Description
Be your Selfie in Bucharest shall focus on the urban and historical non-formal education, in an attempt to provide information to the younger generations, who, with very few exceptions, are not the beneficiaries of any kind of intercultural or urban and heritage education or training in the formal Romanian educational system. The project focuses on how urban heritage education can be provided using the idea of public space, through lectures, screenings, discussions, but also interventions and site visits, presentations and debates sur place given by historians, architects, anthropologists, civic activists, sociologists. Using the case of Bucharest, the project will look into how Bucharest started to be created through the former "mahalale" by communities grouped according to ethnicity and religion: Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Poles, Bulgarians, Turks, Roma etc. The language that various ethnics use in all these cases is conditioned by the public cultural network through the streets, buildings and monuments which are not only identity symbols, but also proof of certain type of social mobility, places of exposing the social and political class under the circumstances of various types of ethnic cleavages. Starting from the identity question “Who are we within the city?”, the project will look at the public space as a location for staging social inequalities based on ethnicity, in an attempt of identifying and presenting a unitary concept of “public space” (in the sense that all the currently used approaches-sociological, architectural and judicial are to be brought together, discovered and explained) to undergraduate and secondary school students. The idea from which some of the meetings intends to commence is that the production and representation of architectural and monumental symbols (buildings, facades, parks, statues, flags etc.) are mainly driven by the state and/ or religion in a struggle for identity recognition and for power.
Summary of project results
“Be your Selfie in Bucharest” focused on the urban and historical non-formal education. The project provided younger generations, which did not benefit from any form of urban education, with the main instruments of conceptualizing the public space. Experts organized formative workshops and site visits. Intergenerational dialogues were important in the formative process. Students, initially trainees, became trainers of their younger colleagues. FSPUB hosted the exhibition of student's photographs. The project entailed an original understanding of urban education. Until present, an unitary narrative of the city obscured the hidden social inequalities based on ethnicity and gender, shifting power relations, new forms of artistic expression. Our formative workshops emphasized the clash between the power driven process of architectural production and the multicultural character of the city. As the feedback forms show, the participants connected enthusiastically to their city. As a result of taking part in the project, they felt less alienated and expressed willingness to engage more in civic and cultural activities. The Project promoter concluded five institutional agreements with five Bucharest high schools. 16 BA students and more than 50 pupils took part in the activities. Students attended four workshops and two field trips. High-school students attended one workshop (coordinated by 3 students and one project expert) and one city tour. Five workshops and five tours were organized by/in the partner institutions. The interdisciplinary teaching materials are important deliverables. Lectures focused on: architecture and politics, minorities and history, protest sites and movements, new artistic forms, gender discrimination, city branding. The tours targeted historic buildings, ‘remembered realms’ or new socializing hubs. Pupils registered 209 images in a competition for the best picture; the Faculty hosted the exhibition. A jury designated the winners of the photography contest. The website, the project promoter account, the press articles and radio interviews contributed to the dissemination of the projects’ ideas and public events. The participants in the project acquired new knowledge on urban education and the history of Bucharest. They show an increased interest in getting involved in civic and cultural activities and a higher degree of acceptance of diversity.
Summary of bilateral results