Hmmm…I don’t know how much you know about our field work, because the on-line platform is at the moment more of a repository for data collect on the ground and the beginning of a wiki for local urban development. Its the mobile pavilion and the activities there that we’ve put a lot more focus on and I think they are yet to materialize at the scale that we’ve intended to.
Basically, the pavilion is a delivery truck with the back of it converted into an office with exhibition panels, benches and tables that can be pulled out in order to make the place around it into an event space. Our info panels and board games manly revolve around urban development, how to understand the legal system, how can you participate in discussions about municipality projects etc., but an important and I think crucial add on to this rather unsexy subject would have been to bring around initiatives active in the areas that we go to, to make it into a sort of local StreetDelivery and transform a neglected public space into something more for a few hours and offer local the possibility to engage with initiatives in their areas. It is this mix that makes urban development in itself start to make sense not the way it is now, closed up in its own institutional box.
I think it is this where we have a lot more work to do and its not because we don’t know who to ask for help but rather because we are a very small team and talking about urban development in itself is a hard to takle subject and we are constantly thinking of new ways in which to make it more understandable and friendly. A good example of a mix of local initiatives and our activities was this event we held at Cinema Favorit in Drumul Taberei, check it out in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA8tFQubYXE
This is why I was proposing you a potential collaboration, in order to bring together all of these grassroots initiatives not in a classic conference room or indoor space but in a public space of the city which is in many ways closer to their working environment and more open to outsiders wanting to get to know more about what’s happening in their cities and maybe getting involved in one of the projects shown there.