→ ASK!

Questionnaire and a printed newspaper about inclusive temporary use, community and youth engagement designed to reach the whole community.
How do you get to know the needs and wishes of a neighborhood? Ask them! During BITU all partners did a questionnaire and had different approaches how to distribute it:

Free Riga (Riga, Latvia) created a newspaper, printed 20,000 copies and distributed directly into the mailboxes of residents in 4 neighborhoods, promoting an online questionnaire for approaching local communities in order to initiate community driven inclusive temporary use and explaining more about inclusive/social temporary use practices - they received over 600 answers!

With the purpose to motivate new, young people and invite them to join the community or start something on their own, Alte Mu (Kiel, Germany) created an online questionnaire online and promoted it in front of their building at the entrance - over 65 people answered. After the questionnaire, they initiated a local meeting for participants to have an exchange about similar interests and offered them help to start new activities - 23 participants came and got involved with the temporary use approaches of the network.

Communa (Brussels, Belgium) chose another approach to attract people to answer the questionnaire. They needed to know specific needs of a local community and understand who is willing to be actively involved, cares about their neighborhood development and wishes to acquire new skills and knowledge.
In order to engage and support the social, cultural and educational life,  Communa organized street interviews in the neighborhood of a new temporary use building called - Maxima (Forest, Brussels). The strategy to reach out to various public was to create teams of two or three people and walk around the area Saint Antoine. These teams were composed of volunteers, occupants of the new TU Maxima, team members and neighbors. Time Slots of 90 Minutes allowed each team to interview and meet five to eight persons. These exchanges were meant to fill in the questionnaire and give information about Maxima, as paper questionnaires orally introduced inevitably influenced the answers given, whereas an online form tends to be more neutral. Nevertheless, this strategy to walk around and directly ask people to answer is a way to reach a panel of different persons who wouldn’t have been necessarily surveyed. Furthermore, the paper questionnaire was meant to serve as an icebreaker with the local inhabitants.

Meanwhile, Institut for (X) Aarhus, Denmark, popularized a questionnaire at the neighborhood of Bassin 7, with the goal to research which strengths and interests are among the citizens and what they can initiate amongst themselves without much support, as also for map interests among locals in the neighborhood, recruit cultural entrepreneur, and provide an empowerment to the locals, that “this is their hood” and they can take ownership and create together. Over 190 responded to the questionnaire.
To popularize the questionnaire, Institut for (X) not only published it online, on local Facebook groups, etc. but also invited locals to the “matchmaking-event” where people could meet others with the same interests and start something among themselves.

→ ENGAGE!

Mentorship/guide for working with youth in Social Temporary Use context (+ Training course).

Once you activate members of a community and talk about similar goals and dreams you may find the need to come up with methods for community engagement.
The training methodology in this handbook is collected and created for youth and community leaders that want to learn more about how to support their communities. It is focusing on the practice of temporary use but relates also to other fields. This book is based on the experiences of the partner organizations of BITU. During the project the methods were tested in a training course of 5 days in Riga, Latvia with 19 participants.

Find out more on 126 pages about phylosophys (feel free to fuck up, spark of potential), community management (energy curve, co-creation of space, popular education), project management (how to curate a space, matrix of participation, dream mapping, place making), governance (diamond of participation, decision making trough consent, initiative circles) and analysis (impact masurement).

→ START!

Starter-kit including tools, guidelines, practice examples for opening up new temporary use spaces and redevelopment areas

The Starter Kit is a “Tool Box”, designed to help young people to organize and manage their own Temporary Use projects in a collaborative, creative and efficient way. It was created by the partners during four study visits and is available in english. Watch our tutorial and get the starter-kit for your next temporary use project. 

→ INSPIRE!

Sustainable cooperation between youth-NGO-municipality, experts for cultural and social development of spaces and areas

Take back the city - tools and inspiration for bridging community and city in temporary use platform” is a compilation of our slickest tricks and best practices in bottom up lobbying for our community - for the right to the city - for the right to housing - and for space for the creative wild and untamed. It is meant as an inspiration and empowerment for you who are working with bottom up cultural and social change in your city.

The approaches were discussed by the partners during a 5-day training course at Institut for (X) in September 2022 with 16 participants.