[MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to the Reclaiming the Street MOOC, where we take you around the world in search of ways that you can reclaim the street in your neighborhood. Today I have with me, the professor of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam, professor Marco te Brömmelstroet. He'll share with you some of his stories about how he changed his neighborhood. >> So thank you for George Share for introducing me and for kicking off together with me, this MOOC Reclaiming the Street. And before we start, I actually want to share two main reasons why I really think it's important to make this MOOC available. And one is a thing quite obvious, is the fact that around the world we see that many people experience that the street became the fluid space where many people wanted to have a changed to occur. And at the same time we saw how difficult that change often was in relation to how we think and do around the streets already for many decades. So this whole corona lockdown situation gave us the experience that streets can change. So we think it's important to our students to give them some reflection on how change actually occurs or how it would just start occurring. But a second reason is more personal because at the last two years I've been moving into a new house, into a new area in ADA in the middle of the Netherlands. And I have personally experienced how reclaiming the streets works or how it doesn't work. And being an urban planner, of course, I tried to link my own experience with with theory. So that's also what we want to do in this course. So what I wanted to do here in ADA, I wanted to challenge the idea of a huge case arrived facility at the neighborhood school. Where the traffic engineers came up with a solution for safe car traffic circulation around the traffic that occurs at a school in the morning and afternoons. But that meant in this case that the claim on the street was that 1,100 square meters of the direct environment of the school had to be paved for this case and right. Which in turn meant that the children were left with only 600 square meters of playgrounds. So two years ago, I saw that plan and I realized that this is the moment that I want to reclaim that space and to give it to the children instead of the car traffic. And then my whole exploration started and partly this MOOC is a way to give that some sense in terms of theory. So what happened was what first of course, you look at people around you. The people, which we will call in the first block, the first followers. The people that are engaged and also want to help you out in reclaiming the streets. But very quickly with these people, you run into a huge bureaucracy as a solidified understanding and institutional lack of leniency of how you can approach that street and what kind of claims you can and cannot make. And in the end, I think one of the most powerful things that I realized during the entire process, if you want to reclaim the street, you also need to reclaim the conversation about that street. You need to engage with different types of languages. So what we try to do here with this MOOC is that we put all these lessons into theoretical perspectives. And take you as a students through the steps that are required to understand, but also to actually allow you and enable you to reclaim your own street. So we came up with a structure for a course. And George, I think you can introduce the structure to our students. >> Thanks, Marco. That sounds like a great story of how you applied the research that you've been taking part in to actually implementing action on the neighborhood level. And I hope by the end of the course that's also exactly what you'll be able to do as students of this course. So after this introduction we'll take you to the first block, where we'll try to understand the nature of transitions in mobility. We'll look at things at the landscape level and see how people and individual of actors can go ahead and influence these larger regimes that are at play. And our feature talk for that module will be Claire Pascoe coming to us from New Zealand. In the block two, we'll look at streets as a place where transition happens. As a place where transitions become experiments on the street level. And we'll take a very recent paper by Luca Baggallini, who documents transitions from all around the world. We'll then look at Oakland, California's marvelous transition during the COVID pandemic in their 75 miles of slow streets. Then in block three, we'll look at the living world versus the system world. We'll look at how bureaucracies can then influence actions on the street level. And what you can do to push back against these bureaucracies or make these bureaucracies work for you. We'll look at how planning and knowledge are related. And for the video for this block, we're going to look at what France has done to really accelerate cycling on their streets during the COVID pandemic. In block four, we'll look at redefining traffic and cities. We go around the world to five different street experiments from different continents. And we'll look at how these major transitions have happened. We'll you go anything from a highway that has been taken over as people space for one day of the week. All the way to neighborhood level experiments where people have really repurposed what their street looks like in their front yard. And the video for this course will head over to London to look at their mini Holland program and how the recent pandemic has changed their streets in that content. And finally, in block five, we'll look at the social capital of urban activism, taking two case studies in London and Amsterdam. We'll see how guerilla style tactics can be used to transform your street. And the video for block five will be looking at how streets have transformed in New York city in a North American context. So, with all this being said, Marco, can you tell us a bit about what the final assignment is for this course? >> Yeah, so it's already embedded in this whole structure, as you already explained. Is that for every block, we have indicated a key reading from the literature that gives you sort of a rabbit hole into the theoretical understanding of change. And all these different levels are the latter off. And of course, we will give you video material and also assignments that will help you to process this more theoretical understanding of change. With actual understanding of what's going down when change tries to hit the road, as we would say. In the videos, we will visit people that actually are trying to make change happen in their own city. So it's quite interesting to see how the theory can help you to understand what these people are talking about. But the key word here in this entire MOOC is in the assignments. We ask you to do assignments in every block and these assignments prepare you to make the final product. Where we ask you to write a concrete action plan that will help you to reclaim your own street or street in your neighborhoods. So what we are doing there is throughout the block, she will ask you five questions and these five questions will come together in the final assignment. So the first question is, who can you say are your first followers? Where are the people that would help you in generating enough momentum for change? The second question is, how can you increase the transformative potential of change that you want to make? And we will learn in block two what transformative potential means and how we can actually increase it. The third question that we're going to ask you in the assignment is, how can you cope with resistance of the bureaucracy? So how do you deal with the fact that the bureaucracy is probably resisting a radical change from happening on the streets? So in the assignment of block four, we are going to ask you to go one step deeper and question the actual goals and paradigms of the way that people talk about your street and to try and change that. And the fifth and final assignment, which probably is the most activating one is to think about and actually do some guerilla style interventions on your street. So all in all, I think what we try to do here with the MOOC is to prepare you to think about change in a different way, but also actively apply it. So if you follow the course and you do the assignments, in the end you will have an action plan to take back your street. [MUSIC]
