A clean-up day at the UCV

Yesterday, Friday the 2nd of February, students –mostly from my “Environmental Intervention” class- another professor and I spent the afternoon cleaning up some of the university gardens, an area called “Tierra de Nadie”. Students from the School of Arts joined us, dressed as what has to be called the “Angel of Spotlessness” or on stilts to make everything more festive. As we scrounged around with our plastic garbage bags and protective gloves we got mixed reactions from the students sitting on the grass or on the benches. Some just let us poke through the trash without offering to help, but others got up to clean with us, getting their own rakes, bags and gloves. One boy with bright orange-dyed hair piled straight up from the top of his head toward the overlying tree branches, not only helped, but had all sorts of useful suggestions and theoretical observations to offer about how to work and the nature of citizen participation. Here are some pictures of our day.