Urban Encounter II

Radical Democracy Urban Encounter II
Co-creation of Common Spaces and Advocacy

The second Radical Democracy Urban Encounter “Co-creation of Common Spaces and Advocacy” will be held on Saturday, May 23, 2015 between 12:30-18:00 at Studio-X Istanbul. Our objective is to start a discussion and start developing strategies on how civil initiatives, social agents, urban planners, chambers, academicians and (digital) media actors can “common” on the matter of advocacy to further their work that focus on the principle of “co-creating common/public spaces for livable cities” as local communities and citizens.

Forum
The discussion forum will be kicked off by speakers of different profiles and all the participants will get involved. We will link different advocacy approaches and practices with neighborhood struggles and groups focused on co-creation and participation to help citizens shape their living spaces. We will address the role the civil society, academicians and media actors can play within this context, and the ways in which the “expert” opinion can overlap with the citizens’ demands and interests. We will share ideas on how to establish the necessary conditions for political decision makers to strengthen their collaboration with the citizens in the area of urban development, and to work “for the citizens and with the citizens” as part of the urbanization processes that encompass the stages of ideating, designing, implementing, and monitoring.
Speakers: Kumru Çılgın (Chamber of City Planners, One Hope Foundation), Alp Arısoy (ÇEKÜL Academy), Laden Yurttagüler (Istanbul Bilgi University Civil Society Studies Center), Merve Seda Çakır (youth worker); Moderator: Kevser Üstündağ (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Street Belongs to Us Foundation)

Workshop
Designed for developing and commoning the advocacy strategies of social agents working on reclaiming the commons and co-creation of the city, the workshop will be an outlet to examine relevant principles, methodologies and objectives in different groups and sharing collectively the inferences. As a tool for the workshop methodology, we will ask the participants to “pin” the neighbourhood-scale ideas and projects to our “dreams map” on the “Imagine it into Being” campaign web platform bidusunolsun.org, which we have developed with the aim of creating network and solidarity between neighborhoods and initiatives focusing on different neighborhoods.

Background
We are realizing the Radical Democracy Urban Encounters as ‘Street Belongs to Us’ Foundation and MODE İstanbul within the Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project, implemented by Doc Next Network. We developed the “Imagine It Into Being” campaign starting with the first Urban Encounter we held under the theme of “Reclaiming the Common Spaces and Alternative Approaches” on December 13, 2014, by evaluating the results of the seminar and the workshop within that encounter. We aim to share our ‘dreams’ about our living spaces and ‘imagine them into being’ together via offline events in neighborhoods and the crowdsourced placemaking platform bidusunolsun.org that includes a “placemaking guide” and a “dreams map”.