[MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome back to the course. And for this week's reading, the social capital of urban activism practices in London and Amsterdam by Katherine VanHoose and Federico Savini. We're very pleased to have Federico join us today. And he is the assistant professor in environmental planning institutions and politics at the University of Amsterdam. He combines approaches of political sociology, urban planning, and critical geography to the study of institutions and social and spatial change in cities. So Federico, it's always good to speak to the authors and good to have you here today. >> Thank you for inviting me, George. >> So let's jump in and our students have read this paper and it's always good to talk about what inspired our authors to write such a piece. So Federico, what inspired you to write this paper? >> At the time, I was doing research in Amsterdam about urban activism, I met a student of mine, Katherine VanHoose, she was doing the research masters in urban studies at our university. And she was also involved in all kind of local activist movements in Amsterdam, but also in London. I was myself also very involved in the local scene of activism. And we both shared one question, which was how can a social group, a movement, a small movement be successful in achieving its own goals in a city like Amsterdam or London? So we decided to take two examples of urban activist movements and trying to analyze how they organize themselves towards achieving their goals. >> Now, this reading isn't specifically about to streets, which is the theme of the course. But in our department, we have the same type of theories and research being done on public space, being done housing. And how do you see this reading being applied to the idea of public space and streets? >> Yeah, this paper tells one very clear thing. It says that a group of urban activists that want to achieve a particular goal, they have to be very careful how they organize themselves internally. But also how they organize the linkages between their members and the external organizations that they deal with, such as municipalities or developers. In the paper, we explain how different movements organize themselves to address these two challenges, the internal organization and the external linkages. The two movements we studied work on areas which are within city centers of two very dense cities. and they particularly deal with spaces which aim to be as inclusive an as public as possible. The first one, the Undercroft in London, is a form of a self organized skate park under an unused mobility infrastructure, in fact. It's an under used space that was supposed to be redeveloped in the time, but that got used quite spontaneously by the community of skaters of that neighborhood and the Schijnheilig in Amsterdam was a squat. A squat estate, a former school estate, which was supposed to provide a public space for political and cultural debates in the city center Amsterdam. So both of them can be understood that sort of public space, and in particular are self managed public space. They're not public space owned and managed by a public institution or a public authority, such as municipalities, but they are public space, self managed by a group of urban activists. So I think our paper can suggest also ways to deal with public space beyond the more canonic idea of publicly managed and publicly owned public space. >> So let's talk a bit about the idea of self management and you're work in political sociology and critical geography. So you have written quite extensively about this idea of the And the Technocracy and how difficult sometimes it is for people to deal with political systems and technocratic systems. And I think perhaps part of this comes to your personal and professional background in talking to a lot of these people. So, how does this paper relate to your personal and professional and academic background working on the field? And how does that help the readers and the students in this course? Also deal with their own issues surrounding the change in public space and surrounding dealing with bureaucracies and Technocracy's and their neighborhood. >> One of the most common problems that academics phase when they interact directly with public policy, and with Urban Development Orban project is to deal with different kinds of knowledge, different types of knowledge. And different types of expertise which are very active in the process of defining the urban future. And one of them most classic attentions that we have in projects, is the one between the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic knowledge of public offices, public authorities. You may imagine the protocols and regulations that are applied by employees of the municipality to the management of space and the knowledge of the user's inhabitants, which are often known organized in Group. But they have a very strong know how or how the space has to be used and will be used in the future. So these two types of knowledge offerings are setting contrast with each other and the academic. In this case, myself is the one that somehow also try to make sense of the different languages and vocabularies that these two knowledge employee in the process. And also trying to connect them make sense of the commonalities and diaergences that they had. So this paper is in fact, and research is the result of a research about exactly this. The way the practical knowledge of users, namely the activists, relates and conflict with the codified knowledge of the municipality which was the owner and the competent responsible organization to manage those places. So this paper shows attention between these two knowledge and also trying to explain how the 1st so the group of activists can organize in order to make their knowledge very effective. Towards the second municipality and the public consultants organized and over in that space. >> And I think this paper does a very excellent job of taking the specific cases of London and Amsterdam and generalizing it to any context where this citizen LED or citizen involved, citizen governing process takes place, right? So you can apply this to any street that kind of that kind of allowed or where the citizens have taken ownership in this process. So I think it's also interesting your paper where you take both the lens of the system are the bureaucrat and also the perspective of the user of dimension. So how can this paper help the reader from these two perspectives? See the world through a different lens that would be helpful in a way for them to produce results? >> Well, this is a very good question. Imagine walk in London or in Amsterdam in the very city center of these two cities. When you walk in this areas, probably you will notice a lot of buildings and a lot of facilities, commercial spaces, but you will not probably grasp the work that is behind those spaces. You might assume that those pages are all owned and managed by a private single owner, for example like a commercial user or inhabitants of the building that you have in front of you. But you might also discover in fact, that these spaces are managed by group of many individuals that have one thing in common. They love that space and they use it daily for their specific activities. You can also, for example, find out through the lenses of this paper, that one apperently monumental and old, but beautiful. School is state in the center of Amsterdam is actually not school but is a political and Cultural Center, managed by activist at everyday struggle to keep that space alive. And in fact, in my paper you also my understand why. Actually, to certain extent failed to do so, unfortunately. That space was vacated in there [INAUDIBLE] few years ago. So in fact, this paper tells you, I would say the backstage of the built environment as a space that is constructed by actors that are often in conflict. It's basically the true story behind all the bricks that we see when we walk in the city, I would say. >> Now and, with that, do you have any advice or action that you seek to inspire? You know, with the writing of this paper, and is there any tips that you give, that you want to give to people who are engaged in this citizen activism as they move through this course? >> Yes, absolutely. First of all, it is necessary to inspire an active engagement with the self management of urban space. We're used too often to think that there is a municipality that might take care of our surroundings when there is a problem, but in fact, the real value of living also in a city is in fact to take ownership to a certain extent of the areas where we live. So the first thing I would like to inspire is to really spend energies in improving the spacing and making it tailor made on the users of it by also using the know how that we have as inhabitants of urban areas. The other thing I would like to inspire is existing urban movements, to inspire existing urban movements to actually reflect on the best strategies to organize themselves in order to achieve specific goals. This is something that me and many other colleagues and friends face everyday when trying to organize a collective action, in a way that is autonomous and independent from external influences of private and public actors. The first thing we need to ask ourselves is how we organize ourselves, and how we influence the public institutions that have the responsibilities to match to manage those public spaces. Well, these are very practical questions that require a lot of experience and often are very, this knowledge is very distributed among individuals. So in my paper, which is a quite modest contribution to a huge constellation of activism in both cities, I try to give an insight on how to make this possible. >> And I think the reading also gives the reader a nice tour, an underground tour of what happens behind the scenes and under the veneer of just the buildings themselves, right? How these cities themselves operate. So I find that also very interesting to read, and something that will take with me as I move around to different places. To really think about how the solid material buildings are built, and what it takes, the enormous amount of effort that it takes to keep these things running and how they're governed. And you can find Federico and also the co-author Catherine Van Hozza. The quick Google search. And if you want to see more Federico's work, you can find them on research gates or also at the University of Amsterdam website. So thank you very much and I wish you a good day, Federico. >> Thank you, George. Thank you to the students. [MUSIC]
