When Juan Londono returned from a visit to his hometown in Colombia last year, he realized his new home, Montreal, was ready to launch its own 100 in 1 Day event. He’d attended a 100 in 1 Day workshop in Bogotá, Colombia during his visit and learned about the grassroots movement erupting in cities around the world.

100 in 1 Day (100 en 1 Día) started in Bogotá in 2012 when a group of students turned an assignment to create six urban interventions into a citywide festival simply by opening the invitation for anyone to create and participate. Two hundred and fifty people led interventions on May 26, 2012 and thousands participated throughout the city.

This inspired people in more than 20 cities around the world to do the same.

“It has us thinking a lot about the paradigm of citizen engagement and that somebody is going to help you participate as a citizen,” Juan reflects. “The paradigm of active citizenship says you have everything you need to be an active citizen in your city. Just go for it,” he says.

The goal of the movement is to reframe what it means to be an active citizen.

“In the future, many of us have a clear idea that the city will be co-created.

“And this is like an archaic prototype of what that would look like — a laboratory in some way,” he says.


More Than One Day

There’s a danger in thinking about the festival as solely about a single day, Juan cautions. The movement is about recognizing individual agency and building community through every possible interaction.

“It’s not about the extraordinary. It’s about the common. We don’t want to promote the idea that it takes a whole day to be an active citizen. Every second, every interaction, is an opportunity,” he says.

While interventions largely underscore community benefits, they also foster a spirit of creativity. “By keeping that alive, we’re bringing more life into the city,” he says.


Bonjour 100 en 1 Jour Montreal

Juan knew Montreal was ripe for the movement because people were already creating urban interventions in the city. When he tested out interventions in public space, he acquired positive reactions.

Juan created a game called ‘bonjour Montreal,’ a trick you play on your own mind. “You tell yourself, ‘I’m going to say bonjour to 10 people today.’ It lifts the weight from wondering, ‘is he going to think I’m weird? Is he going to say bonjour as well? Is he going to ignore me?’”

“The more I played bonjour, the more I realized people are open once you are open. It’s not a matter of closed-minded people that don’t want to interact with each other. No. This city is full of beautiful people that don’t really know how to interact with each other in non-normative ways,” he says.

Inspired by this insight, Juan spread the word, igniting the movement in Canada.

On October 5, 2013, hundreds of Montreal’s citizens came together to implement their ideas throughout the city. People gathered outside Montréal Botanical Garden to share the lifestyle changes they’d made for environmental sustainability through creative photography exchanges. Scientists and citizens joined in a fun activity to establish the ecological inventories of the park at Mount Royal’s third summit. People pushed the norms of citizen interactions by exchanging apples for secrets.

Now Juan is helping to organize Montreal’s second 100 in 1 Day (100 en 1 Jour) festival on June 7. It joins a nation-wide day of action as 100 in 1 Day takes place in Vancouver, Halifax and Toronto on the same day. It is the first time the event is being coordinated among multiple cities on a single day.

For more information about the events, visit: 100in1day.ca