Workshop report:Kicking around for a good cause.Environmental protection combinedwith football

A workshop on football at a festival of the landscape? Where, if not in the Ruhr region! Patrick Schulz from the initiative “bochumbolzt”, which combines the enormous integrative and communicative power of football with the effectiveness of active and local environmental protection, invited us. In practice, this combination currently means that, together with the Bochum Fan Project, football tournaments or sports festivals for pupils are organised on a nearby football pitch or directly on the school playground. During the breaks, bochumbolzt motivates the young football field heroes to clean the playing field and the immediate surroundings from carelessly discarded rubbish.

At the beginning of the first half, feelings and memories about the social space of the football pitch were brought up and possible multifunctional potentials discussed, such as the integration of edible elements around the pitch. Interim result: The football field in the neighbourhood conveys and strengthens the feeling of community – the football field as a spatial anchor, with the aim of creating a waste-free and edible neighbourhood.

“We are currently founding an umbrella association. In the near future, we would like to encourage and inspire people from the cities in the Ruhr region to develop the initial methods and content of bochumbolzt with our support in their city as well and to develop them further together.”

In the second half, the focus was on environmental protection and the global waste crisis, starting with the question of why we should also collect waste locally. This was about an exchange of ideas on a clean neighbourhood and early awareness raising on the production of waste. In the last third of the game, the participants were invited to leave the computer and go out into the fresh air for a short while to see if there is also rubbish on our own doorstep – and to pick it up directly if necessary.

The participants’ conclusion: “It’s very exciting how you combine environmental issues with football! Through football as the connecting language of the Ruhr region, a low-threshold approach to regional environmental protection was found in this workshop and a first, valuable impulse for focusing on the social space of the football pitch was developed.

Text: Patrick Schulz/Jan Bunse
Picture: Lucas Hagen