Porto Alegre, Brazil: My Three Forum Sessions

Action
I co-organized three sessions at the World Social Forum. Although these sessions were only a tiny part of the total WSF experience (see previous blogs), they were a huge part of my personal experience and can help illustrate what happened and did not happen at the Forum.

The first session was called “Building International Networks for Progressive Urban Planning”, organized through Planners Network with my co-conspirator Alex. The event’s official intention was to discuss ways of building a more active international network of progressive researchers, practitioners, students, and activists working on urban planning issues. Our unofficial intention was to combine the session with a broader one a few tents away, an “Encounter of Urban Movements” organized by several seemingly like-minded Latin American urban networks.

Our event was on the first time slot of the first day of sessions, 8:30 am on January 27th. This was only 5 hours after the headliner of the Forum’s opening ceremonies, the French/Latino musician Manu Chao, took the stage. At 8:30, the Forum site was nearly deserted. A few people drifted in and out of our workshop to chat, and at 9:30 a few organizers of the Encounter of Urban Movements arrived at their site. Soon after 10:00, the Encounter began to convene, and we relocated the Planners Network session to their tent.

There were around 40-70 people at the Encounter at any given time, mostly Brazilian campesinos and landless workers. There were also representatives from urban networks in Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, India, and Brazil. The event started with brief introductions of all the participants, followed by several speeches on the Encounter’s background (over a year of previous collaboration) and goals (further develop an agenda and next steps to fight for housing, water, and other basic rights of poor urban dwellers). Because there were no interpreters, Alex and I discreetly translated from Spanish and Portuguese to English, for the Russians and Indians.

The representatives of urban networks were then invited to present their organizations and themselves. Alex returned to our old tent to chat with wandering souls, so I remained to interpret the Russian and Indian speeches to Spanish (quick, how do you say “we are resolutely opposed to all further evictions carried out against our constituents” in Spanish?) and briefly present Planners Network. More polemical speeches followed, and then the organizers proposed that we break into three groups to discuss three issues: how do we communicate together, what is our platform, and what actions do we take now. Since most of the participants were Portuguese and I don’t really speak Portuguese, I decided to take action by leaving.


Brazilian campesinos and their flags at the “Encounter of Urban Movements”

My second session was “Participatory Budgeting in the Geopolitical North”, organized under the auspices of Toronto’s Transformative Learning Centre, with help from Estair and The Transnational Institute of Amsterdam. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process, developed in Porto Alegre and now practiced in hundreds of cities worldwide, that enables ordinary community members to directly decide how budget money (usually the municipal budget) is spent. Because of its success at equitably redistributing public resources and democratizing government decision-making, I wrote my masters thesis on PB in Toronto. There were several sessions on PB at the WSF, but most were in Portuguese and focused on Latin American experiences. Ours was the only one to bring together researchers, activists, and government officials involved with or interested in participatory budgeting in the more developed countries of the North.

The session consisted of 3 short presentations on PB experiences in Canada, questions and discussion about Canadian experiences, 3 short presentations on PB experiences in Europe, questions and discussion about European experiences, a (very abbreviated) participatory exercise to invite broader participant feedback, and time for individual networking at the end. Being my hypercritical self, I felt that the presentations occupied too much time and discussion too little. We also had to arrange impromptu (and inadequate) translation to Spanish for some of the Europeans. Most of the people we talked with afterwards, however, said that the presentations were great and the session was one of the best they had attended. Based on discussions at the session, we’re now starting an international PB network and have already created a new email listserv to continue talking and sharing experiences.


Mingling and networking at the end of “Participatory Budgeting in the North”

The third session was “Public Spaces as Catalysts for Local Community, Economic Development and Democracy”, organized by Ethan from Project for Public Spaces (PPS), with some assistance from yours truly. The goal was to share the approaches and techniques that PPS uses to facilitate community-driven design of public parks, plazas, markets, streets, and buildings, and to establish new international connections between people working on public space issues.

There were around 20 people in our small tent when the session began, most from North America or Europe. Ethan had prepared a powerpoint presentation, but our tent was without power. We organized an ad hoc discussion circle to share participant experiences and discuss PPS’s work. After an hour, the power came back on, and Ethan switched to the powerpoint. The presentation showed a wide range of photos of public spaces in the Americas, along with text and oral commentary. During and after the presentation several people raised questions for discussion. I was feeling a bit ill and Ethan was well prepared, so I let him do most of the work.


Ethan presenting at the Project for Public Spaces session

Reflection
After organizing events, I tend to be too tired and/or disappointed to do much reflection. Usually I become anti-social and lethargic, regretting how much time I poured into an event that didn’t accomplish what I’d hoped. Oddly, I keep organizing events, and often even claim that I enjoy it. Who knows, maybe I do…

In Porto Alegre, it was very easy to be critical. Organizing an encounter of over 155,000 people from 135 countries to discuss hundreds of different issues opens up a huge can of logistical worms. The tents were too hot, fans too loud, translation too scarce, speakers too many, discussion too little, Brazilians too dominant. Yet despite all these limitations, the Forum created a unique space for transnational interactions and for developing an alternative world, difficult as that may be. Participants learned about new ideas, made new connections, were inspired by their compañeros in other countries, and developed many new concrete actions and plans.

We should certainly keep questioning what Social Forums accomplish and how they can accomplish more, but considering that the entire event cost less than the average salary of a baseball star, it seemed like a worthwhile investment to me.

Question
What should meetings at conferences or forums accomplish? How do you decide whether an event was successful?