Europe Lab 2016

Social exclusion of migrants is a problem worldwide. The fact that migrants are not familiar with the cities they (more or less permanently) reside in makes their social inclusion even more difficult. Migrants’ unfamiliarity with the place of their residence consists in lack of not only historic and cultural but also everyday knowledge: where to go to on Sunday evening, what to do on weekend with children, how to spend leisure time or what is the best pharmacy in the area. All these factors, accompanied by migrants’ poor language skills, result in migrants and local communities living in parallel worlds, with no bridges between them. Meet my City is getting different people from one citytogether:People from different backgrounds meet. They show each other the hometown where they live in so-called  personalized guided tours. Tours took place in Stockholm, Perm, Gdansk, Berlin and many more cities all over Europe.

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Are you fed up with the grey urban routine? Are you bored of the apathy and loners? Stir up your city and recover your positive energy. Fling yourself into the joy of play and the exciting adventures of your fresh urban life! By creating gamelike interventions the Project aims to challenge people to try out various strategies to build a more coherent community, increase social cohesion, interaction and cooperation between citizens sharing the same neighbourhood. The game was played in many cities across Europe, for example, Perm, Minsk and Pécs.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the greatest geopolitical events in the modern history of Europe. The event has changed the map as well as the lives of millions of people both in and outside the former Communist countries.

The factual course of events is well documented, as are the cultural, economic and political consequences for the post-Soviet countries. In our project, we focus on the inhabitants themselves, and their stories. How is the upheaval remembered in Russia, Poland and Sweden, and what consequences did it have for the inhabitants on a personal level?

The aim of the project was to create an oral library with stories and interviews.

Current Schengen visa rules are over-excessive and burdensome for foreign nationals who are subject to visa in order to enter the EU. In order to improve this situation, in 2014 the European Commission came up with a legal proposal to facilitate Schengen visa rules for third-country nationals. More liberal visa rules are meant, on the one hand, to save time and money to foreign travellers, and to bring more money into the EU by expanding touristic flows, on the other. Currently, the European Parliament and the EU Council deliberate this proposal. The idea of the project is to twofold: first, to raise awareness of the public; second, to push the members of the European Parliament to approve for the most liberal version of the EU Visa Code possible.