Current policies and politics around urban public space & And what happens if the public space turns into a pitch for mobilisation?
How public is the public space? Indeed, what are we, as members of the public, permitted to do in these spaces? This question is both highly political and highly contested. From politicians to policemen, from artists to activists, from planners to policy makers, nobody is without an agenda about what should and should not be allowed in these spaces. Indeed public space can even be defined as a space for open contestation, and thus the distillation of democracy. For this discussion we bring together a cocktail of characters (hopefully not of the molotov variety) to share some perspectives and positions about about politics and policing, the safety and security, the art and the artifice of Nairobi’s public spaces.
thursday 7 p.m at Goethe Insitute

The future of urban public space & development

Town planners and rappers might not seem like the most likely companions but the correlation between art, culture and urban ‘regeneration’ is becoming increasingly obvious in cities around the world. Nevertheless, this is not an unproblematic relationship. It is true that the inclusion  of community groups, local artists and musicians in the creation of an urban identity ultimately leads to a more imaginative and potent urban code emerging. At the same time, this relationship between  artists and city officials is not always an equal one, and there is always the risk that artists are merely being instrumentalised. ‘Even ‘regeneration’ itself has become synonymous with a kind of gentrification, creating ‘beautiful’ neighbourhoods for the middle classes.

The material is then collated and screened on a monthly basis in public space in Mathare. Thus it functions like a ‘newsreel’ and affords the slum dwellers with a form of local news. Having been screened locally, the content is then uploaded onto the website, which functions both as an archive of this oral history and a means to access a secondary, international audience.

The slum features in the mainstream media almost specifically within the context of violence. SLUM-TV strives to provide slum dwellers with a form of self-representation so that they can begin to tell their own stories and offer a more nuanced, multi-faceted and accurate portrait of slum life.

At the core of this project is the aim to develop an audiovisual format that covers important cultural, social and political issues in Kenya and later within the African region. Whilst at the moment we are screening in public space, the distribution strategy for 2008 is to begin to use the existing ‘pirate cinema’ network that covers the whole region. SLUM-TV will then be distributed on VCD format throughout these existing channels.

Anticipating the future when slum dwellers will have cheaper and better access to the Internet, we will also make it possible for SLUM-TV locally to build a Website to serve as a kind of “YouTube”, linking different SLUM-TV Units worldwide, and producing a digital space for communication and exchange of experience.

SLUM-TV maintains connections with a network of New Media activists. Concurrent with our monthly production of ‘newsreels’, we host six-monthly workshops, offering specialist training in a variety of new media strategies, ranging from media hacking to open source editing.

For more information see www.slum-tv.info