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Title: Liberate not Exterminate Author: Curious George Brigade Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, cities, CrimethInc., critique, green Source: Retrieved on June 8, 2009 from http://dominantfiction.com/@city/City%20Zine%20for%20Web.pdf Notes: Who is the “Curious George Brigade”? Most obviously, we are the authors of this lil’ zine. We are also an action-orientated international anarchist cabal. We are friends, comrades and co-conspirators. You can’t join the CGB, so just make your own damn brigade. We also wrote a slick book called, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs (www.ageofdinosaurs.com or www.yellowjack.com). We are always looking for feedback, so you can contact us at cgb@ageofdinosaurs.net. Let us know what you thought of it.
We wrote this zine because we feel this is one of the important topics
floating around our scene right now. Most of these ideas are not
original with us but we felt they have not yet been collected together
in print format yet. We hope to spark some interesting conversations
about cities, ecology and anarchy among our friends and future comrades.
Feel free to copy this zine and pass it out to lovers and
fellow-travelers. You can just reprint a section or just the art. If you
wish to get more information about any of the topics discussed in the
zine just write us we would be glad to send you some suggested readings
and web-sites. If you like the art, you may want to check out
www.dominantfiction.com.
We, like most anarchists in the world live in urban areas. We call it
our home and it is where we do most of our political work. Yet many
anarchists tell us the city is a problem, it is part of corporate
civilization and has given rise to everything we despise. Our green
anarchist comrades suggest that if we were serious about anarchy we
would see that cities must go (along with most of the world’s
population). While it is true people can be blinded by love, we feel our
affinity for the city is not blindness. When we dream, we dream of
anarchy at home both in the city and in the wild. Despite where we
choose to live and work, we find our passions are akin to our green
brothers and sisters. Not only do we believe the city can be redeemed,
we believe it might be the best hope for achieving the goals of green
anarchy and healing the Earth.
Below is not simply a polemic in favor of an unsustainable urban
lifestyle. We have spent years studying, thinking and working for this
goal. We have read the works of many green anarchists and conversed
throughout the long winter nights with travelers bringing the
anti-civilization message. We have listened, we have read, we have
argued but we still believe there is hope. So this is a political
love-letter for the city and a promise to our comrades that our
commitment to anarchy is real and our love for this planet is true.
Anarchy and cities are not in conflict anymore than wildness and
anarchy. This little zine is part of a larger project which in turn is
part of even a greater momentum towards rethinking the urban. While it
is true no leader has crystallized the different strands of these
various movements, theories, communities and projects; we do believe
there is a growing understanding that the urban environment can be
remade along the lines of anarchy; and further, it must if we have any
chance. We, raccoons, rats and feral cats, have much to share with our
wild cousins. We do not shirk at the enormity of our task but celebrate
its audaciousness. Others may dream of ruins but we dream of teeming
lively neighborhoods.
“I’m a bank robber, because banks are where the money is.”
We believe if you have a serious critique of capitalism and the state
(along with the related oppressions they spawn), it might be wise to
reclaim their fortresses-the cities. The cities are the home to modern
capitalism and state power. They are the engines of the modern economy
and the places where their devastating policies are made. We have to
confront the enemy at their fortress, if we take away their fortresses
they will cease to exist.
For too long, anarchists have surrendered where 3/4 of the world lives
to these corrupt and corrupting powers. We believe urban anarchists must
organize and create militantly radical infrastructure in the very belly
of the beast, if we wish to have substantial victories. Retreating to
the forests and wildernesses will not stop the dual juggernauts of
capitalism and state power. Even the courageous eco-actions have either
failed or simply sent the bastards somewhere else to exploit. If
anything whole scale retreat weakens our ability to create active and
real resistance to their rape of the wilderness. We must fight on all
fronts but if we wish to actually stop them from pillaging the earth
they must be stopped in the cities. If Derrick Jensen is correct that
cities are “black-holes of resources”, than we must actively engage in
new, sustainable ways of living in the city. We must push cities towards
livability, which includes being surrounded by a robust and free
wilderness. It is hard to imagine the nation-state without the city. But
in order to fight the nation-state we don’t have to reduce cities to
rubble but take them over. Cities, like the wilderness, are not
commodities to be bought and sold, they are the places where we live,
work and play. Anarchism is already an international conspiracy, we are
everywhere, we are the scruffy student in the college library, we are
the pizza delivery boy, the school-teacher, the social worker, the
architect, the squatter, the guerrilla gardener, this city is our home
and we are taking it back.
Cities if done right can actually be good for the environment.
Responsible, ecologically sustainable, caring and smart cities are
possible, not just in theory but are being created in practice. High
density urban areas can allow more land to revert to wilderness and
speed the earth’s recovery (if it is not already too late). For example,
if all urban places had the density of Hoboken, NJ (approximately 35,000
people per square mile) the entire population of the US could fitinan
area the size of the state of New Jersey. Imagine what the effect would
be on the rest of the continent. Greater urban concentrations, that are
based on bioregional principles, will dramatically reduce the need of
technological tentacles (power lines, highways, sewers, etc.) that have
strangled our forests and waterways. We can, and must, reduce the waste
that our delusion of manifest destiny has given rise to. Such
abominations like Las Vegas, situated absurdly in the desert, will no
longer be sustained. To turn the highways back into meadows and the
strip-malls return into forests, will require not only creative thinking
but also complex far-sighted projects. Cities have been fertile beds for
radical ideas with their concentration of human discourses, cultures and
resources. Few machines, many hands and many minds.
Many will argue that green anarchy is a result of the research and
theories of deep ecology. Our green comrades took the revelations of
deep ecologists and turned them into political praxis, creating a
vibrant multitude of communities throughout North America. They have
even had some heroic victories in their struggle to preserve the ever
threatened Earth and for this we will always extend our solidarity. They
have inspired us with their bravery,creativity, and endurance. They are
an important part of the overall resistance, but alas only a part.
It is only recently researchers, thinkers and most importantly
“ordinary” people have been examining the complex ecology of the city.
Audubon Society was shocked to find more species of birds in New York
City than in the entirety of North Dakota. There are over 20 plants that
exist solely in this city of over 8 million souls. There are animals
that range from rats to coyotes that share this largest American city
with us. Many people would be shocked to know that parrots live in
Brooklyn and falcons soar above Wall Street. New York is not alone with
its diverse flora and fauna,all major urban centers are teeming with
animals and plants, many with new hybrids not found anywhere else. The
city is like a desert, in that most people see it lifeless and devoid of
variation, but neither is true. We know the desert is a fragile and
wonderful environment that creates unique adaptations to the harsh
geography. The city is a made environment but it is not solely used by
humans. Some species have learned to thrive like the falcons, pigeons,
rats, raccoons, etc. while new species have developed to take advantage
of the urban environment like the feral rooster and the brick martin.
The green anarchists have done much to show we have lots to learn and
gain from intimate experiences with nature. We city-dwellers could not
agree more. The city is filled with wild life and we must learn to
listen it. We believe it is wrong to believe that a pigeon or Brooklyn
parrot is any less natural or wild than a spotted owl or a bald eagle.
One can experience the wonders of nature in the city, perhaps not in the
same quantity as out in the wilderness, and learn from these
experiences. Cities could, and some have, developed to be more open and
protective to the wildlife that shares their urban neighborhoods. The
ecology of the city is more than simply the flora and fauna of its area
but also the relationship between everything from micro climates, human
occupation, and architecture. Committed individuals are finally turning
their sights towards the problem of keeping city ecologies in balance
but this will of course always be threatened by corporate greed.
Capitalism is not only threatening the Northwest’s old growth wilderness
but also ecology of the cities.
The green anarchists (and others) have done an admirable job drawing
attention to the need of preserving our dwindling natural biodiversity.
We agree that biodiversity is integral to a healthy ecosystem. We
sincerely believe cultural diversity, like bio-diversity, is also key to
thriving human communities. Cities are natural reserves of cultural
diversity, one can walk through the neighborhoods of London, New York,
Port Au Spain, or Hong Kong and experience not only ethnically distinct
areas but new hybrids of intermingled cultural identities. Linguistical,
cultural, ethnic and stylistic variants are in continual dialog with
each other in the healthy city. The city allows these diverse
communities to cross-pollinate and create new more flexible identities
that enlarge everyone’s horizons. Out of these fusions can come a
multitude of resistances to the suffocating hegemony of capitalist and
nationalist conformity. The city air of cultural hybrids and diversity
allow everyone to breath more freely. The anarchist cornerstones of
affinity and free association are more easily realized in these swirling
concentrations of cultures. The stifling conformity of tradition is
opened up in the discourses of different styles, languages, cultures and
passions. Large concentrations of people allow us to find true affinity
that matches our ideals and dreams. There is a reason people leave the
stifling tradition of the rural areas and seek the cities, it is a
natural desire to find tolerance and communities that we can share in.
The cities allow us to reinvent our lives and create new families. It
allows us to join our desires of freedom with others creating
communities of personal and communal liberation.
While it is true oppressors be them kings, real estate moguls or petty
politicians have always tried to create the perfectly ordered city —
these attempts have for the most part ended in failure. This is because
the city naturally strives for liberation because it has a natural
propensity for anarchy and chaos. These oppressors have used zoning
regulations, armies of militarized cops and business improvement
districts to try to control and regulate the population. They seek to
remove public spaces, discourage gatherings, prohibit non-commerce
activity and cripple spontaneity but no city in the world has ever
completely succeeded in taming its populace. Most cities strive for
centralization but the reality as (lived by any city dweller) is that
most large urban systems are by necessity decentralized. The
neighborhood, the enclave, the ghetto or the hood has its own modes of
self-organization. The happy truth is that chaos in the large city is
endemic and it requires a huge amount of resources and energy to keep it
subjugated. The slightest implementation of chaos into the system turns
the dreams of the oppressors into nightmares. One need not look far or
into the murky past to see cases where the feeble authority of the city
crumbles and brings forth not self-destructing chaos but self
organization and mutual aid. When New York suffered its last blackout in
2003, the city’s neighborhoods came together: neighbors checked on the
sick and elderly in their communities; secretaries and bike-couriers
directed traffic; and stores gave away free food, beer and even sneakers
for those walking home. In fact crime reached a record low during the 36
hour black-out. Buenos Aires had an even more remarkable transformation
during Argentina’s monetary and political crisis. Neighborhoods
organized themselves into local spokes councils and everything from
stores to factories set up real worker councils to ensure the city
functioned. Voluntary medical services and fire services were provided
by both professionals and local inhabitants while everyone took a more
active involvement in securing their own neighborhoods. For months the
city, despite the economic and political crisis, ran smoothly and was
more democratic than it had ever been. We only need to give the city a
sharp shove to release it from the grips of those that wish to strangle
the vitality of the city. Chaos can be our ally in liberating the city
and preserving the natural environment.
To us the city represents at its heart, choice, chance, chaos,
creativity and possibility. It is the unique place that can allow our
personal choices to find company and outlets. The city is home to chance
encounters, never knowing whom you will see on a street corner or what a
neighborhood has to offer. Chaos runs right below the numbing billboards
and stays in the shadows of the streetlight’s glare but is always around
us. Chaos organizes, reorganizes and destroys the city. Cities attract
creative people for a reason. Cities are first and foremost created and
are always seeking to recreate themselves. Novelty and change are part
and parcel of the urban experience, just as order and tradition are part
of the rural experience. Hunter-gatherers maintain the same knowledge,
architecture, myths, ideas and tools for hundreds of generations, while
cities undergo change almost daily.
These changes are often detrimental to the lives of city-dwellers. Too
often change is an excuse for those in power to continue their
oppression. Despite this, there are possibilities. The city with its
choices, chance encounters, chaos, creativity and changes can produce
anything. Possibility is the currency of the city. As nature provides an
abundance of experiences so does the city. Experiences we can choose to
learn from, improve upon and move forward towards balance. The city
provides experiences that can be found nowhere else. For example, one
can watch the flow of humanity and enjoy the seclusion of anonymity at
the same time. You can involve yourselves in alternate lifestyles for an
afternoon or a lifetime. You are constantly challenged and educated by
those that are different than you. This is not to say that there are not
equally unique natural experiences to be had in other forms of living,
but by eliminating the city we would be loosing not only cultural
diversity but also a varied range of beneficial human experiences. We as
anarchists need to try to enlarge our experiences, skills and dreams and
the city is one of those places made for the task. It is no wonder many
of us choose to travel to, live in, fight for and dream of cities.
Many anti-civilization critiques are valuable but they are unfortunately
undercut by much nonsense that is nothing more than reactionary noble
savage sentiments. Some try to pass this off as based on reality where
the fact is far from the truth. For example it is not uncommon to read
about egalitarian hunter & gatherers, and how if we usurped civilization
we could exist in some Eden-like utopia. While it is certainly true
there are some hunters and gatherers (e.g. Inuit) who are remarkably
egalitarian and may even exhibit a number of admirable anarchistic
traits, it is hardly universal among hunting and gathering peoples.
There is in fact nothing magical about hunting and gathering that leads
people to reject hierarchy or oppression. To be honest we must
acknowledge that many of the same evils we despise in civilized
communities we can find (though writ small) among these pre-civilized
peoples. Sexism is extremely common among the majority of hunting
gathering people expressing itself in domestic abuse, female genital
mutilation, longer work hours for women and girls and of course female
infanticide. There are also quite explicit hierarchies among many
tribes. Often a few men (though less frequently women are included) have
a monopoly on spiritual powers and even in some cases the use of
violence. Conformity is also quite common, some anthropologists have
argued it is a necessity among these type of tribes. This conformity is
absolute, its adherence is enforced by violence (uncommon) and social
isolation (often) which can be fatal for those that step outside the
tribe’s taboos.
We shouldn’t see hunters & gatherers as non-humans. They are like us,
they are neither worse nor better. The structure of hunting and
gathering does not preclude hierarchy, violence, or oppression. Simply
returning to some misty “Golden Age” is not going to cure humans of the
problems of power dynamics. This form of economic reductionism should be
labeled for what it is, a reactionary fantasy. It rejects the complexity
and agency of humans while denying a hundred years of research on the
topic. There is no particular survival strategy, pastoralism, hunting
and gathering, agriculture, horticulture, etc. that is inherently
egalitarian or anarchistic. One can find a few examples in all forms
that suggest humans are capable of living in a non-exploitative way.
There is no single simple solution to ending hierarchy and oppression.
City-dwellers are no less or more capable of creating egalitarian and
non-hierarchical structures than any other humans.
There is another common fallacy used by green anarchists in their
relentless attack on urban living. They argue that as a species humans
can not live in such dense environments. Again they return (as they
inevitably do) to the hunter & gatherer model of population density.
Leaving behind the ethical implications of getting rid of 5/6’s of the
world population, this argument falls flat on its face. It is a result
of misapplying the predatory model. The predatory model of optimal
species density makes the faulty assumption that since we are at the top
of the food chain, we need the same amount of territory as other large
predators. Most large predators are of course carnivores and we as a
species are omnivorous. Thus neither the predator nor the prey model is
sufficient for understanding our ability to live at high or low
population densities. There have been and are large mammals that live in
unbelievably dense clusters, without the aid of any technology as we
understand it. There has also been a great deal of time and energy
devoted to study humans in extremely dense, often artificially induced,
populations (e.g. refugee camps). The research does not support the
claims made by primitivists and others that humans are ill-equipped to
live at density levels found in most cities. Again this points to
inherent desire to reduce the complexities and flexibility of the human
species to a simple one-size fits all solution. We as anarchists reject
such simplistic reductionism and dogma in favor of a more varied and
nuanced approach.
Hunters and gatherers only work four hours a day while civilized folks
in the US must toil in excess of 40 hours, is a common argument. That
must mean that hunters & than 9 times as efficient than us sweating away
in cities. We have the right to be suspicious of such claims from
primitivists. The number of work hours is confusing at best, since other
anthropologists have recorded much higher numbers some as high as 10
hours a day when travel is taken into consideration. The real problem is
how much of our work in the modern era is for subsistence (food ,
shelter and clothing)? Do we honestly believe that we are working 40
hours a week just to feed ourselves, put some clothes on our body and
have a shelter? One recent study from the University of Chicago
suggested the average American only spends about 15% of their income on
these things, the rest is taken up with luxuries, entertainment, taxes
and health care. So who works more, hunters and gatherers or
city-dwellers? It is hard to say and in the end not important. Marx was
right, it is not about labor but about alienation. Most humans (whether
they are civilized or not) enjoy working if they can see the fruits of
their labor and they have control on how they will expend their labor.
People work for free in gardens, on their homes and volunteer in record
numbers. It is capitalism and wage slavery that is the enemy not the
number of hours needed to obtain the basic necessities. Even if a worker
in a dismal sweatshop only had to work 5 hours a day to provide the
“basics”, we would still be against that type of work.
The most dangerous result of idealizing hunters and gatherers, or any
“other” for that matter, is that it objectifies them and sets people
apart from the rest of humanity. Hunters and gatherers are people like
we are, with the same fundamental minds, creativities, skills and
problems. We can look to them for examples and models (like we should
with any group) but it is foolish to gild them so much they are no
longer human. The distinction between civilized and wild is not so
concrete and absolute. No contemporary group of hunters & gatherers
could meet the requirements of these extremists. In fact it is not
uncommon to read writings condemning certain traditional people for
being “traitors” because they fail to match up to some dogmatic
anti-civilization check-list. This is not only ludicrous it is
potentially damaging. Many traditional cultures are actively fighting
their own extinction at the hands of loggers and oil companies, we need
to show solidarity not seek to idealize them or call them traitors.
The major problem with the extreme anti-civilization argument is that it
is religious in nature. It seeks to ignore rational thought (some
gatherers are more go so far as to reject language) and relies on a
return to a mystical golden era. Is there really much difference between
the primitivists view of hunting and gathering societies and the
fundamentalist view of the garden Eden? Evil, or civilization in their
case, is introduced by unknown and unknowable causes and opens up a
Pandora’s box of ills upon the world. The extreme anti-civ folks wait
for the end of days to come, seeking signs of the inevitable collapse of
civilization, when the majority of the population will be destroyed in a
planet cleansing apocalypse. Just like the fundamentalists they believe
they will be left standing when the smoke clears, instead of God’s
chosen people they are the Gaia’s chosen few. Like religious fanatics
before them, they seek to retreat to the fringes of society, returning
to the land and waiting for the omens to appear. They actually seem to
rejoice in the on-coming apocalypse but fail to see that any “end of
days” could irreparably change the planet making it inhabitable
especially for hunting and gathering peoples. We feel it makes more
sense to try to stop the destruction now. Fight with our passions,
dreams, intellects and lives. If we all retreated to the land, there
would be no land left worth inhabiting. We must stop the rape of the
Earth in both the cities and the wilderness. It could be our only hope
in saving our shared planet.
Unfortunately many will miss-perceive the below projects as useless
reforms. They will denounce the people who engage in them as
non-revolutionaries and thus make the mistake of rejecting their
projects. This would be foolishness and possibly fatal for our planet.
We need to create bases and open spaces, especially in the city, where
people can experiment and create sustainable resistance (just as we seek
a sustainable planet). If we are actually interested in radical change
there are some things we must do now: we have to build new economic,
justice, and social systems. We have to do this all while maintaining an
equal emphasis towards destroying the existing Empire. We must be
creative and create long-term supports and temporary sanctuaries while
at the same time tearing down the walls of capitalism and the state. To
be successful we must start somewhere, and inevitably this will look
like the examples below. We need to link these isolated projects
together with real solidarity. We need to share and innovate with
communities working to remake the city. We need to expand the
possibilities. As eclecticism is a key to healthy thriving cities, we
much become radical eclectics in our urban projects. We need to open up
spaces, and protect them, for resistances to grow and evolve. We know
that many participants in the below projects would not identify
themselves as anarchists or even radicals. They are ordinary folks doing
extraordinary things in a hostile environment. Many of these projects do
have affinity with anarchist principles like: mutual aid,
anti-capitalism, horizontal decision-making, and voluntary association.
This work can only benefit us in our ability to create broad-base
resistances against “The System”. We must be willing to learn from them
and seek to inspire them to expand their projects. We must be willing to
support them in their struggles as we will need their support in the
future. In a society where voluntary association and mutual aid are
crucial components, we must also engage in mutual trust. The city is a
dialogue and we must be willing to engage in it in honest ways if we
have any hope in breaking through the propaganda of Empire.
Below is a sampling of grassroots projects by ordinary people trying to
recreate the city in a more sustainable way. Some of the projects may be
modest but all have possibilities in creating a more sustainable city
and resistance. We are impressed with the diversity and inventiveness of
these projects and the people who keep them going. We feel these
projects are useful oasis’s for anarchists, to be used as models in
which to envision and put in practice a new city.
The city is a social, cultural, political, psychological but also
physical place. It occupies a particular geographic location and its
bones are structural elements — buildings, roads, infrastructure
systems, green spaces. These elements are the body that the “genus loci”
or the spirit of the place inhabits, and a city’s spirit is constantly
being transformed by the rebuilding of its body. Rulers have
acknowledged and used this reality for centuries. Today’s
hyper-capitalism is reshaping countless cities across the Global South,
Eastern-Europe, Russia, the far East, China and so many more. And if it
is true that if you change the physicality of a place you change its
spirit, scattered around the globe, communities of resistance are trying
to do the same thing, changing the spirit of consumption and greed into
a spirit of sharing and mutual aid.
One of capitalism’s main tenets in its relationship to the physical
world is that “things” are valuable because they are scarce. And they
truly are if every living human on this planet needs space and resources
dedicated solely to herself. Those of us who reject capitalism know both
intuitively and from experience that this is a fallacy and that we can
multiply and reinvent our available resources simply by sharing,
multi-use, and reuse.
In cities, capitalists are endlessly convincing us that land and
buildings are scarce, yet this scarcity is maintained by consciously
letting resources lay underutilized. Communities of resistance have been
reclaiming and subverting urban and peri-urban land and architecture for
centuries.
The most common way of reusing or subverting land is the construction of
shanties or “informal settlements”. Informal settlements are the most
common form of urban living in the Global South where close to half the
urban population lives in such areas. In fact, certain cities count
hundreds of shanty-towns which occupy land that was either unused or
dedicated to other uses. Based on informal or traditional land tenure,
shanties are not only providing housing for new urban populations with
few options, but represent an important change in urban and peri-urban
land-use. This change to the planned land-use, and the densely built
environment of the shanty can at its worse negatively impact the
environment and by extension the health and well being of shanty
residents, but at its best it can spur environmental preservation
efforts not only by residents but by supporting communities.
Here are two examples: in Istanbul, Turkey, the residents of a
shantytown located in the city’s erosion zone have done a great deal to
stop land erosion by planting olive groves. The olive trees with their
extensive root system prevent land erosion, provide a green cover for
the area, as well as a source of income for shanty residents. Their
age-old method has proved many-fold more successful than the concrete
jerseys used by the city administration as temporary retaining walls
against erosion.
In Mexico City shanty-residents living in the city’s green belt
developed with university students the Ecologica Productiva a plan for
transforming the green-belt into biological preserve while providing for
the living and economic needs of the inhabitants. The plans, later
scuttled by government intervention, included sustainable technologies
like solar-powered dry-compost outhouses converting organic waste into
fertilizer along with communal management of a variety of natural
resources.
Closer to home, in hundreds of North American cities, community
gardeners have been converting abandoned lots into beautiful gardens.
Many of them provide not only much needed green space but food for their
communities. In the last 30-something years, community gardening and
urban agriculture have become a popular feature and a recognized asset
to urban neighborhoods. Yet many gardens, especially in our own city,
are still struggling with displacement and evictions stemming from their
informal squatter origins. The progressive institutionalization of
community gardens in the US has become a double-edge sword, making the
creation of new gardens using the traditional ways of squatting
abandoned property less sustainable and jeopardizing the life of
previously established gardens. Still community gardens are a prime
example of reclaiming and subverting urban land, growing edible gardens
often in brown fields and other areas considered ecologically beyond
repair by the mainstream. They are a wonderful successful experiment in
stopping and reverting the environmental degradation of the land without
millions of dollars in remediation and massive land-works. They have
also become a catalyst for community participation in both tending and
preserving the gardens, knitting neighborhoods together. This type of
community-building is an important step in sustaining and launching
lasting resistance.
Vacant land is not the only urban space that is being reclaimed and
reinvented by communities in resistance. From our western experience we
know of many buildings that are squatted by those who need a place to
live or wish to open an independent space for cultural and social
encounters. Squatting has a long and energetic history in NYC and other
North American cities. The North American squatting scene has for the
most part been limited to residential enterprises (which of course can
be radical) but Europeans and others have taken squatting much further.
The stories of squats in Berlin and social centers in Italy are just two
examples of squatting that provides the impetus for a real
counter-culture to the rulers of a city.
Berlin squatting, like squatting in NYC, began in the economic recession
of the late 1970’s. A vibrant and integrated squatter counter-culture
grew up in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. The cornerstone of these
communities was communal living, and the creation of radical social
centers: infoshops, bookstores, pirate radio stations, coffeehouses,
meeting halls, bars, concert halls, art galleries, and other multi-use
spaces where grassroots political, artistic and social cultures were
developed as an alternative to the regulated and isolated life of
capitalist German cities. From these safe and thriving social spaces
grew major grassroots initiatives (involving people from around Berlin)
to fight nuclear power; to break down patriarchy and gender roles;to
show solidarity with oppressed people throughout the world by attacking
the European-based multinational corporations or financial institutions
like the World Bank; and after German reunification,to fight the rising
tide of conservative neo-Nazism. Undoubtedly these actions would have
been more difficult and less militant without the presence of a safe
harbor in which to incubate and launch these acts of militant
resistance.
Around the same time, Italy launched its own mass political squatting
movement. The movement began in 1975 when some radicals snuck into
dilapidated buildings in poor neighborhoods of Milan, Rome and other
large industrial cities, cleaned places up and issued manifestos stating
what they hoped to accomplish. The neighborhoods generally lacked
preschools, libraries, vocational schools, medical clinics and spaces
for organizing meetings and concerts. Typically the squatters invited
the local population to their social centers. Leoncavallo, Italy’s first
and most famous social center, is a giant structure covered with
magnificent murals, containing a concert room, a show space, a
skateboard ramp, numerous offices, a documentation center to help
immigrants and several bars. Currently, Italy has approximately 150
social centers. Social centers are autonomous zones where the government
and police are not welcome and where city-dwellers feel free to actively
participate in a vibrant and varied community. Social centers are fairly
well integrated in the communities they reside in and have been quite
successful in injecting radical militancy in many local campaigns. They
have spawned a number of new radical communities including the famous Ya
Basta! White-overall movement of the late 1990’s and ecological defense
groups.
Squatting has not been limited to buildings and empty lots, the very
infrastructure of the city has been hijacked by various communities.
Shanty dwellers and squatters have long ago become adept at siphoning
off energy and water from absurdly centralized and “managed” city
utilities. Others have “gone off the grid” freeing themselves completely
from the unsustainable infrastructures of modern capitalist cities. One
group in Paris has reclaimed abandoned underground sewer tunnels and
caves to create a fertile ground for radicalism.
La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a clandestine cell of “urban explorers”
and political radicals which claims its mission is to “reclaim and
transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression
for free and independent art and culture” created a cinema (showing
political films), with restaurant and barannex (also used for
meetings).It was constructed in a series of interconnected caves
totaling some 400 square meters beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across
the Seine from the Eiffel tower. This underground community has created
free and open space to delight and challenge the residents of Paris.
All of these examples have several common features — multi-use of space,
diversity of both uses and users, and larger numbers of people being
able to enjoy small amounts of space. They reject the scarcity model of
capitalism by providing good working models for a different way of
living and organizing urban space.
Squats and social centers are obviously not the only way to organize in
non-hierarchical ways in the city. Any resistance counter-community must
also develop counter systems to distribute necessities of life (economy)
and social justice. Cities have been at the forefront of developing new
and alternative economic models of varying degrees of radicalness.
Most cities are dominated by capitalism. In fact, capitalism was born
and has flourished in the city. While all of this is true, it doesn’t
mean that capitalism has gone unchallenged in urban areas. A
surprisingly large number of folks have rejected the exploitative nature
of capitalism and have formed various economies based on principles more
akin to those of anarchism. There is the LETS non-monetary system that
has spread to over a dozen cities in North America that involves tens of
thousands of folks. It uses a modified version of bartering and has
systems in place to prevent hoarding, speculation and wealth
accumulation. While it is far from perfect it does represent a model
that many people feel is worthwhile and meaningful. Cities in East
Africa have long used “distribution centers” to deal with the allocation
of everything from food to radio batteries. These centers are often
found in poor neighborhoods and informal settlements. The system is
informal and self organized, relying on the natural surpluses and
changes in peoples’ life situations to keep materials and products in
constant circulation without using chit, money or other such currencies.
In some places this kind of exchange makes up 40% or more of the local
“economy”. East Asia has used various communal resources to effectively
maximize living standards of working class folks by sharing like the
Korean “kite” for example. Madison, WI has developed a fairly
comprehensive and complex cooperative system. Its goals are, “self-help,
self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity.” While
it still uses money and has many elements of capitalism it has
nonetheless developed a huge alternative system to standard capitalism.
It has linked together workers, farmers, residents, consumers, artists
and other Madisonians for over 30 years.
Anarchists have begun to adopt anti-capitalist economies in a variety of
cities. Most of these attempts have been small but are innovative
starting points. Recently anarchists have been thinking about new
economies, ranging from new fangled parecons to ancient gift-based
societies, and putting them in practice. Food Not Bombs, free stores,
really really free markets, free-cafes should be just the beginning. We
can (and need to) develop truly radical systems that both provide for
the needs of those living in the city and at the same time challenge
directly the exploitation of capitalism. We have a long way to go but we
have started.
Much of the exploitation that emerges from modern cities comes from
irresponsible consumption expectations. This includes growing oranges in
the desert, flying tropical bananas to Moscow by the ton or any thing to
do with Las Vegas. What is clear is that the needs of the city and those
who choose urban lifestyles must be radically alerted to make them
sustainable. For centuries cities have relied on brute force and
coercion to meet the unrealistic demands of those living in metropolitan
areas. Food is the most obvious need of dense populations in limited
geographic bio-regions. If a city can not feed itself, it will be forced
to get food from the countryside. This can easily slip back into modern
exploitation and domination.
Much has been done in Europe and the Global South to reduce the amount
of food needed to feed the city. The US still throws away about 1/2 the
food it brings into cities. Even when cities get their consumption under
control they will still need a staggering amount of food. Fortunately
the last fifteen years have seen a dramatic increase in urban
agriculture and the initial results are encouraging.
In an increasingly urbanized world, many new urban dwellers know that
cities harbor vast untapped resources that could be used to grow food.
All over the world there is a turn to urban gardening and animal
husbandry that, combined with technological breakthroughs on the
renewable energy front, offer hope for a sustainable future. Shanty
dwellers also know that cities harbor vast unused resources — mounds of
garbage, nutrient-rich wastes flowing unused into the oceans through
sewers, and the legendary ingenuity of people. With these resources mega
tonnage of food can be grown, and mega tonnage of meat and fish
harvested within city limits.
There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. For example in Europe, in
1990, 65 percent of Moscow’s economically struggling families raised
their own food, up from 20 percent in 1970. There are 80,000 community
gardeners in Berlin with 16,000 on the waiting list. Reykjavik produces
nearly 40% of its food within the city limits, mostly through informal
cooperative gardens.
East Asians have long excelled at urban agriculture for several reasons.
First, they are willing to plant every unused square foot of land.
Second they are willing to use any and all urban wastes for fertilizer.
Third, farming is an ingrained family and community chore, much as it
was when people lived in traditional villages. The shared task of
raising food has another effect — it helps keep families and communities
together, despite the pressures of modern urban life. Super-dense Hong
Kong produces nearly 50% of its fruits and vegetables with in the city.
Tokyo has used rooftop gardens to great result, over 70% of roof-top
acreage is used for the production of food. The three largest cities in
India get 80% of their poultry (meat and eggs)needs from small chicken
coops and feral chickens. In greater Bangkok, 60% of the land is under
cultivation, 72% of all urban families are engaged in raising food,
mostly part-time.
Cities in North America have also been experimenting with urban
agriculture. By 1994, 300,000 households in the US were using a
community garden, and 6.7 million more said they’d do so too if there
was one nearby, the numbers are even higher per-capita in Canada. City
farmers play a major role in waste recycling, creating a closed system
in which organic wastes — from food, manufacturing and sewage — are
reused instead of festering in dumps and polluting waterways. Human
waste is turned into compost, domestic waste water safely irrigates many
crops, and aquaculture stabilizes animal manure. In Mexico City, for
example, many families keep pigs — urban pig farmers recycle up to 4,000
tons of the city’s food wastes every day as much as two of the polluting
“waste management” mega-plants.
Obviously we need more urban agriculture, too much space in modern US
cities is left fallow. The court is still out if cities can actually
produce enough food to be absolutely self-sufficient but many cities
around the world are pushing the envelope towards 100%
self-sufficiency.What is amazing and inspiring is that this trend is
truly a massive grass-roots movement that has for the most part been
ignored by large Governments, Universities and large NGOs. Communities
have spontaneously realized the many explicit (eg. providing healthy
foods cheaply) and intrinsic (eg. knitting communities together) values
of urban horticulture.
Water is another indispensable need of cities. Many modern cities have
giant earthworks bringing water from hundreds of miles away (getting
further each year). Not only is it expensive and environmentally
damaging, it is for the most part unnecessary. According to a UN 1990
special commission on water and irrigation, most cities can obtain most
if not all of their domestic and commercial water needs from a
combination of conservation, local watersheds and rain-water collection.
In fact, until very recently that is how most cities did it. The obvious
problem with rainwater, and for that matter private wells for
capitalists and governments is that it is free and by nature
decentralized. Capitalists have turned water into a commodity and
governments have used it to exert even greater control over people. The
good news is people are starting to organize against this engaging in
water conservation and returning to rainwater collection. Greywater
systems are growing throughout the world. New approaches to plumbing
have reduced water consumption in some cities by more than 65%. Rain
water harvesting is also growing. For example Vancouver has seen a
number of “water harvesters” collect so much water they are able to meet
the needs of their of neighborhood and sell the extra water (at a
cheaper price) to local industries. Others are looking at ways to obtain
water from other sources like snow and even dew. Obviously not all
cities, especially those built in dry bio-regions, will be able to
support their current population. Yet we know that even desert cities,
before massive irrigation projects, were able to maintain fairly large
populations with sane approaches to water. There is no reason we can not
do as well.
Pollution is turning the very building block of life, air, into a deadly
toxin. It is a severe and purposefully under-reported health disaster in
cities spanning the globe. If cities are to be healthy environments they
must meet their energy demands without suffocating the inhabitants. The
first step must be creating post-carbon cities. This obviously means
getting rid of the internal-combustion engine. For too long cities have
been designed for traffic not people. By eliminating vehicles not only
will air quality improve but a great deal of space devoted to them will
be freed up for other more human and ecological purposes. Most people
underestimate the amount of space devoted to vehicles in the city from
streets, parking lots, garages and so on. There is of course other added
benefits to eliminating internal combustion engines, people will be
safer and noise levels will substantially drop in urban areas. Many
cities have been experimenting with car-free zones and the number of
car-free cities has doubled in the past five years.We must remove the
rumbling, polluting, predators from our streets and free our urban
landscape.
Cities must also rethink their energy needs. In a post-carbon future,
there will be no need for polluting power plants. This like removing
traffic will open up new space in and around the city. Most modern
European cities have been developing alternate means of providing
energy. These non-polluting methods have included: geothermal, solar
(active and passive), natural hydro-power, wind and methane management.
Despite what the US government and big oil companies would have people
believe, huge amounts of safe renewable energy are being harnessed
throughout the world. Poor countries have been using a variety of
passive, low-tech strategies to ween themselves off non-renewable
resources. Of course if these techniques are to be realistic cities must
radically change their energy use habits. Some cities have actually
reduced their energy consumption in the last ten years, while America
has continued to increase it at a demented rates. Some researchers
believe that cities can reduce their energy needs, by instituting sane
conservation models, by as much as 75%. One of the important
characteristics of changing energy needs, is that most of the alternate
techniques for power are decentralized and often free. This would reduce
at least some of the power of both states and capitalists.
Unfortunately many of the above examples ranging from urban agriculture,
to water harvesting and the innovative ways people are making the city
sane and sustainable are isolated. Most cities lack an integrated
counter-culture that connects squatting to agriculture to green power to
political transformation of the city.
The Free Town of Christiania in Copenhagen, despite its current
difficulties, is probably the one western, contemporary, on-going model
of isolated projects integrated into a real counter-culture. That
explains why the Danish government is in such a hurry to “normalize” and
“legalize” Christiania.
Like many other squats around Western Europe and the US, Christiania
began in the 1970ies when people took over an abandoned military
barracks area in Copenhagen. Since, the squatted barracks have evolved
into the Free Town of Christiania. The Free Town has a complex system of
self-governance, with various councils focused around different tasks:
Common Meeting, Economy Meeting, Area Meeting, “busyness Council”,
Cooperative Worker´s Meeting, and House Meeting. All decisions are made
by consensus, while straw polls are sometimes taken to assess the
residents’ opinions.
In the early 1990ies, the residents of Christiania prepared a Green plan
for the their town in response to authorities’ development plan for the
area. Based on the principle of self-organization, they wished to
address the development of Christiania as an open, creative and
constructive urban area in balance with nature.
Their plan, which has been in the process of implementation for the last
fifteen years, specifically aims to make Christiania ecologically
sustainable while improving both the built and natural environments.
Christianianites based their work on three fundamental principles — the
principle of self-governance and responsibility; the principle of
solidarity; and the principle of balance with nature. These principles
are regarded as the basic conditions for the free development of the
individual within their community and in balance with nature. Fiercely
anti-capitalist and independent-minded, Christianites have built their
unique homes from the scraps that nobody else wanted. The squatters have
decorated their walls with murals and graffiti, made their own coinage
and fly their own flag (three yellow dots, representing the three i’s in
Christiania, on a red background). They have even established their own
holidays. Determined to create a place where they could create art, let
their children play in nature and live-out free lifestyles, the
Christianites transformed the area. The most visible result of the
social experimentation in Christiania can be found in the inhabitants
homes, which are as varied as its citizens; some are built in the
abandoned barracks, others on the shores of the area’s serene lake and
at least one in a tree. One is shaped like a UFO, another has grass
growing on the roof and there is even one built entirely of windows. The
uneven curves, asymmetrical façades and exotic building techniques
contrast with the geometrically conservative architecture throughout the
rest of the Copenhagen.Cars are banned from the streets, and ecological
experiments with wind and solar power, garbage recycling and water
treatment took place before the rest of the country had even heard of
the green movement.
One of the basic premises of Christiania’s urban form is that nature and
culture should both be part of the city. The built and natural areas
should be weaved together into one organic whole, where in some areas
nature has a free range, and others are cultivated by people.
Christianites have replanted the embankments of the river with grass.
Water is oxidized with solar cell and windmill-driven fountains and
water steps. They have made significant effort to reduce the energy-use
of the area, and plan to build solar energy collectors and heat stores
in the embankments. They have reduced the amount of waste they produce,
with decentralized garbage sorting made by each household. In1991 the
residents of Christiania were reusing 50% of their waste, today this
percentage is even higher moving towards a goal of 80% reuse. They have
done this by increasing composting, intense recycling and building a
sewage system where greywater is recirculated through natural root zone
installations. Water treatment is done locally, first by the use of
earth-toilets and low water use flushing systems. Water use is also
reduced by water control systems, and rainwater collection and reuse.
Electricity use is reduced by low energy light-bulbs and appliances, low
voltage systems, household windmills and solar panels. The long term
goal is to convert exclusively to low-voltage renewable energy sources —
solar, wind, and combustion.
Heating is also decentralized, with passive solar heating (50% of shower
water is heated by solar power), experiments with new furnace types, and
with waste water installations. A conscious effort has been made to use
ecologically sustainable products, ecological building materials and
recycled materials.
Christiania is a car-free town, where only products are transported by
motor vehicles with limited access to the area. As the green plan puts
it “fewer machines — many hands”.
The residents of Christiania have made significant changes to the way
they live and to what they perceive as their needs. They have done so
because their community is based on autonomy, and the right of the
inhabitants to decide for themselves in what kind of environment they
wish to live. Making decisions collectively and with responsibility to
the community has given them a common understanding of their need for a
sustainable life in balance with nature. The environmental improvement
initiatives in Christiania are the result of self-governance and direct
participation in both making decisions about improvement through a
decentralized structure of consensus-based decision-making and direct
labor making the improvements themselves.
Our anarchy is an anarchy of abundance. It must be in order to survive
against the power of our enemies. We are forcing the horizons wide open
to the imagination. We believe there can (and must) be a world that has
both wilderness and cities — a planet where people live in
hunting-gathering tribes and in the diverse neighborhoods of cities.
Where the goals of both groups are in harmony. There is enough
creativity in our minds, enough courage in our souls and enough passion
in our hearts to accommodate both green and urban anarchy. No desire
need succeed by destroying the other.
For too long many anarchists’ message to people has been that preserving
the environment and living a in a sustainable way will take huge
sacrifices but has to be done because it is the right thing to do.
We agree that it will take a lot of hard work to save our planet, but we
don’t believe it has to be a sacrifice.We don’t believe that we must
give up everything including art, homes, and even language if we are to
live in harmony with our planet. We believe that living in anarchy, is a
better and more meaningful way to live, in the city or in the wild. We
reject the fear-mongering of capitalist scarcity — the idea that you can
never have enough and poverty, isolation and even death is only a
paycheck away, is what keep capitalism going. We believe the city, and
the world, have magnificent abundance. There is work that needs to be
done (a lot of it), but it won’t be done out of some sense of duty or
sacrifice,it will succeed because people find it full of meaning and joy
in their own lives. Too many people think being environmentally
conscious is a chore, but it can be empowering and fun. Working with a
group of friends in a community garden is much more meaningful than
pushing a cart alone through some soulless mega-mart. Allowing animals
and wildlife to share the city will bring new experiences that can teach
and enthrall us for free.
In our little zine we have shown how millions of people are injecting
new meanings in their lives by actively rethinking and recreating the
cities they live in. What they are doing is right for the environment
and the city but it is also intrinsically powerful in and of itself.
Capitalists need people to be always hungry for more, states need people
to be so fearful that we voluntarily give our power to them. We seek to
make the city a place of abundance and where we can trust our neighbors
again. This is happening and will continue to happen. Our individual
autonomy is best realized in a self-selected community, and the city
allows for many communities to grow. As we redesign the city, we are in
fact redesigning our lives. We can all become architects and builders of
our future, and what could be more powerful and fulfilling than that?