urbanism

In the summer of 2008, a group of drifters traveled in search of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor (MRCC). They looked for the region’s counter narratives; they found evidence of small town organizing, prison resistance, and perma-cultural farming living right beside agribusiness, supermax prisons, empty factories, and Christian conservatism. They witnessed the reflections of cities, in the urban migrants seeking fairer futures on open land, in crop production that fuels and feeds the masses, and in the waste exported from cities.

Our experience is that social support is crucial to community organizing and movement building; hence support is a central piece of radical coemmunity organizing. Contemporary organizing in manye Left and radical currents does not adequately incorporate support or their own self-reproduction1 into their work. This piece examines support in context of neoliberalism and current crises.

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Revitalization. Inclusion. Social Mix. Diversity. Vibrancy. This is the jargon of contemporary urban planning. While this kind of language is full of potential and promise, more often than not, these words serve simply as euphemisms for gentrification—for the displacement of socially and economically vulnerable groups.

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SINE: Early Saturday morning, St John's Church, also known as the 2640 Space, was beginning to hum with the sounds of the City From Below.  People bustled behind book tables, served up food and coffee, began contemplating neoliberalism and resistance; everywhere was hustle and buzz.  I didn’t know what the day would bring, and I didn’t know that Kid(z) City was actually going to be the best imaginable way to start it.

Around the time of the City from Below Conference, there had been a great deal of trans-organizing happening in Baltimore. The energy was high for many transfolks, queers, and allies as the end of March approached.  The Conference was jam-packed with activists from in and out-of-town, and it seemed like an interesting space to not only meet those involved in similar struggles and organizing work, but to really sit down and discuss the reality of modern, radical, queer activism.

The Pnyx is a hill facing the Acropolis in Athens. It is where in ancient times about 6,000 politically active citizens would stand and address the Assembly, exercising democracy at its birthplace from the 6th to 4th century BC.  Today, Filoppapou Hill, the larger area where the Pnyx sits, has been under threat of privatization.

Community Land Trust Q & A
James Tracy interviews Jim Kelly

1) What is a Community Land Trust?

A community land trust (CLT) is a democratically controlled nonprofit organization that owns and controls land to make sure it is used for permanently affordable housng or other purposes that benefit the surrounding community.

2) Across the United States, what are communities using it for?

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David Harvey: This foreclosure crisis, this financial crisis, has to be thought of as a crisis of the city, a crisis of urbanization – and if it’s a crisis of the city and of urbanization, then the solution has to be a

To: All poor Americans and their communities in resistance

The privatization of land--a public resource for all that has now become a false commodity--was the original sin, the original cause of this financial crisis. With the privatization of land comes the dispossession of people from their land which was held in common by communities. With the privatization of land comes the privatization of everything else, because once land can be bought and sold, almost anything else can eventually be bought and sold.