From local to global, from the neighbourhood to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to Europe, in short, from the citizen to the institutions, here is what the
Bottom-up concept consists in - in an ascending order of hierarchy- which resulted in the elaboration of the Colab Quarter events.
Such a process gave us the opportunity to question and redefine what European identity stands for, not as something that would be given for granted, but as a moving identity, in a permanent process of redefinition by the very people who live here and embody it.
This semantic approach also allowed us to get back to the roots of what Europe was primarily built for : strengthening peace and democracy.
Through a process of creolization, the objective is to get from the multiple to the individual identity and not from the individual identity to the multiple. It is not to consider the individual identity as a selection pattern of multiplicity, but on the contrary, to consider it is the result of the intersection of these multiple aspects. This approach will create bonds in diversity, in such a way that the identity will prevail on the multiple.
From the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood - as a political issue and a living space - is located in between private and public spaces, the individual and the citizen. It is the place where intimacy joins the public sphere and gives room to the citizen, beyond the abstraction of the individual. It is all about the unicity as derived from the unexpected, the unpredictable, permanently in the making.
Promotion/enhancement and creolization of cultures. Any individual embodies a particular culture. It represents the memory of this individual, it shapes him/her and identifies him/her. The Colab Quarter events aim at having those memories meet, merge, confront into necessarily casual encounters, in order to give birth to new practices, new ways of living together, through a process similar to creolization.