More than any other city I’ve been to, Berlin is the closest thing in my mind to what a city “built for the people” looks like.

East Berlin, that is. The ex-West Berlin is completely different, more typical of big western capitals with imposing, super-symmetrical, grey buildings standing starkly next to hyper-modern architecture, big monuments and chain stores strewn about large avenues that take hours to traverse – with many cars on the road and few people on the streets. The whole thing feels a bit cold and impersonal and during working hours, a bit like a giant German ghost town.

The East on the other hand is living. Its chaotic.  There is graffiti absolutely everywhere, everywhere everywhere. Paint chips off of buildings, plants grow off ledges of buildings, people whiz by on bikes and smoke in cafes, a constant stream of people occupy the streets:  talking, lounging, cooking food, playing football.

The wall might as well still be there – many, in fact would like it to be.

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A few weeks ago, Aiyana Stanley Jones was killed by the Detroit police, who raided her home while she was sleeping.  The incident passed the national media’s “if it bleeds it leads” rule and was even more tragic because Aiyana was only 7 years old.

Five days later, 20-year-old Damion Gayles was shot and wounded by the police only a few blocks away.  The community was outraged and the media picked up that outrage as well.

But what is less known about Detroit is how the people in this city that has been under economic, political, and police siege for so long, have been gradually building an infrastructure for peace and promise from the grassroots.

When violent crime and police brutality spiked in the 90s, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality was formed to document acts of policy brutality and misconduct, to create greater accountability and justice from law enforcement, and to advocate for a police force that is more racially diverse, more respectful, and more adept at dealing with and serving people of different backgrounds and abilities.

One of the Coalition’s core organizing strategies is to form “Peace Zones for Life” across the city in which mediators are called in to arbitrate conflicts between neighbors and families rather than the police.  Their idea is to “put the neighbor back in the hood” and to transform tragic events into community-building efforts for safer futures.

The killing of Aiyana and shooting of Damion have sparked the creation of new Peace Zones  across the City.  The shootings are tragic, but the innovation and tenacity of the Peace Zones deserve celebration.

Another kind of peace zone are the spaces and places being made where youth can participate in change-making and thrive.  Central to such efforts are veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs (who will be 95 in July) and the Boggs Center, which was established in 1995 by friends and associates to honor and continue the revolutionary legacy of theory and practice of Grace Lee and her husband, James Boggs, now deceased. Read More…

This Mothers’ Day I would like to pay special tribute to (you Mom, of course), but also to the women known as Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In March 1976, then-President of Argentina Isabel Perón was deposed by a military coup. This marked the beginning of a military dictatorship known as the “Dirty War” which would last until 1983. During that time, an estimated 30,000 people “disappeared”, mostly young women and men struggling for the return of constitutional rule, for the freedom of their country from its subjugation to U.S. interests, and for the respect of the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights. It was later discovered that most of these young “desaparecidos” had been abducted, tortured and killed for allegedly “corrupting Christian and Western values.”

“Que Digan Donde Estan” – Pictures of those who disappeared during the “Dirty War”

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When thinking about urban environmental repair, there is perhaps no better place to start than in what may seem to be the most unlikely of places: Detroit, MI.  Yes, the ex-capital of the auto-industry is rewriting the rules of urban regeneration as we know them and Detroit residents are creating a whole new way of thinking city-life.

As Rebecca Solnit says, Detroit’s best-known recent history is one of urban apocalypse characterized by “deindustrialization, depopulation, and resource depletion”

One third of the population lives beneath the poverty line and local officials estimate unemployment to be near 50% (the official figure is 30%).

Since the mid 1950s, the population has gone from nearly 2 million people to less than 900,000. Thirty percent of Detroit’s land is currently vacant – roughly the size of San Francisco in square miles. On top of this, the entire city of Detroit has become a  “food desert” — there is not one produce-carrying supermarket in the City. The endless rows of abandoned buildings and houses of what was once Motor City offer an eerie glimpse into a “post-American” future.

Flickr/tronics

Flickr/bobjagendorf

But out of this land, another story is emerging, in which the people of Detroit are re-inventing their city as the urban agriculture center of the country.

I recently met Asenath Andrews, the principal of the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for young mothers and pregnant teens who raise animals and organic fruits and vegetables.  The school also offers classes on beekeeping and more to the community..

The conversation opened a window for me upon Detroit Green.

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I recently received a kick-ass comment from a friend of mine named Stuart Murphy. He had some insight to share on the development of the London Olympics and how it’s affecting community here. Thought I’d give him a little shout-out and repost his comment here. Thanks Stu!

From what I can gather through working on an employment project across Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham (3 of the 5 host boroughs) over the last few years very few local people seem to be benefiting even from the short term construction boom. To my mind, those construction jobs aren’t being done by local people to the extent thats been promised. And thats not meant in the Nationalistic ‘they’re all Polish immigrants’ sense.

Anecdotally it seems that contractors have bussed people in from wherever, to the extent of even giving them fake local addresses in order to skew the stats and not get too much heat from the Olympic Delivery Authority for not employing locals. Not that there would be too much heat, as the targets for employing locals appear only to be aspirational. Its unclear that Section 106 Agreements (see link for definition: http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=71631) are in place or being enforced, so there’s basically no accountability, and therefore no real incentive to hire local.

For instance only in the last week it has emerged that there are only 150 apprentices working on the site, and only 1 from Hackney. Its a 500 acre site, and covered in construction workers.

Here’s a link or two:

• Article about low numbers of apprentices: http://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2010/03/10/only-one-hackney-apprentice-on-olympics-site/




• Link to a report by the snappily titled All Party Urban Development Group about regeneration projects creating local jobs: http://www.centreforcities.org/assets/files/APUDG-BuildingLocalJobsFINAL.pdf




• Also, awareness raising network on issues relating to the London Olympics. Its billed as a network of individuals (which it may be) but there’s fairly strong themes, politically, running through the articles: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/

London Olympic Park construction equipment, by renaissancechambara (via Flickr).

Plan for London Olympics 2012 Village Photo: ecofriend.org

In 2012, London will be hosting the Summer Olympics, “the greenest games to date” according to the Olympic Delivery Authority chief executive, David Higgins.

London authorities are gearing up to win the gold in sustainability, with claims of cutting carbon emissions, lighting a carbon neutral Olympic Flame, using recycled materials and cleaning up the brownfield upon which athletes will compete. But that’s not the only legacy the city hopes to accomplish. London is also looking to implement a robust social agenda to accompany the physical regeneration projects. As the Strategic Regeneration Framework report hopefully proposes:

The true legacy of 2012 is that within 20 years the communities who host the 2012 Games will have the same social and economic chances as their neighbours across London.

London Olympics Photo: gadiss.com

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I recently attended a public lecture given by Andrew Simms, the Policy Director of the new economics foundation, a UK-based think tank that develops new ways of thinking about our planet, our economy and our lives.

You may have heard of Simms and his nef colleagues; they’re the people behind the über-popular and increasingly ubiquitous “Happy Planet Index”, which measures countries based on the size of their ecological footprint, the length of their inhabitants’ lives, as well as their citizens’ declared levels of happiness.

The talk (hear the podcast) presented, in an unconventional way, nef’s guiding principles in rethinking the world as we know it. The ultimate goal was to retool the way Western nations’ economies operate by reducing our carbon emissions, our dependence on oil and the never-ending consumption and waste “treadmill” that propels the first two variables in this equation.

In order to do this, he suggests three ways to move towards a more sustainable planet and more people-oriented economy:

First, we must figure out more robust, yet still realistic, standards that are aimed at gauging people’s well-being and measuring their ecological footprints (the ethos behind nef’s Happy Planet index).

Second, we should place a ban on advertising in our public spaces, a move which, he argues, would further nef’s goals of reducing consumption and waste, as well as promoting happiness – all of which he views as inextricably linked. Simms points to the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paolo as proof positive that this ad-free-zone strategy actually works.

Finally – and this I found particularly interesting – we have the idea of moving towards shorter workweeks. By reducing our labor hours (and again, Simms is specifically talking about Great Britain and the U.S.), we could not only potentially resolve the paradoxical situation we currently face — e.g., the simultaneous societal conundrums of overwork and unemployment – but we could also boost our general level of well-being while simultaneously reducing our consumption and waste, thus promoting more sustainable lifestyles. It’s a call to arms for a simpler life, one in which people would ideally spend more time with their friends and family, learning new skills or doing hobbies.

Decreasing work hours is a concept that has actually been around for a long time. It was one of the driving principles of labor movements during the industrial revolution, during which agitating workers demanded fewer hours to prevent fatigue. It’s also an argument that is being mobilized today to combat the current recessionary unemployment levels– an idea borrowed from the influential 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed a shorter working week was the “ultimate solution” to unemployment. Read More…

Five months ago, Brixton, one of the coolest areas of London, adopted its own currency, shown on the right below – the Brixton pound.   (scroll down for photos and videos).

The idea behind it? Helping to maintain a tight and sustainable community by promoting local businesses. The logo says it all: “Money that sticks to Brixton”.

This is how it works:  You exchange your regular British pounds for Brixton pounds at an exchange rate of 1:1 to spend in local businesses who accept the currency. While Bank-of-England-issued money is still accepted in local shops, some businesses incentivize their customers to buy their products in Brixton pounds by offering perks and discounts – more bang for their Brixton buck, so to speak. Brixton pounds can then be converted back just as easily.

By creating a more limited space in which money can be spent, local currencies gain “velocity” (i.e.: “The speed with which money whizzes around the economy, or, put another way, the number of times it changes hands” (definition by The Economistt) as they circulate in the local economy, acting as a powerful tool of reinvestment. According to a study done by the New Economics Foundation, money spent in this type of localized economy actually circulates three times as much as it would if spent in national chains! That means, you are essentially “voting with your wallet”. You decide where your money goes.

Brixton Market

For local businesses, this represents a huge plus as the profit they make stays in the community – as opposed to moving out of the community, up the ladder to high corporate executives of big national chain. This not only creates stronger ties of solidarity within the community, but it also adds value to the services and products sold in the local economy while building a strong local infrastructure.

Brixton shop

In this way then, mom and pop shops are sheltered from the tough competition of chains – who can sell their products at very low prices – jobs are protected in the area, and the community’s sustainability (and survival in these recessionary times!) is assured.

Rosie's Cafe

On top of all of that, Brixton’s local currency is helping keep the uniqueness of the neighborhood alive. About ¼ of Brixton’s community is of African or Caribbean descent. Reggae music blasts through the bustling open air market, as you wander along the stands sporting yucca root, sweet potatoes and plantains all interspersed between Halal butchers, Afro-euro beauty parlors and Vietnamese supermarkets.

fruit and vegetable vendor

It is not the first local currency of its kind. Communities from all over the world have created their own – from Australia, to China, Germany and Argentina. Here are some pictures of what some other international local currencies look like.

Brixton is the fourth community in the UK to print their own money, and there are talks that the city of Amsterdam might take it on as well!

For more information on the Brixton pound, you can visit their website at www.brixtonpound.org

And here are two cool videos from www.debateyourplate.com and the BBC’s Politics Show.

From 2006 to 2008, at the tiny age of 22, Ashok Kumar served as a Supervisor of Dane County, in Madison, Wisconsin.  He was endorsed by both the Greens and the Socialists and managed to pass some pretty fantastic stuff.  He’s a great storyteller, and despite his heavy hittin’ background, he’s not as serious as he sounds!  Today he’s a fellow student at the London School of Economics, where I interviewed him for my column, Really Serious Things.

Celine:

The theme for our blog is “Flipping the script,” so we are telling stories of people taking back the city and rethinking who the city is for and what it looks like.  You, Ashok Kumar, are someone who has done that.  Let’s start with the legislation you passed in Wisconsin, tell us about that.

Ashok:

That’s interesting.  I guess as an activist who was able to wiggle his way into public office I was trying to ‘flip the script’, but I never thought about it that way.

Our election campaign was always about harnessing the collective power of peoples’ movements within Dane County to assist in shifting the power relations.  And if some good policy came out of it, great! But that wasn’t the goal.  The policies we chose to fight for were always about localizing struggles as well as addressing community concerns in their own right.

Third-Party Candidate

From the beginning our relative success came as a result of me not running as a Democrat.  Ours was a district where it was still possible to win even if you ran to the left of the Democrats. It’s not intrinsically problematic to be a Democrat, but it’s usually difficult to affect change if you do since you owe your success to the party in power along with those vested interests that support that party.  In running as an insurgent third-party candidate, I was able to continue this adversarial role while in office.

Immigrants Rights

Two weeks after my election there were 25,000 people marching for immigrants’ rights in Downtown Madison.  Out of this national fight for immigrants’ rights, we worked with community organizations to institute full housing protections for undocumented immigrants. We ran a campaign for the county to offer id-cards for the undocumented, and organized immigrants and allies against a racist sheriff who targeted immigrants despite us passing a sanctuary law which made it illegal for county sheriff’s deputies to enforce or assist with federal law enforcement of immigration laws.

This was our model.  Gauge where the community stood and work in solidarity on policies that built power as well as win concessionary demands.

Section 8 Housing

A few other examples of policy campaigns include the ending of Section 8 housing discrimination.  This was a campaign that low-income, mostly black, community organizations had organized without avail for over a decade, against racist landlords who refused to accept Section 8 vouchers and had led to a systemic ghettoization of ‘Section 8ers’ as they were called.  Our law made it illegal for landlords to refuse these vouchers, and doubled the housing options for over 3,000 low-income families on Section 8 housing assistance.

Making Bad Contracts Good

Other laws included permanently ending millions of dollars in public and private jail profiteering, an outgrowth of years-long campaigns by the urban churches of Dane County. We also passed a law making it illegal for the county to contract with violators of labor laws, which coincided with long-standing campaigns taking place by the labor unions UNITE-HERE and SEIU who were organizing low-income laundry and janitorial workers at the time.

Ear to the Ground

Laws included expanding full housing rights to transgender people and people with criminal records that passed as a result of these communities directly confronting do-nothing supervisors. We also recognized Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day because Wunk Sheek and other Indian organizations demanded it, which created quite a stir on right-wing radio.  My point is that policy-making is about keeping your ear to the ground and responding appropriately, not seeing yourself as the torchbearer.

Domestic Partnership

Another big campaign that was taking place simultaneously in many states at the time, including Wisconsin, was “vote no” on the marriage amendment–campaign.  We lost.  After so much organizing the results were devastating to many who had organized tirelessly around the issue. Following this, I wrote the Dane County Equal Benefits Ordinance, which required all contractors and subcontractors of the county to recognize domestic partnerships as equivalent to marital benefits.  This affected thousands of Dane County businesses and workers.  The organizing around the law was more about peoples’ ability to not be demoralized after such a mammoth campaign at the state-level.  Winning can sometimes serve that purpose, and provide the necessary short-term fuel to continue struggling. People organized and the law passed.  It was the strongest most expansive domestic partnership law in the country and has been used as model-legislation in a number of cities and counties around the country.

Wisconsin to Venezuela

The last law I was able to pass was the sister-agreement with Andres Eloy Blanco Municipality, Venezuela.  Many saw this as a shout-out to my people on the left, but I and others who I organized with saw it as more representative of our broader internationalist philosophy.  I don’t want it to seem as if the solution is to work on electoral campaigns and pass a bunch of laws.  It’s about something bigger, more structural.  The sister agreement was about building solidarity ties with similarly minded communities in the Global South.  It was about learning from their struggles and looking at our own local struggles within a global context.

Legislating from the Movement Up

All in all I was able to write and pass over a dozen laws because of the social movements that these laws were bound with.  This will also result in their actual enforcement, unlike many laws that pass through backroom deals.  The fact that people of color, working class people, women, LGBT and other historically marginalized people organized and forced the power structure to recognize their humanity serves a multiplicity of purposes, most important of which is the collective knowledge within these communities that hegemony is socially constructed and organizing is the key to winning.

Ultimately, I think, many in the community concretized the idea that real democracy takes place in the streets, not on the legislative floor. The latter is just a tool for organizing the former; we’re taught it’s the other way around.  In that sense, I think we were able to ‘flip the script’, at least just a bit for people in Dane County, when it comes to the narrative sold by the power structure, and internalized by us, about what’s actually possible in our communities.

Celine:

Related to that actually, there is an article about you which describes your “philosophy as a politician” which is you saw yourself as “an extension of Dane County’s social movements, the real agent of progressive change.” I really like that. It’s so rare, so refreshing…

Ashok:

Well yes, although this might be ‘flipping the script’ on conventional notions of what’s possible within representative government I don’t think this is necessarily ‘the model’.  You have to consider the demographics of my district and Madison in general.  Dane County is the second largest county in Wisconsin after Milwaukee.  I represented Downtown Madison, arguably one of the most progressive districts in the country.  Even though I ran with the Green Party, almost every union – with the exception of the sheriff’s deputies union – supported me.  That isn’t normal in other areas around the country.

Taking the Streets into the Supervisors’ Chambers

Even though I ran in the most contested election in the county, against two Democrats and a Republican, I was still supported by the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women.  This doesn’t happen in most places.  Nonetheless, although Madison is progressive, the same cannot be said for the other 64 cities, towns, and villages that make up Dane County.  Before I was elected my supporters and I had been organizers in campaigns that involved building occupations, hunger strikes, and other forms of direct action.  We modeled our county campaigns around a similar strategy.  Through marches, direct confrontation, public shaming, ‘packing meetings’, and targeting financial support our campaigns were able to bring reluctant Supervisors kicking and screaming to our side.

Media Critics

This also led to a barrage of media criticism from radio to print to the blogosphere about our ‘tactics’.  I don’t know what I can say about that… maybe we could have been a bit more tactful about what we said and did, but I just think that the media in most places in America sucks, that’s all.  Plus many of these operate at the behest of powerful interests that we were confronting on a daily basis.  They served the interests of the chamber of commerce, apartments association, builders, realtors and others who felt genuinely threatened by movements and progressives in power.

Celine:

Yes you did come across harsh critics along the way, but you did great work! You put a spin on politics-as-we-know-it in the U.S., by not using the usual “my hands were tied” cop out plus you gave people a platform on which to be heard, to elevate their struggles which in turn brought about legislation that is completely outside of the “leftist” gamut of “things that can be done in our communities”. You guys rocked! Any closing remarks on collective action/organizing/coalition building…

Ashok:

Hey thanks!  All three of those are key components to not just ‘winning the policy’ but building capacity for movements.  Progressives in power need to see that as their role.  It’s about building infrastructure for the long haul.  For example, if you get elected in a place that doesn’t have much movement culture, work to pass a law that eases the rights of workers to organize rather than a budget amendment for a Purchase of Service Agency.  Put your energy where it is most effective.  The latter may help a few people, but the former builds capacity for movements to develop in the future.  That’s just one example, but I think you see what I’m getting at.

In Dane County, we had the worst black-to-white disparate incarceration rate in the country.  The black community of Madison has been organizing around issues of racist policing for decades.  The newer immigrant organizing also targeted the sheriff department’s policies.  In seeing the intersectionality of these issues and one common target these movements were able to coalition and make gains in ways that aren’t normally possible.  The white power structure pits low-income communities of color against each other, fighting over limited housing, social services, and resources – the crumbs.  The best use of local policy campaigns is as a tool to highlight the intersectionality of our movements, which will build lasting alliances between these communities.  In looking at local elections and policy campaigns I think people on the movement-left should see the value of them, ultimately, as tools for political education.  So, my point is that the victory is in the struggle. …but actually winning some demands sometimes is good too.

More about Ashok:

A guy at the water cooler: Ashok Kumar talks about being socialist in public office

Critics ignore Kumar’s progressive strides