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Enter the Void - appropriating urban free spaces f..
Enter the Void - appropriating urban free spaces for youthculture
Start date: Jan 2, 2016,
End date: Jan 1, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
The Structured Dialogue "ENTER THE VOID" will create a 2-year long, transnational exchange between the cities of Berlin Amsterdam, Budapest and Riga on the common question of how to facilitate young people's access to urban free spaces. The contexts in which we pose this question could hardly be more diverse. Depending on each site, access barriers can be of economic, legal, administrative, educational, political or other nature. Our aim is therefore to set up a interdisciplinary network, exchange good practices and join our ressources set up a dialogue, develop site-specific strategies, involve decision makers, and incite conrete action.At the core of this process, we will organize 4 transnational project meetings with each time 33 particiants from the following stakeholder groups: young people (18-30), experts from the field of youth, culture and urban development, and decision makers. Young people will receive a 50% share in participation (i.e. 17 young participants in each meeting). In total, a minimum of 30 young people will be directly and very intensively involved in ENTER THE VOID's interdisciplinary expert network. Through this process, they will be empowered to act as multipliers within their peer group and scene network. ENTER THE VOID's strategy for change is, thus, to incite spin-off actions. Because not from individual project meeting, but only from lasting local networks change can happen. Young people will start to go their own way and work on their causes independantly of ENTER THE VOID. Through these spin off activities, the number of young people reached through our program indirectly far exceeds the comparatively low number of directly involved young people and helps to put this number into context. We believe that ENTER THE VOIDs impact will be broad, powerful and very much youth centered.On a political scale, the local level of decision making is, according to our change strategy, the most relevant one. However, the national and international levels will be targeted by ENTER THE VOID to support the dissemination of good practices and the unusul approaches we will apply and refine in the fiel of youth.Because, what differs ENTER THE VOID from many other youth projects is that, first and foremost, it takes the basic condition of the Erasmus+ KA3 program that "all activities are lead by young people" very seriously. In each project location, young people have full responsability over an equal share of the program and receive empowering support from established network partners. Secondly, the structures, values and tools of democratic decision making are neither "taught" nor in any fictive context - they are applied within a very concrete ojective: the improvement of young people's access to space. Because ENTER THE VOID takes the complex structures of decision making for what they are: not an exciting thing to learn, but a necessary pain only to be compensated by a greater ideal. This leads to the tird point: our program has a unique sense of "street-credibility" - a quality to not only reach pre-affiliated target groups but young people from underground scenes with a very critical posture and, in part, active defiance towards institutional democracy. We believe that critique is what bring life to democracy. And we believe that reclaiming democracy is by far more subversive than fighting it.ENTER THE VOID is not just supposed to be a claim - we want it to become a "how to" instruction. The project results will therefore be combined in an ENTER THE VOID manual. Rather than focussing on the processual details (which are usually very site-specific), the manual's objective is to convince those in other cities who say: "this isn't possible". In short, the manual is a tool to inspire, to open the box and to demand discussion. It is a tool to put our site-specific work into a European context, to make our actions transferrable and thus valuable for the future to create a lasting impact well beyond the project itself.