Wanting to address the social needs of citizens is not enough. Educating action promotes the participation and empowerment of people, generates links of belonging, recreates community.
© Ana Yael Zareceansky
“Education does not change the world. Education changes people. People change the world.” Paulo Freire.
The slogan of the Congress of Educating Cities (“An Educating City is an Inclusive City”) is revolutionary in times of social fracture, disintegration, increased inequality, new forms of social exclusion. Because in the midst of the dazzling luxury, the streets are marked by times of crisis. Times of evictions, unemployment, child malnutrition, extreme poverty, loneliness and isolation. Consequently, the slogan becomes the banner for an ideal, for another way of understanding and experiencing the city.
An educating city is an integrative city, a school of citizenship, which ensures the development of its inhabitants and the capacity to reconstruct a collective “me”. Educating cities want “us” to secure a place and a link of belonging for everyone. They are human cities that generate humanity and combat disintegration and social exclusion with initiatives that bring together people who are committed to the community and who practise co-citizenship, every day making a more just and fraternal city a reality.
The slogan unites inclusion and education as two sides of the same coin. One cannot be understood without the other. The concept of educating cities reminds us that we cannot aspire to solve exclusion and other social problems from a paternalistic or assistance-driven standpoint if we fail to consider the essential political dimension of education. The response from well-intentioned initiatives, often urgent and fragmented, is not enough. Wanting to address the social needs of citizens is not enough. Educational action promotes the participation and empowerment of people, generates links of belonging, recreates community.
In the congress agenda, the presentation of experiences took up considerable time. Participation, empowerment, social and community ties are dimensions at the forefront of five of the experiences shared; integrative experiences which describe the desire to promote civic commitment, to work toward a fairer, equal and egalitarian city; that address the most vulnerable sectors among the population; born in environments where fragility and growing vulnerability are met with limited acceptance. These actions generate new forms of solidarity and recover the centrality of people as protagonists of their own lives. All these actions have a clear political dimension and thus an educating mission.
Brazil, the motherland of Paulo Freire (who is the father of liberation pedagogy), presents two experiences from which we can all learn. In the São Paulo metropolitan area, there are two cities – São Bernardo do Campo and Santo André – working on different projects, both driven by the desire to transform the city through a change in public administration. Rigorous citizen-participation processes tell us about a new way of going about and understanding politics, of generating democracy and building citizenship.
The first words to frame São Bernardo do Campo’s multi-year participatory project make it quite clear what is being proposed: “To govern is to break with paralysis and put an end to the exclusion practices that leave most of society alienated from government decisions, the very decisions that affect the lives of everyone. To govern is to open up, to welcome in. It is to know how to listen, think and act together.” In Santo André, the participation process has reached children and brings together the entire network of public schools with the clear desire to “make them the protagonists of their city’s history”. The boys and girls are leading debates and making proposals on health, sport, culture, housing, the economy and all aspects of city life.
From Argentina’s capital in Buenos Aires, the notion of a political reality created with an educating mission is shown. The experience “Women in Everyday Urban Planning”, led by the Ministry of Housing and Social Inclusion, promotes a new paradigm in public administration and a new way to exercise democracy. The key words are “participation, dialogue and living together” from the perspective of gender. With the awareness that all too often disadvantaged women remain at the edge of political life, women’s councils are being created in all neighbourhoods. Mappings of daily life are created, along with surveys, debates and sessions for reflection. The efforts aim to incorporate women’s view of reality into urban planning, to hear their voices, empower them and to make them participants in public politics and citizen administration. The women’s councils debate and make proposals on domestic work, inter-neighbourhood mobility, urban segregation, housing conditions, gender violence, services and public spaces.
From the Portuguese city of Almada, the experience presented promotes the exercise of active citizenship among the elderly. The Senior Citizens Council is the driving force behind a social-inclusion plan for this group. The local government, organisations, companies, the university and cultural agents coordinate to monitor significant actions such as Universidade Sénior (Senior Citizen University), home help and support, the Flexibus to improve mobility, volunteers to combat loneliness, sports activities, integration-oriented projects and quality-of-life campaigns. All activities are aimed at reinforcing autonomy, quality of life and the exercise of citizenship among senior citizens while strengthening and recreating support networks.
In Rennes, France, the creation of social connections between university students and the city’s poorest neighbourhoods guides the objectives of the Association of Students for the City (AFEV). Under the slogan “Live Together”, it has started up a project that unites the students’ right to housing with their desire for social commitment in poor neighbourhoods. Students are offered accommodation in social housing at a modest price in exchange for their participatory commitment to neighbourhood life. The exchange benefits the students and the neighbourhoods while forging links between two worlds that are close geographically but distant.
In the Barcelona experiences presented, the city becomes a first-class educator: it creates unity in diversity, opens up opportunities for the future, and recreates shared spaces. At the heart of the action are participation and different social agents’ right to citizenship. Words and phrases like empowerment, capacity-building, involvement, commitment to citizenship, community cohesion, participation, links and connections are the notes that make up the melody in the fight against social exclusion. A background music that incites the beneficiaries of the different projects to become the protagonists of the action, whether they are young people, women, senior citizens or children. Participation and civic commitment thus become keys to understanding what integrative experiences, construction of citizenship experiences and educating city experiences are.
Fighting against social exclusion means promoting cohesion, commitment, feelings of belonging to the group, interdependence and living together. Local governments work shoulder to shoulder with institutions and organisations to create free, responsible citizens who construct the future and develop new responses to social problems. They are not afraid of debate and tensions; they do not deny conflict and the most noble sense of the political life is recovered; that of the civis who populate the educating city. Social initiatives join forces with public action to recreate a common space in which citizens can make their voices heard, not only to claim or to propose ideas, but also to design, plan and manage city life. The beneficiaries become agents and the distance that separates them from decision centres begins to shrink. Bureaucracy is reduced and the distance between those on the inside and those on the outside, between the few and the rest, is cut down to construct “us” in a common space with room for all.