MediActivism European Hackcamp

On May 24th 2021 The People Speak, an East London group of artists, academics and art practitioners launched the Mediactivism European Hackcamp with ‘City of Dreams’ – a Europe-wide online forum discussing Right to the City issues across Europe. The session included at least 5 live reports from cities, ‘talkaoke‘ and — literally, in real time — the creation of a picture of ‘Right to the City issues’ in Europe and the forms of media activism addressing them! Watch and react to the stream here.

MediActivism European Hackcamp opened from a studio in East London. We used the methodology of Talkaoke – something in between Karaoke and a Talkshow – to present five cases in which activists and/or citizens claim their right to the city.

From developing a more sustainable form of tourism in post-covid Seville to protecting the famous Zakole wetlands near Warsaw from aggressive city expansion driven by neo-liberal incentives by creating awareness of the intrinsic values of nature both for humans as well as the planet overall. And the cultural activist movement in Zagreb told about their fifteen year-long efforts to reclaim the city for the common good, which resulted in a landslide victory in the local elections a couple of weeks ago, replacing the clientelistic system that was in place since the end of the wars in the nineties.

The rest of the week we will have in-depth conversations on five different tables on how connecting these local practices in which citizens take control over their own environment by using media can contribute to a European public sphere in which perspectives are exchanged and shared European interest is discussed in a bottom-up way.

We will talk about methods for activists to infiltrate mainstream public debate, ways for media to collaborate inter-locally to create a European perspective and strategies to change policy, both through collaboration with policymakers as well as building a movement proposing radical change. This will all feed into local policy fora in six European cities in autumn and a large European policy forum in Brussels at the end of the year.

Watch the presentations of the results of the MediActivism European Hackcamp here.