Let's kick off Block 3. In Block 1, we have explored the theoretical lens of transition thinking, and we talked about items like regimes and niches, and the importance of understanding landscape developments, and we apply them directly to the specific dynamics of [inaudible] and mobility. Together, we watched the discussion about how COVID and the lockdown could be seen as a landscape opportunity for real change in reclaiming our streets. You remember the shirtless dancing guy? He made us think about small initiatives and how they can lead to large system changes and how important the first follower is. We all listened to Claire Pascoe sharing how the regime in New Zealand is actually responding to the emerging niches of street-reclaiming initiatives by boosting their potential. Then in Block 2, we followed Luca Bertolini in unpacking street initiatives as transitions experiments and we discussed their transformative potential. We shared the ongoing struggles in Oakland and read about the ambitions for radical change in Milan. Now, we arrive in Block 3 where we will explore these dynamics in a slightly different way. The question that is central here is, how do you connect a street experiment with the dynamics of a regime? In my personal story of the neighborhood school, I think this was, for me, the hardest part. So we organized a small group of people in the neighborhoods and we started dancing, and we had our own ideas of how to reclaim this public space around the new neighborhood school. But how do you change the default design? Here, we see the default design and in the left bottom corner, we see this red square, and this is actually the kiss and ride zone. This kiss and ride zone is a solidification of a whole set of norms, and guidelines, and standards that is used by the regime. In this case, mostly the municipality to create public spaces. We wanted something different, at least the small group of first followers. But then you're up against all these standards, norms, and guidelines, all the expertise and the resistance of the municipality and the inertia of the owner, the urban designer, and the school director, and even also some neighbors. Because they say, well, this is the way we designed this public space, so this large red square, this kiss and ride is something that we just do. We take it for granted, and the fact that because of that, the school yard itself is much smaller, now we see it here it's 739 square meters or that's just a result of that. You're up against all the standards. Actually it took us almost two years where we applied all kinds of tools and instruments, and I could use my knowledge as an expert as well. I also knew how to system world works, that helped a lot in jumping all the hoops at the right time, but it also made me aware how important it is to realize these barriers and how to overcome them. Important elements that we use here in these two years was, for instance, to do our own counting of the parking spaces around these neighborhoods to show people that it actually is quite a relaxed context. When the school is open, most of these parking spots were actually free, but never counted that. So we did the counting ourselves. We also used evidence and strategies from elsewhere, schools that actually, instead of building a kiss and ride, make sure to disencourage the use of cars to bring children to school. We use that evidence also to convince the experts and the regime. Maybe one of the most important elements is that we got the municipality to do a government-led support measurements. So we went out into the neighborhood and we ask people, would you support a change of this way of designing public space? It was overwhelmingly in favor of this initiative. We got 85 percent of all the neighbors actually wanted something different, but this was not included in the thinking, in the norms. That brings us to the final two elements that we used in this process. One was that it was very important to make the intervention a temporary pilot from day 1. What we suggested now is to create a different design of the same public space, but as a temporary pilot project where we also do all kinds of measurements if this new design actually works, and this overcame a lot of resistance with the experts of the municipality. Last but not least, it was very important to make the design process inclusive. Watch how this led to a new design of the same space. We could actually reclaim this entire space, and for a large part now, it will become part of the schoolyard where children can play. Instead of the 700 square meters that we originally got, we now have a playground for the children of around 1,200 square meters where they can actually use the kiss and ride as a place to play, but as you can also see here, the elements of the kiss and ride are still in place, and this has to do with the importance of the temporariness of this new design. If it will not work, if the expert was right and people will come with a car to the school anyway, then we will have to place back the kiss and ride on this schoolyard. But I think it's very important that if we do this on day 1, people will see and consider this as a loss. We will explore this dynamic with first going into a chapter written by [inaudible] will give us some conceptual tools to understand this process of how system world and the living world connect. She looks at the specific perspective of the street level professional with the intermediary between the living world where all this tacit knowledge comes from, all this understanding, in this case, for instance, from the neighborhood and the system world. Her example helps us to understand the importance of making that link and the importance of the challenges that come with them. Then we will watch how Bruno [inaudible] a stain from Austria explained to us how they built bridges between the living and the system world in their efforts to get French cities to embrace cycling on the streets in the lock-down situation around COVID, and they had spectacular results. Think about maybe you've seen some images of how Paris has changed in the last couple of months, and also the city of Leon. One of the things that will tell us is the importance of building brought alliances to get people together around different goals to reclaim their streets, and with these group of people, you actually have enough momentum, but also capacity to actually challenge the expertise of the regime parties. Again, we see the importance here of embracing the first followers, even if they're very unlikely first followers and celebrate them as people that are joining your effort. We then also included a tongue-in-cheek video in which a typical conversation between the living and system world unfolds, where a traffic engineer with his best intentions, tries to convince a mother that her street will be improved. A crucial element of this block is that you should use it to think about your own street and your own city. What are your bureaucratic barriers? Where is the resistance in the regime? Who is the street-level professional that you want to engage with? How will you overcome those barriers in the process of reclaiming your street?
