Pinchuknatalya's List: AWESOME POLITICAL SOCIAL ACTION

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    One of former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus' many inspired strategies for changing the mindset - and, eventually, the behavior - of the city's unruly inhabitants was the installation of traffic mimes on street corners. (Photo courtesy of El Tiempo)  

   

    Academic turns city into a social experiment 

   
• Mayor Mockus of Bogotá
• His measures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning
   economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between
   formal and informal rules, and Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue
   creates social capital.
• Professor Jane Mansbidge of the Kennedy School,
• "Democracy From Theory to Practice" class

• His presentation made it clear that the most effective
    

   

    campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and 

   

    participatory stakeholding.
• Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass 

   

    North,
• ürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social capital.

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• "The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task," Mockus said. "Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change."
• Mockus taught vivid lessons with these tools. One time, he asked citizens to put their power to use with 350,000 "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" cards that his office distributed to the populace. The cards were meant to approve or disapprove of other citizens' behavior; it was a device that many people actively - and peacefully - used in the streets.
• Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 people called and the mayor organized a meeting with all those good taxi drivers, who advised him about how to improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers. The good taxi drivers were named "Knights of the Zebra," a club supported by the mayor's office.

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• When Antanas was elected the first time, Bogotá was so violent that it was the only South American capital the guidebooks recommended not to visit.
• violence was confronted by inviting people to draw on a balloon the face of the person who hurt them most, then giving vent by hitting the balloon. 45.000 people participated.
• During his two terms, the homicide rate went from 82.1 per hundred thousand inhabitants to 23.4.
• He fired 3,200 transit officers and put mimes to control the traffic. Mimes put no fines, but made fun of those who violated the rules. The mayor felt that the Colombians were more afraid of being ridiculed rather than punished. He was right: deaths from traffic accidents dropped by half since the beginning of his first term as mayor until the end of his second.

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