MediActivism

What 

The movements for the right to the city are flourishing in different cities of the world as a response to the life conditions imposed by the neoliberal politics. Civil society is organising to claim for politics about housing, struggling against those who privatize territories and worsen the living conditions of citizens. Added to that, most of the local councils are failing at their attempts to implement public policies to protect public space and material and immaterial heritage of the cities. MediActivism aims to produce a series of activities and media contents making visible and scaling up debates related to the right to the city. MediActivism aims at producing an impact on the social awareness about housing and public space, connecting what happens at local, national and translocal levels. By doing that, we aim to produce transformations in the cities we live.

How

Thanks to this international project, ZEMOS98 is producing a series of activities in the local context in the following three years: a hackcamp in which 30 persons will work in the production of prototypes answering to the needs of citizenship in relation to the difficulties of access to affordable housing and the privatization of public space; a Right to the City Lab in which six activists and media makers will plan and launch a communications campaign with a series of contents oriented to introduce in the media agenda those conflicts related to right to the city issues; a public activity in which contents will be presented; and finally a European hackcamp where participants in the different contexts of the project will work together to find ties among different contexts. MediActivism is a project with six partners working in the same topics and formats from different parts of Europe: Krytyka Polityczna (Warsaw, Poland), Kurziv (Zagreb, Croatia), Les Tetes de l’art (Marseille, France), Fanzingo (Botkyrka, Sweden), ZEMOS98 (Seville, Spain) and European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam, Netherlands), which is the coordinator. This project is financed with an Erasmus+ grant.

Why

MediActivism meets our need of researching and producing new narratives for political struggles, and to narrate the ways in which local councils are developing urban policies that are expelling neighbors from their neighborhoods. Their policies hurt the social fabric by putting in risk public spaces in the cities. This project aims to produce contents which generate social cohesion around these vindications in order to produce a lasting transformation in the way cities are built.

Resources

Open Paper: The city is Ours (Download)