The MyStreet Movement and Participatory Video

What is the future vision of children in a Pupil Referral Unit in North London? How does Budapest’s skateboarding subculture create its own representation? What do Prague residents do on the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution? These are a few of the wide-ranging topics explored by the filmmakers of MyStreet. Launched in the early 2010s, the MyStreet project, modelled on the UK’s Mass Observation movement, expanded traditional academic forms of knowledge production to include broad social groups, researching everyday experiences and publishing the videos on a map-based website. This article presents the history and connections between MyStreet and its historical predecessor, the British Mass Observation movement of the 1930s, and then analyses some videos from the collection to examine how MyStreet enables marginalized groups to represent themselves.¹