As the final activity of the School, the Public Policy Creation Lab, the students were able to put into practice everything they had learned during the training programme, especially those skills related to facilitating safe and participatory spaces in which they were allowed to explore, remix and propose public policies with the aim of submitting them to the public authorities in an attempt to make democracy more permeable, accessible and closer to the people, a democracy that is becoming increasingly cold and depersonalised. and more accessible a democracy that is becoming increasingly cold and depersonalised.
A training programme focused on practical application
On 10 July 2025, 15 young people aged between 18 and 30 from Barcelona took part in the Legislative Theatre workshop on the Right to the City facilitated by the cohort from the first edition of the School of Creativity and Democracy.
Young migrants accompanied by the Barcelonactua Foundation, young activists involved in the fight for the rights of the migrant population in Barcelona, and a representative of the Directorate-General for Open Government of the Government of Catalonia were facilitated by the cohort, which knew how to use legislative theatre, digital participation and participatory research methods to rethink the right to the city and its intersection with the concerns of the city’s migrant population from the perspective of young people, with diversity in class, ethnicity and gender.
Taller de Mapeo
Platoniq (2025)
The day began with a mapping exercise in which areas of social, cultural and personal oppression were identified, along with everyday frictions that would later be used to define specific scenes to work on. Each of the tables, facilitated together with the school’s students, explored personal stories, both lived and borrowed, that could serve as inspiration for the creation of a script that would dramatise them and make them more relatable to anyone.
Process: scripting the day-to-day
Once the situations had been identified, the scripts wrote themselves. Whenever this exercise is proposed, the difficult part is not letting the stories flow freely, but rather focusing them, making them concrete, trying to remember the smells of the place, the clothing of the participants in the situation, the emotions that reality generated.
Once the scenes to be performed had been specified, the young people and students devised ways to make them come alive for those of us in the group. Changes of clothing, use of physical resources taken advantage of from the salt we were in, tables tuned to become windows of an administration that was too often inaccessible.
Results: public policy proposals
Once the dramatisation process was complete, the political team got down to work. It was time to think about what needed to be changed so that a scene of oppression could become a scene of opportunity. After half an hour of deliberation, the team put forward its proposals, which were then refined by all the participants. The result was two embodied and realistic public policy recommendations aimed at improving the lives of young migrants.
Votación sobre las propuestas políticas
Platoniq (2025)
The first set of recommendations falls within the framework of Just Transitions to Citizenship for Vulnerable Young Migrants and responds to a common problem among undocumented migrants: how young migrants of legal age, especially those in an irregular administrative situation, without a family network or living on the streets, face a fragmented system, with educational and residential circuits that do not communicate with each other.
The second set of recommendations responds to the digital administrative itinerary and human support in accessing rights. Both the participants in the co-design of the scenes and the policy working group highlighted the need to address the fact that “migrants face excessive bureaucratic complexity from the moment they arrive, marked by a lack of coordination between public offices, duplication of procedures, and a digital system that, instead of facilitating, hinders access to basic rights.”
A school experienced and facilitated by its students
The School’s stance on this type of exercise is to prioritise those “affected”, so that they are the ones who lay the foundations for social debate on the issues that concern them. This also includes the participants in the programme, who, after listening to more than 14 professionals from across Europe explain the essential concepts of participatory democracy, can put what they have learned into practice and add their own personal skills.
If you would like to know more, please visit the School’s website. And if you are interested in joining the second cohort, we are already preparing the second edition. Tell us who you are and why you are interested here.
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This content was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Barcelona City Council
