[MUSIC] So we arrived at the final content block of Reclaiming the Street and it's a fun one because it will be action packed. We will use this block to develop an understanding for urban activism and we will prompt you to learn this all by doing. Let's first again improve our conceptual understanding of temporary, bottom-up, handmade, guerrilla pop up, insurgents, grassroots, or do it yourself urbanism. We will do this by reading a paper about all of this written by Katrina Funkhouser and Federico Savini. They aim to develop an understanding why certain initiatives are able to cooperate with institutions, while others are not. They use two cases, one in London and the other in Amsterdam and they studied from the inside and with that they explore the importance of maintaining group dynamics. They say that it's very important to develop internal capacity, the bonding social capital, as they call it, and external connectivity, bridging social capital. And they give us some clues on how to do that, and they relate to lessons we've already learned. So use intermediaries to bring groups together, tying individuals and communities that lie slightly outside of your core group. I think a great example of this was the lecture by Stanford OSHA and how he explained how he used this to develop the capacity to become sort of a larger player in the debate. The second element that comes from this paper is to use expert advice and they also explain why this is important as a link between your own group and the experts and institutions. So this links again to also the paper by Nanka Phelo on looking for and using street level professionals as this important link between the living world and in this case, the gorilla initiative and the system world. And a third one is what they show is the importance of using social media to also to develop external connectivity and to get other people involved and to share your own message. They also point out that there's the risk here and that's the risk of being co-opted. So if you work together with the regime, of course the regime can use this to co-opt your initiative and actually then make it less powerful. If you're interested in that Federico Savini and Luca Bertonlini actually also explore this politics of knishes in a different paper, and if you're interested, we will provide you with the link and the description. So after reading this paper, we join Lauren Rushing in understanding how the Dutch gorilla struggles in the 1970s, that led to sort of an overturn of the way that cities like Amsterdam use their streets. And how this gorilla struggle can inspire current struggles on reclaiming the streets in the city of New York. We will also go into an example of Ron Finley is a very inspiring example. He's an urban gardener in the city of Los Angeles and he helps us to understand the real world dynamics of do it yourself urbanism. But as I already said, the best way to understand change is to actually learn by doing. So we end this block with inviting you to look for your own ways to do a pop up, experiment, reflect on what happens and share it with all of us. We will give you some examples, but we are very excited to see what you will do.
