The first legislative victory of the Civil Rights era was obtained by hundreds of people going where they weren't invited. In 1961, Black and white Freedom Riders, well trained by SNCC in nonviolent action, rode Greyhound buses from Washington DC southwards primarily in order to wait, together, in waiting rooms that were still unconstitutionally segregated.
Creative Time, Social Practice Archive: In 2000 Heavy Trash, an anonymous arts organization of designers, architects, and urban planners, implemented its Aqua Line project throughout various parts of Los Angeles. The project involved the installation of false "Future Station Location" signs in the downtown area, notifying passersby of the impending construction of a subway that would connect the downtown to the Westside.
In the 2012 presidential election, did you know that one of the underdog anti-party runners was Gumby?!
In the attached video, you will hear Gumby offer transportation alternatives (Pokey and friends), challenges of not believing in vice presidents, and the importance of people and clay-people working together.
An advertising agency creates a one-time action for traffic safety, then uses documentation to generate awards and free promotion for their company. Did traffic fatalities actually drop after this was done once? Their Press Release doesn't make mention.
From McCann's Press Release:
It has been a long and exhausting battle for the bike activists in Puebla one of the cities in Mexico. Collectives and activist groups have long pushed for including bike infrastructure around the city, in a horizontal, democratic way.
Hundreds of taxi drivers gathered together on the streets of Mexico City protesting against Virtual apps like Uber and Cabify. They formed a caravan and stopped the traffic for hours, as a way of denouncing unfair price competition.
Thich Nhat Hanh reads his poem "For Warmth" in Vietnamese, Krista Tippett reads the translation in English, excerpted from the episode "Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism."
It took 17 high schoolers, eight mentors from Kansas City and a 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia to create the first ever social media powered car.
The concept was to bring MINDDRIVE to life with tweets, posts, shares and likes which were monitored by an Arduino device. This open-source, single-board microcontroller triggered the vehicle’s motor based on the number of tweets and posts about the project.
On the 5th of May 2021, the subway's 12-line partially collapsed, killing 24 people and injuring more than 70. Onboard, were children, young women and men, and the elderly. The accident also killed a man and injured a woman who was driving a car, upon which the train fell.
The poorly conditions of the subway structure had been repeatedly reported by neighbors living nearby. No institutional response was given.
For the past few years, I've been creating what I call "art of social conscience:" tv spots, viral emails, paintings and posters, but none of it has engaged viewers as much as this series of "historical" markers, each one a small story containing a discrete point of view.
A Colombian college student created this idea to improve Bogotas citizens experience when using the public transportation. According to one scientific study, the worst problem Bogota citizens had to deal within the public space was public transportation; this problem represented the principal cause of high percentages of stress and anger among citizens.
Tens of thousands of taxi drivers in South Korea rallied to the streets after the introduction of a new ride sharing app was revealed to be released in South Korea. The rallies first began after a taxi driver set himself on fire in protest against a new ride-sharing app. The ride sharing app planned to introduce a carpooling service Kakao mobility which is a unit of the popular messenger operator Kakao corp.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
Forensic Architecture's Cloud Studies is a project that investigates the impact of toxic clouds on colonised and oppressed communities. The clouds, originating from sources like tear gas, industrial emissions, chemical weapons, and forest fires, often go unaddressed due to doubt and denialism.
The White Bikes are the best known acts of creative activism by the Dutch group Provo. The political wing of the Provos won a seat on the city council of Amsterdam, and developed the "White Plans".
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
A technological feat has emerged amid the Chilean protests. A video of protestors bringing down a police drone has gone viral on social media sites. These protestors didn't use any physical or gun force to bring the drone down. Instead, they used another form of technology: lasers. A lot of bright green laser beams were pointed in unison at the drone, which can be seen moving erratically, before quickly falling down to Earth.
Mexican truck operators, members of the national transporters union (Trabajadores de la Alianza Mexicana de Organización de Transportistas A. C. (Amotac) ) organized a national strike across the most important and circulated freeways of the nation. Hundreds of cargo vehicles blocked the way, preventing other vehicles to continue on their route.
Ron Krielen is a social designer and a taxi driver. He spent five years driving a taxi for elderly and disabled people. En route, he would get to know them and their individual situation. He realized that this kind of personal contact gave him a better insight into possible solutions than many of the healthcare providers who were actually assigned to each case.