Decolonizing Cities: Building Inclusive Futures for Our Cities
Urban Decolonization
Our cities carry visible traces of our past, a past that is often violent, oppressive, and exploitative. Europe has a long history of colonisation and imperialism that inevitably emerges all over the cities where we live. Monuments erected to celebrate controversial figures, streets named after individuals tied heavily to colonial ventures, and racist representations of colonised people are all traces of colonialism in our cities. But there’s more. Often, evidence of our history is more subtle: buildings constructed thanks to wealth earned via the exploitation of the colonies, factories refining produce that couldn’t have been present in Europe if not for the looting of other continents, and institutions involved in upholding and celebrating colonial rule.
Walking through our cities, we are confronted with these traces that unveil the violent history of our countries and reveal the underlying ideology of white supremacy that drove our leaders and our nations. This is why it’s so important to decolonise our cities: to strip our public spaces of symbols that still carry these ideologies in order to create more inclusive spaces and, consequently, a more inclusive society. Decolonising the spaces where we live means decolonising the way we perceive the world around us and eventually dismantling colonial systems of oppression.
UDEW – Urban Decolonization Walks in the EU
In order to achieve this, we need to question what we see, actively search for these traces, and reframe them in our collective consciousness. Our project, UDEW, stems from the need to challenge our history and aims to decolonise our cities using a participatory methodology developed in Italy by the project “Decolonise Your Eyes.” Promoted by the association Quadrato Meticcio, this project encouraged young people to recognize traces of Italy’s colonial past and understand its implications for today’s society.
Similarly, our project aims to map public monuments and spaces dedicated to colonialism, imperialism, and slavery across four European cities: Brussels, Dresden, Padua, and Seville. We seek to provide educators and civil society organisations with a non-formal training methodology designed to raise awareness among younger generations. By involving young people and local communities, especially those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods or with migratory backgrounds, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of our shared history. Additionally, we strive to engage local communities and public authorities, such as municipalities and city councils, in developing awareness activities that address the historical distortions and current perspectives of past colonialism. Ultimately, we promote a Europe-wide initiative to enhance the awareness and memory of Europe’s colonial past, encouraging international debate and reflecting on Europe’s unified history.
Partners
The project involves seven partners from four different countries, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and it is funded by the European Commission.
S-Com from Belgium is an international association based in Brussels, dedicated to fostering social change through various projects like the Genre Médias project, which focuses on combating sexism in the media, and the Vis à vis project, which offers help to victims of online hate. S-Com’s broad portfolio, developed over almost 20 years, includes collaboration with international partners, particularly in providing communication and dissemination support for various European projects, with a focus on the digital landscape.
TeleRadio City was founded in Padua in 1979 as the publishing house of Radio Sherwood, one of the first free radio stations in Italy, which started its activities in 1976. They publish five online newspapers (Globalproject.info, Meltingpot.org, Sherwood.it, Sportallarovescia.it, Eco-magazine.org), and since 1990, they have organized the Sherwood Festival, a musical, cultural, artistic, sporting, social, and political festival that takes place in Padua every summer for a month. TeleRadio City fosters values of non-discrimination, equality, pluralism, and social and climate justice.
Jugend- & Kulturprojekt e.V. (JKPeV) is an educational and cultural center in Dresden focused on promoting diversity, equality, and inclusion. To achieve this goal, they design and carry out educational, creative, and cultural activities on-site and abroad, encouraging cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary cooperation. Many of their projects aim at confronting our past history. Remembering the Past – Building the Future, for example, is a project that explores and reflects on the impact WWII had on Europe and on the causes that led to totalitarian regimes.
Gea is a nonprofit social cooperative with the objective of promoting and implementing integration and active citizenship processes for migrant people, with a specific focus on families, communities, women, youth, and vulnerable groups. The organization has developed experience and expertise and structured collaborations with public and private social services, particularly in the areas of institutional capacity building for health protection, countering educational realities and intercultural education, empowerment, rights protection, training, participation, active citizenship, and anti-discrimination, with specific attention to women, youth, and children. GEA, as a starting point for the development of the UDEW project, was inspired by the Visual Research Method – a workshop conceived and conducted from 2014 to 2020 by Prof. Annalisa Frisina (FISSPA Department, University of Padua), which led to the creation of the participatory video project (Decolonizzare la città. Dialoghi Visuali a Padova).
INClusion is a non-profit and non-governmental organization based in Seville that strives to boost the social inclusion of citizens with fewer opportunities and empower all citizens to become agents for social change and sustainable development. INClusion offers awareness-raising activities, learning courses, and skills development opportunities using a non-formal education approach. They also promote sports initiatives and international exchanges as a way to foster intercultural dialogue and the development of soft skills for active citizenship.
Quadrato Meticcio is an associate partner of the project. They are an Italian local sport and cultural association that promoted the creation of the collective “Decolonize Your Eyes,” dedicated to challenging colonial heritage still present in the streets of Padua. “Decolonize Your Eyes” was born in Padua in 2020, specifically in the Palestro neighbourhood, which still sees numerous streets named after people and battles related to the colonial liberal and fascist periods. The collective organises decolonial walks, posting multilingual informational signs and discussing colonial history and its many legacies.
The University of Padua, an associate partner of the project, is one of the oldest universities in the world and has facilitated the development of new visual research methods on decolonization through the FISSPA Department, under the guidance of Prof. Annalisa Frisina. These methods were used during workshops that proved to be valuable opportunities for teaching and research in a reflective and collaborative way, addressing the issue of racism in Italian society through the critical analysis of visuality related to European modernity and the experimentation of counter-visual practices.