What if...citizens only want more walls,
cameras, surveillance, cars, tesla tunnels, parking lots, etcs.. as some sort
of dystopian dysfunctional future city? What if people have no interest or
hope for any better future for their own community? What can urban
planners do to overcome these challenges when working with community
development? In this lecture, we will discuss the case study of the Homeless
Workers Movement (MTST) in Brazil and withdraw lessons on how community
organizers or any planners directly engaged with communities could
potentially facilitate processes that open up the collective imagination. In
MTST, their insurgent planning practices produced shifts on how people
perceived their territories, themselves, and their futures - moving from
hopeless, to "the desire for a house with a car in the garage," to a
"desire for the city," an embodied and active right to the city. We
will discuss the practical role of planners, as mediators of social learning
processes in three interconnected dimensions: making territories visible (to
residents and to the government); making people visible to themselves (to see
and be seen as an individual, part of a community, citizen); and finally, based
on the previous two dimensions, making futures visible (to move from
hopelessness to sensorial images of alternative futures).
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