Project
A Participatory Urban Arts
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Amount Funded
99,110 EUROProject Duration
01 Aug 2022 - 31 Dec 2023 -
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Lead organisation
Yayasan Kota Kita
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Kota Kita is a non-profit organisation based in Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia focused on working with citizens to make cities a better place. We envision a model city that is shaped and shared by informed and empowered citizens as we believe that citizens should beat the heart of cities’ decision-making processes. Our interdisciplinary team bridges dialogues between governments and citizens by influencing urban policies, encouraging open access to information, providing civic education, and facilitating the involvement of all citizens — especially the marginalised and excluded. Because without these voices, we will never realise a city shaped and informed by empowered citizens — A City for All.
Our work is driven by four core values: 1) Promoting the Participation of All Citizens; Kota Kita believes that everyone in cities is essential; we all have roles and responsibilities to actively participate in making our communities a better place. We facilitate and promote the involvement of all people, especially the marginalised and excluded, to bring in different perspectives, voices, and strengths, to make cities better places; 2) Empowering Future Urban Leaders; Kota Kita is committed to shaping the next generation of actively engaged urban leaders by promoting learning and developing tools. We do this through research, capacity building, and providing pedagogic experiences within our organisation; 3) Democratising Urban Information And Knowledge; Kota Kita believes that sharing knowledge can help people better understand how to take advantage of opportunities and overcome the challenges that come with rapid urbanisation. We are committed to raising awareness by making urban information available and accessible to promote action and change; and 4) Cultivating Creativity and Innovation in Cities; Kota Kita believes that creativity and innovation will be the driving force to address cities’ challenges today and beyond. We strive for out-of-the-box thinking and narratives that go beyond the status quo as a platform to engage and mobilise citizens into taking action and participating in the development of the cities.
In the past 11 years, Kota Kita has grown from a citizen-led initiative in Solo to become a leading civil society organisation that promotes participatory approaches in more than 25 cities in Indonesia. The organisation’s urban inclusivity initiatives have been recognized by UNESCO in 2017 and received a Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) Global Urban Mobility Challenge 2019 award. In 2021, Kota Kita received the Best Place maker of the Year award and the Best Place maker in the NGO/Community (Public Space) from Place maker Awards ASEAN 2021 for a participatory placemaking initiative in Ngampon, a neighbourhood in the Indonesian city of Surakarta. We have also been recognized with the Zero Project Award 2021 for our participatory data collection approach to create a disability-inclusive city. We have also led and organised events such as the annual Urban Social Forum – a civil society-led forum that brings together civil societies, practitioners, and students in a collective goal to improve cities.
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Organisation
Kota Kita is a non-profit organisation based in Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia focused on working with citizens to make cities a better place. We envision a model city that is shaped and shared by informed and empowered citizens as we believe that citizens should beat the heart of cities’ decision-making processes. Our interdisciplinary team bridges dialogues between governments and citizens by influencing urban policies, encouraging open access to information, providing civic education, and facilitating the involvement of all citizens — especially the marginalised and excluded. Because without these voices, we will never realise a city shaped and informed by empowered citizens — A City for All.
Our work is driven by four core values: 1) Promoting the Participation of All Citizens; Kota Kita believes that everyone in cities is essential; we all have roles and responsibilities to actively participate in making our communities a better place. We facilitate and promote the involvement of all people, especially the marginalised and excluded, to bring in different perspectives, voices, and strengths, to make cities better places; 2) Empowering Future Urban Leaders; Kota Kita is committed to shaping the next generation of actively engaged urban leaders by promoting learning and developing tools. We do this through research, capacity building, and providing pedagogic experiences within our organisation; 3) Democratising Urban Information And Knowledge; Kota Kita believes that sharing knowledge can help people better understand how to take advantage of opportunities and overcome the challenges that come with rapid urbanisation. We are committed to raising awareness by making urban information available and accessible to promote action and change; and 4) Cultivating Creativity and Innovation in Cities; Kota Kita believes that creativity and innovation will be the driving force to address cities’ challenges today and beyond. We strive for out-of-the-box thinking and narratives that go beyond the status quo as a platform to engage and mobilise citizens into taking action and participating in the development of the cities.
In the past 11 years, Kota Kita has grown from a citizen-led initiative in Solo to become a leading civil society organisation that promotes participatory approaches in more than 25 cities in Indonesia. The organisation’s urban inclusivity initiatives have been recognized by UNESCO in 2017 and received a Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) Global Urban Mobility Challenge 2019 award. In 2021, Kota Kita received the Best Place maker of the Year award and the Best Place maker in the NGO/Community (Public Space) from Place maker Awards ASEAN 2021 for a participatory placemaking initiative in Ngampon, a neighbourhood in the Indonesian city of Surakarta. We have also been recognized with the Zero Project Award 2021 for our participatory data collection approach to create a disability-inclusive city. We have also led and organised events such as the annual Urban Social Forum – a civil society-led forum that brings together civil societies, practitioners, and students in a collective goal to improve cities.
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Project
Youth with disabilities in many Indonesian cities often still face barriers in expressing a strong voice in the decision-making processes of their cities, notably due to limited awareness for accommodations to ensure their full and effective political participation such as the use of sign languages. Kota Kita’s research study in Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, Indonesia (2017) found that even though the participation of citizens with disabilities in local and national elections are relatively high at 60.1%, participation in neighbourhood meetings and in local budgeting meetings are low at 27% and 2.2%, respectively. This data indicates that citizens with disabilities are not yet involved meaningfully in expressing their needs and advocating for policies that directly affect them.
While Solo has strong history of inclusion over the decades, as noted in a report by Global Disability Innovation Hub and Kota Kita(2022), improvements are necessary to enhance the participation of people with disabilities in community dialogue in both formal and informal mechanisms. In fostering a more socially-just space for more meaningful participation, there is a need to deepen the way citizens interact as a collective, build shared awareness and solidarity, and explore the tension between spatial and social to influence change within the acknowledged existing power that currently shapes the city. For Solo, urban arts, particularly murals, have been a tool for citizens to express their needs of urgent issues in the city, and there is great potential in using urban art to deepen the participation of citizens who will enjoy the spaces—in contrast to the conventional method of commissioning artists.
The participatory urban art project proposes a series of activities for youth with disabilities in Solo to collectively build their position in the contested urban narrative through creative placemaking. Our project aims to converge the voice of youth with disabilities—particularly those who are deaf and have hearing impairments—and connect those voices with visual arts as a means of expression, awareness-raising, and reclaiming of spaces. Through this participatory urban art project, piloting in the City of Solo, Indonesia, we hope to celebrate and leverage the diverse, intersectional aspirations of the youth in the city, build solidarity, and mainstream discourses about urban inclusivity.
The project will incorporate a participatory creative placemaking approach through activities such as photovoice workshop, co-design, and participatory mural as primary tools to manifest the collective aspirations of youths who are deaf and hard of hearing. We will engage 10 – 15 youth participants to produce participatory mural artworks in three [3] public spaces in Solo, utilising the process as an exercise to enhance their agency and capacity to advocate for rights in the city and raise public awareness on urban inclusivity. The project will activate targeted public spaces by painting the mural together and sharing the learnings to other stakeholders in the city. The main objective is to use murals and art installations as a shared learning process and not merely as an end product—a process to make the invisible more visible.
Ultimately, we hope to see more people aware of power inequality in citizen participation and understand the implication of this situation for people with disabilities. The initiative might not target structural change initially, but we expect to see the collective awareness rise and lead to more collaborative efforts to enhance the quality of citizen participation by integrating initiatives in both spaces to bring changes within the complexity of our cities today.
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Youth with disabilities in many Indonesian cities often still face barriers in expressing a strong voice in the decision-making processes of their cities, notably due to limited awareness for accommodations to ensure their full and effective political participation such as the use of sign languages. Kota Kita’s research study in Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, Indonesia (2017) found that even though the participation of citizens with disabilities in local and national elections are relatively high at 60.1%, participation in neighbourhood meetings and in local budgeting meetings are low at 27% and 2.2%, respectively. This data indicates that citizens with disabilities are not yet involved meaningfully in expressing their needs and advocating for policies that directly affect them.
While Solo has strong history of inclusion over the decades, as noted in a report by Global Disability Innovation Hub and Kota Kita(2022), improvements are necessary to enhance the participation of people with disabilities in community dialogue in both formal and informal mechanisms. In fostering a more socially-just space for more meaningful participation, there is a need to deepen the way citizens interact as a collective, build shared awareness and solidarity, and explore the tension between spatial and social to influence change within the acknowledged existing power that currently shapes the city. For Solo, urban arts, particularly murals, have been a tool for citizens to express their needs of urgent issues in the city, and there is great potential in using urban art to deepen the participation of citizens who will enjoy the spaces—in contrast to the conventional method of commissioning artists.
The participatory urban art project proposes a series of activities for youth with disabilities in Solo to collectively build their position in the contested urban narrative through creative placemaking. Our project aims to converge the voice of youth with disabilities—particularly those who are deaf and have hearing impairments—and connect those voices with visual arts as a means of expression, awareness-raising, and reclaiming of spaces. Through this participatory urban art project, piloting in the City of Solo, Indonesia, we hope to celebrate and leverage the diverse, intersectional aspirations of the youth in the city, build solidarity, and mainstream discourses about urban inclusivity.
The project will incorporate a participatory creative placemaking approach through activities such as photovoice workshop, co-design, and participatory mural as primary tools to manifest the collective aspirations of youths who are deaf and hard of hearing. We will engage 10 – 15 youth participants to produce participatory mural artworks in three [3] public spaces in Solo, utilising the process as an exercise to enhance their agency and capacity to advocate for rights in the city and raise public awareness on urban inclusivity. The project will activate targeted public spaces by painting the mural together and sharing the learnings to other stakeholders in the city. The main objective is to use murals and art installations as a shared learning process and not merely as an end product—a process to make the invisible more visible.
Ultimately, we hope to see more people aware of power inequality in citizen participation and understand the implication of this situation for people with disabilities. The initiative might not target structural change initially, but we expect to see the collective awareness rise and lead to more collaborative efforts to enhance the quality of citizen participation by integrating initiatives in both spaces to bring changes within the complexity of our cities today.