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 peoples’ “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.
The People’s Assembly in Parliament Square, London. Lee Nichols.
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.
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