Place: Riga Street 8
Organiser: local community, Employees of municipality, Local CCI actors
Participants: residents of Rūjiena
Goal:
Goal 1: To engaging local community in a clean-up day activities (community building activities).
Goal 2: A clean-up day to start working on the revitalization on the courtyard based in 8 Rīga Street, with the plan to develop it into a new meeting place for the community.
WHAT IS IT?
Riga Street 8 courtyard has been deliberately chosen as a central location for the BSR Cultural Pearl events, where residents of the local community could meet to discuss issues, celebrate festivals or just relax after a long day at work.
The place is currently degraded as the buildings have been unoccupied since the early 2000s and it is a local authority property that the local authority has planned for the development of the site. One of the solutions was the creation of a North-Central Crafts Centre, but this idea stalled due to the Covid epidemic, conflicts between architects and the loss of funding.
Why was an existing cultural institution not chosen, such as the Rūjiena Culture Centre, the Rūjiena Folk School or the library? The answer is simple, there is no neutral cultural place in Rūjiena, no quarter that would serve as a place for people to meet, regardless of the working hours of the institutions, the staff.
To revitalise Riga Street 8, was decided that the first activity would be a clean-up (organized within Latvian Big Clean-up activities). The local community invited to the clean-up, to offer to create together, to beautify their cultural place, which would create a greater sense of belonging to the city of Rūjiena, to the community. Before the clean-up the local working group met twice. During the meetings discussed what improvements should be made, what would be needed from the technical side to be able to make these improvements and the responsibilities were divided. The activity plan deliberately chose a clean-up of the site.
The clean-up is one of the tools that allow us to move closer to the goal of creating a strong, united local community, ideally a residents’ council that comes together, discusses issues of importance to itself, makes decisions, and defends its interests in the region. This was the first event in the CP activity plan where a large turnout of residents was not expected, due to the fact that community residents are quite passive towards new ideas. The first step was to present ideas on how the community can work towards a common goal, i.e. to make the place more pleasant and beautiful, and we used culture as a way to realize this goal.
HOW TO?
Learnings
RECOMMENDATIONS
Do not rely on general invitations but reach out to the active groups separatly.
LEARN MORE