This week I had the privilege of joining the Fearless Cities conference, hosted by Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform founded by 15M and PAH activists in 2014.

The conference announced a global municipalist network, featuring delegates from more than 100 cities around the world.

Municipalism is a movement of cities taking power from states, and using that power to transform politics from the bottom up. For a good intro, check out this recent article from Kate Shea Baird: A new international municipalist movement is on the rise — from small victories to global alternatives.

The conference named two goals for the municipalists:

• to feminize politics — developing new ways of organising based on horizontal collaboration, collective intelligence and the politics of everyday life, and,
• to stop the far right — combating the politics of hate and fear with local policies that reduce inequality and promote the common good.

The speakers were hugely inspiring. To give you a taste, I’ve extracted quotes from the four sessions I attend.

Democracy from the Bottom Up: Municipalism and other Stories

I found myself nodding along with everything shared by Debbie Bookchin, daughter of the original municipalists, Beatrice and Murray Bookchin:

All ecological problems are social problems. We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy. We need to fundamentally alter our social relations. How do we bring an egalitarian society into being? The municipality is a logical arena to start. […]

Social change won’t occur by voting for the candidate who promises a minimum wage, free education etc., only an activated citizen movement can transform society. […]

Local assemblies transform citizens. We are made new humans by participating. We grow beyond capitalist modernity.

Ritchie Torres from the NYC Council, opened with two questions about the US context:

• How do we achieve progressive municipal governance in a world of federal divestment?
• How do you bring participatory politics while so deeply entrenched in two-party politics?

They said their greatest achievement in NYC “is that we’ve brought into mainstream a new idea of municipal government. It’s common sense now that local government is not just for filling potholes, it can be a force for equity. […] We’re not just a legislature, we’re a vehicle for community organising. Being merely a legislature, you will be undermined by legislative and financial activism from the right. But if you’re organising communities, you can make headway.”

Sinam Mohamad was greeted by a standing ovation from the crowd, inspired by stories from Rojava, the autonomous region in the north of Syria:

We in Rojava have built decentralised, democratic self-rule in an extremely difficult situation. Economic embargo, besieged, terrorist attacks, chauvinist mentalities… In spite of all this, we built our municipalism. […]

Kobanî faced an attack from ISIS; a city full of fear, everyone frightened by the attack. Fear means you are dying while you are alive. Turkish bombs in our cities, villages. Children sleeping with fear. Mothers afraid for their families. We struggled for peace, which we have achieved now. We built a democratic administration together. Not just Kurds but a mosaic of religions and nations: Turkmen, Arabs, Syrians, Assyrians, Muslim, Yezidi, Christian, and so on. All agree to coexist in this area. This is our aim, to live together without fear. All the people come together and agree to the social contract.

If you don’t have an organisation that is very well organised for equal gender, you won’t have a free society. Free women = free society. Constitutionally we have equal genders, 50–50 participation. Co-president system means we have Mr and Mrs Presidents.

See my full notes from that session here.

Sanctuary and Refuge Cities

On Sunday morning, we joined a panel on Sanctuary and Refuge Cities. Speakers included city officials from Barcelona, NYC, Berlin, Kilkis (Greece), and Paris. Some highlights:

Daniel Gutierrez from Interventionistische Linke in Berlin explained how they created an anonymous health card so migrants can access services without fear of deportation. The same is happening in Barcelona and parts of France. Ignasi Calvó explained that the Barcelona ID is a municipal (not national) register of citizens, so they can bypass the racist laws of the Spanish state, but it still carries state validity, conferring automatic rights to anyone carrying it in the EU. He warned though, “If you’re going to use civil disobedience, you have to ensure the consequence will be on the city, not on the migrant.”

Each of the speakers reiterated the same simple point: that everyone should have access to the same rights. They argued against categorical distinctions between migrants, refugees, and other residents, as these categories create exclusion.

Amélie Canonne from Emmaus International explained how the state fuels radicalisation: “Repression creates radicalisation, both within migrant communities and in the activists working in solidarity with them. In EU, food distribution is banned, activists are arrested, trialled, radicalised.”

Comments from the audience revealed the huge intelligence in the room. For instance, one commenter shared their concerns about the elephant in the room: the question of race. “This has been a colourblind discourse, forgetting the racial aspect, treating migrants as foreigners rather than people of colour. In the US, white nationalism is one of the main drivers working against migrants.” For more on this, see my recent article on white nationalist militias resisting migration from Latin America.

A city councillor from Philadelphia agreed, explaining how systemic bias is compounded against people with intersecting identities, not just “people of colour”, but “low income, migrant, people of colour.”

A Lebanese participant shared some broader context: “We have been receiving refugees for 60 years, maybe 2 million of them. We have a lot to say about the experience! Are these European cities connecting with the history of refugees in Lebanon? We have made so many failures, and success stories too. Many European cities are coming at this for the first time, learn from us!”

It was inspiring to hear so many cities taking radical steps to resist the racist policies imposed at the national level. See my full notes from that session here.

For the closing plenary, Kali Akuno shared razor-sharp analysis from their experience in Jackson, Mississippi.

“In Jackson we talk about the “Syriza trap” — thinking that our leftist forces can manage the contradictions of capitalism. Thinking we can transform capitalism without transforming society. Where has that ever happened? We need to transform society from the bottom up in a participatory way.”

They reiterated “proximity”, a theme woven throughout the conference:

“Direct contact with your neighbour. Find out their interests, hopes, desires, fears, then organise for what you want, and to not be subject to those fears. You will have to confront racism, sexism, xenophobia: you can overcome that at the local level and create a practice to open your neighbourhood to new people.”

The map of participants shows the global extent of this emerging movement

We then heard updates from delegates from around the world. The UK delegate received enthusiastic applause throughout their short speech:

“Use political office as a resource to support the transformation from below. We’ve learned the lessons from feminism, we change the order when we refuse to participate.”

A panel discussion with no white men. How has this never happened before?

Finally, at the end of the day we enjoyed a one last panel — a furious, joyful, incendiary lineup of speakers. I took fairly comprehensive notes, which you can read here.

Yayo Herrero was one of the most incredible speakers I’ve ever seen. Their transformation recipe is worth quoting in full (that is, my transcription of the English translation of the recipe):

“Acknowledge the very clear reality: that material reduction is not catastrophe. It is a catastrophe to not address this with equity and justice.

“We are obliged to think about freedom and a framework of rights that is not just individual but has a relational sphere.

“We need to imagine an ecologist feminist alternative that is anchored in the land, and in our bodies. Put life and sustainability as a political and economic priority. Expel markets as the centre of the political logic. Challenge the perverse logic that if we don’t keep on feeding this exploitive system we won’t grow wellbeing.

“We need a different way of science and technology. We need to expel the part of science that is based on fantasy, promoting things that are not possible, or only possible for a few. Put science in the service of life.

“We need social organisation where men and women and institutions are co-responsible for care. Life must be cared for, it’s not just a job for women.

“We need alliances that allow us to organise a sabotage to this historic plan. Feminists, entrepreneurs, ecologists, trade unions… build a complicated diverse alliance of majorities.”

Activist philosopher Vandana Shiva spoke last, concluding beautifully:

“Nature is intelligence, diversity, and self-organisation. Municipalism is self-organisation at the level of cities.”

And with that, we were ejected out into the warm Barcelona evening. Reviewing these notes, I’m stunned by the quality of all these speakers. The conference felt very much like a sequel to last year’s Democratic Cities conference in Madrid, where I was first introduced to the idea that cities can offer hope in an age of hopeless states.

The conference organisers got a couple of simple things right which made a profound difference to the mood and the content: they made the event accessible with €20 tickets, and they ensured the majority of speakers were women.

However, with respect, I do want to offer a criticism: every session I attended shared the same linear format, with one person speaking, and a room full of intelligent, engaged, creative people simply listening. We can do so much better than this! As Vandana said, municipalism is self-organisation at the scale of the city — I’m hungry for self-organisation at the scale of the conference. We can use horizontal collaboration structures like “Open Space Technology” to unlock the collective intelligence of all the participants. We can intentionally design for relationship-building, rather than hoping for it to emerge passively in the hallways and lunch breaks. This Thursday my partner Nati and I are hosting a workshop on self-organising at the scale of 10s to 100s of people; perhaps we can convince some of the conference organisers to join us and the next Fearless Cities event will have a format to match the content.

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Calling for action to protect open wifi networks, the Pirate Party’s Julia Reda writes how collectively built-up, not-for-profit wireless networks like Freifunk provide Internet access to refugees, “allow[ing] them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.” In the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, where activist-coordinated refugee solidarity groups support housing projects, there is a growing need for internet connectivity and regular maintenance. Working in a similar ethos, Exarcheia Net provides internet access and technical support to 10+ locations around Exarcheia – facilitating internet access for over 1,000 people.

Alongside this work, James Lewis, the initiator and facilitator of Exarcheia Net, is supporting community members in establishing cooperative networks. But the objectives of Exarcheia Net go beyond providing Internet connectivity to these places and include the following:

• providing internet access and service infrastructure for grassroots institutions like cooperative and non-profits,
• creating and maintaining associations to facilitate the sharing of Internet access among groups of people,
• piloting and prototyping a new type of neighbourhood/district-level community network that includes physical spaces and regular face-to-face meetings for governance, training and engaging people, cultural activities, etc ,
• demystification of technology and emancipation of citizens in building and operating their own technology infrastructures,
• using locally-run services (e.g. secure messaging, file share, video streaming, internet radio)
• organising ExarcheiaNet projects in a P2P way by facilitation rather than hierarchy and project management, building in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing peer to peer, and allowing networks to grow and connect to each other in an organic bottom-up method rather than ‘funded’ and top down.

Greece is home to a number of community network projects, each following their own governance model, such as Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN), Sarantaporo.gr, and Wireless Thessaloniki. Community network projects bring with them lower data costs, often faster internet speeds than telecom-provided internet, and benefits of privately owned infrastructure such as privacy and locally run services.

From June 12-16, you can join Exarcheia Net for a series of workshops,  where Exarcheia residents will join in on a public introductory workshop and guests from Freifunk (Germany), Altermundi (Argentina), Guifi.net (Catalonia), Ninux (Italy) and OpenFreenet (India) will lead an open debate on building self-organized community networks at the neighborhood level.

Exarcheia Net is looking for more people interested in working  “hands-on” in community networking and setting up p2p infrastructure. To connect with Exarcheia Net, check out the Wiki or join a weekly meeting by contacting James Lewis: lewis.james at gmail dot com.  

Lead image “Le libraire d’Exarchia – Athènes, Grèce” by ActuaLitté, Flickr

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Eddy Adams of SIX interviews P2P Foundation researcher Penny Travlou at the Unusual Suspects Festival in Glasgow, where she spoke passionately about the work she’s been involved in with refugees in Greece.  This interview was originally published in Social Innovation Europe’s Magazine.

As part of our Beyond Crisis Collection, Eddy interviewed Penny to learn more about this work of using food making and sharing to support migrant integration in Greece.

To get us started, can you tell us briefly what you’ve been doing and how you got involved?

I am a cultural geographer and ethnographer based in Edinburgh. I have an academic post in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Since 2010, I’ve been doing research on creativity as a collaborative and sharing knowledge practice within various emerging networks.

I started my research with digital practitioners and artists, but currently I am working with nomadic co-living communities, hackers and refugees. I know that it may not make much sense, but all these diverse groups have one thing in common: they are on the move; they are nomadic. Of course, we cannot compare the experience of Northern European web designers – for example – who cannot afford to live anymore in London and Paris with that of the Syrian refugees who are forced to leave from their country due to the war. However, they all form a nomad transient citizenship which in my view is very influential in the way Europe will be shaped and experienced in the years to come.

So last February, I moved to Athens for 5 months as part of my research leave. There, I met the co-living/co-working community unMonastery which had just moved to Athens too. I decided to focus my research on this community, but as they were creating a network within the city I ended up researching that instead! That’s how I got introduced to Jeff Andreoni, an unMonasterian and great connector with whom I organised my first pop up kitchen event last April. Jeff is a food enthusiast who has been organisingdinners in Athens for years to get locals and immigrants together. In this event, we collaborated with an Eritrean refugee, Senait who is a professional cook, but who didn’t have the ‘know-how’ to start her own business in Greece. Senait would like to open a restaurant in Athens in the near future. Our pop up event was held in a beautiful neo-classic house in the centre of Athens. We hosted 100 people, served 15 different dishes and home-brewed non-alcoholic beer all made by Senait and provided live African music.

That made us think that such small-scale events can be a great way to give job opportunities to newcomers i.e. immigrants and refugees and get them feel part of the Greek society and culture. From that event onwards, we got collaborated with and participated in other immigrant collective pop-up events. In the summer, we set up the African Collective Kitchen “OneLoveKitchen” with a group of cooks from Senegal, The Gambia, Sudan, Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. We collaborated with the African United Women Organisation and Nosotros: the free social centre. All our events have been self-organised without any formal funding. We have organised small pop-up dinners in houses and roof terraces, have served food in a solidarity economy festival and have catered for two conferences. Since September when a great influx of Syrian refugees has been arriving in Athens, some of us have also been involved in daily collective kitchens preparing food for a housing squat for refugees and other similar initiatives. Jeff and I are now working on the Options Foodlab, a professional kitchen and co-working space for food training which we hope to set up soon.

Why do you think food is such a good connection point with refugees?

What I always say when people ask me why I got involved in such a project is to think of where the words ‘company’ and ‘companion’ come from. They both derive from the Latin word ‘companio’ which means one who eats bread [pane] with you. Thus, food making and sharing is a social act and a means of exhibiting respect for an existing or future relationship of reciprocity. Food making is about hospitality and connectivity. There is not a better way to bring people together: you don’t need linguistic cues to connect with others. With this perspective, we can think food as an object of exchange, a gift that can be shared and exchanged.

Tell us a bit more about the migrants you’ve been working with. Are most of them new arrivals? Where have they come from – and do they see themselves settling in Greece or moving to other parts of Europe?

Most of the immigrants and refugees we are working with are from Africa and have been in Athens for a couple of years. Some have gained refugee status and others are still trying to get their asylum status. Most of them have daily jobs such as working in cafes and restaurants, busking, house cleaning and looking after elderly patients. They are all underpaid. Then, there are the ones who are unemployed or do small jobs from home (e.g. making and selling bread in their community, hairdressing, mending clothes etc.) Nonetheless, most of them would like to stay in Greece for long and making plans for settling down and opening their own businesses. Only two of our cooks left to Northern Europe in the summer when the Macedonian borders were still open.

What barriers are they facing, in terms of social and economic integration?

The list of barriers that refugees and immigrants face upon their arrival in Greece is very long. Don’t forget that Greece is still within a financial crisis and austerity-ridden environment. Thus, the problems that refugees experience are even harsher: hostility and suspicion from locals, unemployment, homelessness and difficulty to assimilate new cultural values. Some of the people we work with have escaped from extremely undemocratic regimes, faced imprisonment and torture before arriving to Greece, so for them it is very important to move on from their past and make a better living. Unfortunately, in most cases, they find themselves trapped within a bureaucratic system which is difficult to penetrate and get the necessary papers and documents in good time.

Often, building a trusted relationship is the key to successfully working with vulnerable marginalised communities. How have you done this in Athens?

I fully agree with your statement: trust is the glue for good and long-lasting relationships. In our case, I think we have succeeded to make good friends and business partners because we have tried to avoid hierarchies within our group. We are true believers of collaboration, peer-to-peer learning and horizontal power structures: we are all equal within our network of collaborators. Of course, this is not easy to maintain and there is not a magic recipe either. We also had our failures: there were instances of conflict among our group. How could you bring together people of so many different cultures, political ideologies and religious beliefs? We’ve been working with Muslims and Christians, old and young, women and men, anarchists and new agers, people of different sexual orientations, basically with very different people. Thus, conflict should be expected and welcome in the group. It’s a way to go forward: of understanding people’s differences and positionalities. What though has made us continue is ‘trust’ amongst one other: the belief that we are all equal and part of a solidarity network.

Who have been your key allies and supporters on the ground? In Greece when there are so few resources, where has your support come from?

So far, we’ve been working as self-organised autonomous initiative without any formal funding. Most of us work as volunteers in the foodlab and pop-up events. In fact, only the cooks are paid via donations that the guests give. We have also got a small grant from OuiShare, the global community for a collaborative society.

In the past, we tried to make partnerships and collaborations with local authorities and public organisations but without much success. Due to the financial crisis, there is a lot of resentment on what they can offer financially to initiatives like ours. We also tried to collaborate with NGOs, but again as they also face an uncertain future, they cannot commit to new projects.

Our closest allies and supporters are people who know well our work and ‘trust’ us, other self-organised initiatives and collectives.

Looking at the work that’s been done so far – although it’s a loaded term – where’s the innovation in your opinion?

In a few words: ‘human capacity’ and ‘solidarity’. All our work is based on developing a strong network of supporters and volunteers and sustaining relationships within the network. Each of us has a distinct role within the project according to our skills. Some maintain the online communication, write blogs, organise the events, and others do the shopping and help the cooks. We also care for each other, we try to ensure that we are all in good health and happy. Thus, innovation is in collaboration and sharing. We co-create the pop-up events.

And what are the plans for the future? How can you build on what’s been done so far?

At the moment, we are working on our business plan as we would like to see our project becoming more self-sufficient (not depending only on donations). We are looking at all different business options from setting up a social enterprise to a company for-profit. This is not an easy task as the business environment in Greece is not very good at the moment. We are also looking for a space to use as our co-working hub where we can cook and organise pop-up events.

How transferable are the approaches that you have developed? What can other cities take away from this work?

If you don’t mind I will change your question a bit and ask first what people in bottom-up initiatives in other cities can take from our work. Well, this is easy to answer: commitment, enthusiasm and belief that you can change things if you get together. You can only succeed if you collaborate and share knowledge practices and skills. However, city top-down level support is more than welcome. It will make projects like ours have a future: it will provide financial stability to those who need it e.g. the refugee/migrant cooks. We also cannot always depend on people’s goodwill to help for free; this will only sustain precarious labour.

If people reading this want to help or get involved, what can they do?

There are two ways that people can help our Options FoodLab: if they are in Athens, they can come in touch with us and get involved in the organisation of our pop up events. Then, they can of course help us raise money to purchase cooking equipment and set up our space.

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Learn more about Options FoodLab and see other examples of migrant integration in our collection.

The post Options Foodlab: How food making and sharing is supporting migrant integration in Greece appeared first on P2P Foundation.