Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons
A new project seeks to amplify the message of local struggles between
citizens and urbanisation processes in Poland, Spain, Turkey and the
United Kingdom.
http://www.docnextnetwork.org/radical-democracy-reclaiming-commons/
The world seems to be flooded by an unending wave of indignation and
political unrest. The media sphere extends beyond the printed press and
television news, into our personalised social networks, evoking a
constant stream of images: fluctuating markets, stagnating economies,
vibrant multitudes, insurgent violence. It is all too overwhelming to
take in, as the simultaneity of events reduces voices to
indistinguishable frequencies in a wall of noise. It's as if anything
can spark widespread revolt, like a park in Istanbul, a squat in
Barcelona, or the price of a metro ticket in Rio de Janeiro.
The Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project tunes out the
broader context of global unrest and tunes in to the local level at
which the protests take place, so we may hear the common theme that
binds them. That theme is citizens seeing their right to decide what
kind of communities they want to live in denied by faceless processes
far-removed from local reality, and certainly not accountable to it. As
social ecologist Murray Bookchin once put it, city space, with its
human propinquity, distinctive neighbourhoods and humanly scaled
politics -- like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense
of mutual aid and its strong family relationships -- is being absorbed by
urbanisation, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenisation,
and institutional gigantism.
In the midst of the wildcat general strikes and decentralised
occupations that defined May 1968 in France, the sociologist Henri
Lefèbvre wrote that these types of protests were claiming people'
right to the city, which he defined as a demand for a transformed
and renewed access to urban life.
In more recent years, David Harvey has revived the concept, writing
that:
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to
access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing
the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right,
since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a
collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation.
These concepts, together with the understanding that protest is
fundamentally a form of caring for our communities, are what guide
Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons. With support from the Open
Society Initiative for Europe and the European Cultural Foundation, the
project highlights and empowers social agents who are proposing radical
changes in the way society participates in common spaces. These social
agents come from Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The goal
of Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons is to increase the
visibility of their local struggles and maximise their social impact
using the networked medialabs of the Doc Next Network to produce
socially engaged media with a lasting impact on public debates.
Poland: Opening the heart of the city
In the heart of Warsaw, tucked away in the lush green tangles where
John Lennon Street meets Jazdów, lies a community of small rural
houses. Established by the USSR in 1945 as a part of Finnish war
reparations, they form an enticing island of tranquility in the
capital's urban landscape, and a living monument to the city's 20th
century history. Yet in recent years, city officials have decided that
they would rather replace this area with the glass skyscrapers so
typical of large city centres. In response to this, social activists
responded by organising Otwarty Jazdów (Open Jazdów), a grassroots
initiative that includes current and former Jazdów residents,
community organizations, local activists and young politicians trying
to stop the demolition of the houses by promoting Jazdow as a common
space for the city's inhabitants. It is a process that is similar to
what activists are doing in the neglected, formerly industrial Ursus
district. Starting in 2012, people in this district have been
organising actions that criticise the urban decay it has been subjected
to, informing the public of residents' unmet needs and promoting the
district's history through the bottom-up creation of a Social Museum.
As each of these campaigns uses the institutional and grassroots tools
at their disposal in their disputes with city officials, Radical
Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons will help amplify their message so
that they can achieve their goals.
Turkey: Making the city liveable
The neoliberal city is the motor of Erdogan's Turkey. Its booming
economy is the result of a massive construction
