How about that? I can grow my own vegetables in my back yard in large boxes or huge bags provided by people who devoted their time to help people like me who are concerned about their carbon footprints but have no time to do anything meaningful to compensate it. I could grow potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and what not...and you bet I will do it ! Well done urban agriculture team
I think the debate and discussion was quite interesting too. We were divided into groups that contained different actors like farmers, urban residents, urban planners and policy makers. And each group had a different social mix and complexity. I had a lot of fun playing the farmer who in the first place was against the idea because I was afraid of losing clients but then I realised this was quite a well-off neighbourhood where I could sell my services in different forms (consulting, guiding, etc). Good learning experience.
Next lecture we moved to the field of urban politics. After my lecture on the regime theory, the regulation approach and the role of structure and agency we had a student-led debate on the participatory governance. The research team was specifically interested in the role of immigrants in the policy making processes and their debate was quite interesting. We had role playing this time with a different scenario in which immigrants, policy makers and residents had to find effective policy instruments to increase the social, cultural and political participation of immigrants. Well-done people!
In both occasions it was good to see the progress made in the field researches in Antwerp and Rotterdam. I am pleased, as I also said in the class, with the results so far even though you had very little time to conduct your field work. I must also say that I will miss the synergy in this group. It does not happen very often that such motivation and energy combined with continuous enthusiasm and harmony appears in a group. Am I lucky or what? From next week onward we are going to have workshops in the classroom to make comparative analysis to get the groups ready to present their results. Talking about participatory democracy the students have also voted for having a mid-term exam (to my surprise) so 16th of April we will go through that process and have another (and final I'm afraid) movie night. Which movie am I going to show this time? Well will be my final surprise...
Have a good Easter break!
Tuna
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