting: Take pictures of interesting sites and add them to the fiche.
In order to get a clearer idea of how to fill in the fiche, you can have a look at a sample fiche.
Once the area has been scouted, please fill in one fiche per site, name it “Streetname_Postcode_Zone number” and safe it in this folder.
Please don’t forget to mark the streets that you have scouted (and pass that map to Team Building?) so that we can be sure no streets have been missed (such as on the border between two zones).
Because the scouting (of most areas) can be done individually and has proven relatively fast (especially in residential areas), we suggest that Reeflings hand in the fiches as soon as possible when they find a site. This will help team building to screen the different sites on a rolling basis.
If you have any questions or encounter a problem during the scouting, please contact @reef-building or the Scouting Exercise coordinator xyz.