Connected Neighbourhoods 2.16

During the past 2 years the Academy of Popular Culture and other International partners have worked on developing a project called “Connected Neighbourhoods”.
The Connected Neighbourhoods-project will be an innovative communication project on generating democratic processes from bottom up in order to create democratic engagement and civic participation by social, cultural and artistic means. The project will be carried out by students of the different universities and colleges for higher education in Europe, in co-creation with civilians, civilian organizations, local politics and business partners and experts on themes that are important in the European Union.
The main question is: how to create participation between citizens, politics and local organizations/partners in different European countries as a basis for democratic engagement.
The themes are social inclusion, geographical migration, employment, sustainability and gender issues. The definitive themes will be chosen by each partner, depending of the local questions of the participants and partners.

The future project has its core activities in seven city lab in which during six months a variety of strategies will be executed to create involvement between the citizens of one neighbourhood and between the citizens of the different neighbourhoods and their local environment. The students will be supervised by professionals from their schools and by experts in community art and design from all over Europe.