Category Archives: World Urban Forum

Papers by Marcelo Lopes de Souza

1. Together with the state, despite the state, against the state: Social movements as ‘critical urban planning’ agents, 2006
2. Social movements in the face of criminal power, 2009
3. Cities for people, not for profit—from a radical-libertarian and Latin American perspective, 2010
4. Which right to which city? In defence of political-strategic clarity, 2010
5. A (Very Short) Tale of Two Urban Forums, 2010
6. Urban Development on the Basis of Autonomy: A Politico-philosophical and Ethical Framework for Urban Planning and Management, 2010
7. Marxists, libertarians and the city, 2012
8. NGOs and social movements: Convergences and divergences, 2013

Die Bewegung der Hüttenbewohner

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http://www.mvwit.de/de/aktuell/bewegung/index.php/art_00002095

Die Bewegung der Hüttenbewohner

Die Basisorganisation Abahlali base Mjondolo kämpft gegen Zwangsumsiedlung

“Wir merkten, dass unsere Probleme überall die gleichen sind: wir haben kein Wasser. Wir haben kein Land, um in Sicherheit unsere Häuser zu bauen. Wir werden nicht gehört und wir werden misshandelt, wenn wir uns wehren”, sagt S’bu Zikode, der gewählte Sprecher der Hüttenbewohner in der südafrikanischen Industriemetropole Durban. Abahlali base Mjondolo setzt sich ein für die Umsetzung der in der Verfassung garantierten Rechte, die durch die Regierungspraxis immer wieder verletzt werden. Die Bewegung entstand in einer Armensiedlung in Durban, hat sich inzwischen aber auf viele der großen Städte in Südafrika ausgebreitet und mit anderen Sozialbewegungen verbündet.

“Die an der Macht sind blind für unser Leid”, schrieb S’bu Zikode in einem vielzitierten Zeitungsartikel. “Ich fordere unsere politischen Führer dazu auf, mindestens eine Woche bei uns in den Hütten zu verbringen. Sie müssen den Schlamm spüren. Sie müssen sechs Toiletten mit 6.000 Leuten teilen. Sie müssen die Ratten verjagen und die Kinder davon abhalten, die Kerzen umzustoßen. Sie müssen für die Kranken sorgen, wenn es riesige Schlangen vor dem Wasserhahn gibt. Sie müssen zusehen, wenn wir unsere Kinder beerdigen, die in einem der Feuer umgekommen sind, die an Durchfall gestorben sind oder durch AIDS.”

Der Zusammenschluss der Hüttenbewohner hat bereits viel erreicht, jedoch auch den Hass von einflussreichen Politikern auf sich gezogen, deren Korruption sie anklagten und deren Landschiebereien sie vereiteln konnten. Sie schafften es, Zwangsumsiedlungen zu verhindern und Verbesserungen für ihre Siedlungen auszuhandeln. Ihr größter Erfolg war die Klage gegen das neue “Slumgesetz” der Regierung, das in vielen Aspekten an alte Apartheidgesetze erinnerte, mit denen informelle Siedlungen kriminalisiert wurden. Im Oktober 2009 gab das Verfassungsgericht Südafrikas den Hüttenbewohnern von Abahlali vollständig Recht und verurteilte die Regierung dazu, den verfassungsfeindlichen “Slum Act” zurückzuziehen.

Dieser unglaubliche Erfolg war jedoch überschattet von einer Welle der Repression gegen die Sozialbewegung, die viele der lokalen Leitungspersonen von Abahlali dazu gezwungen hat, sich zu verstecken, um ihr Leben und das ihrer Familie zu schützen.

Überfall auf die Siedlung

Ende September 2009 wurde die Siedlung Kennedy Road in Durban von Schlägertrupps überfallen. Das Sozialzentrum und die Wohnhäuser von 30 bekannten Leitungspersonen von Abahlali wurden verwüstet. Die Bewohner verteidigten sich, zwei Menschen starben. Am nächsten Morgen kamen die Schläger in Begleitung der Polizei zurück. Diese nahm 13 bekannte Mitglieder von Abahlali unter Mordanklage fest. Viele mit Abahlali verbundene Personen – auch S’bu Zikode – mussten wegen direkter Morddrohungen fliehen und sich verstecken. Lokale Vertreter der Regierungspartei ANC übernahmen die Kontrolle der Siedlung.

Bischöfe und Menschenrechtsgruppen solidari-sierten sich sofort mit den Hütten-bewohnern. Sie sprachen von einer Gefahr für die junge Demokratie Südafrikas, wenn der alles beherrschende ANC politische Gegner mit solchen Mittel auszuschalten versucht. Auch Amnesty International drückte seine Besorgnis aus und inter-nationale Persönlichkeiten wie Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein und Slavoj Zizek unterzeichneten eine Petition zugunsten von Abahlali. Bis heute gab es jedoch keine unabhängige Untersuchung der Vorfälle. Gegen die Verhafteten gibt es noch keine Anklage. Fünf sind weiterhin in Haft.

Demokratie von unten

Im März 2010 sandte Abahlali base Mjondolo eine Delegation nach Rio de Janeiro zum Weltstadtforum, das alle zwei Jahre von UN Habitat an verschiedenen Orten der Welt veranstaltet wird. Wie alle Entscheidungen der Basisbewegung Abahlali, so ist auch diese Reise Ergebnis langer Diskussionen in allen Gremien der Organisation, in denen von unten festgelegt wird, wer gehen soll und was die Vertreter als Stellungnahme zu überbringen haben. In den Versammlungen Abahlalis hat jeder das Recht zu reden, niemand wird unterbrochen, alles wird von englisch auf Zulu und Xhosa übersetzt. Abahlali setzt auf eine “langsame Politik”, um jedem eine reale Teilnahme zu ermöglichen. Abahlali nennt dies “Living Democracy”.

Austausch in Rio

Louise Motha, eine der drei Delegierten in Rio, schaffte es, die beschönigenden Darstellungen der südafrikanischen Regierung eindrucksvoll zu widerlegen. Das Wichtigste, so Louise, war jedoch der Austausch mit anderen Organisationen. “Wir haben viel gelernt von den Leuten, die leere Gebäude in der Innenstadt Rios besetzt haben und diese jetzt umbauen. Auch hier werden die Armen an den Stadtrand vertrieben und wehren sich dagegen. Unsere Erfahrungen mit den Vertreibungen im Vorfeld der Fussball-WM sind bestimmt hilfreich für sie. Es wird hier zu ähnlichen Konflikte kommen.”

Den Armen in Rio de Janeiro steht 2014 die nächste Fußball-WM und 2016 die Olympiade bevor.

Klaus Teschner, Habitat Netz

Cities for All: Proposals and Experiencies towards the Right to the City

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Update: This book is now also available in French.

This book includes a chapter on Abahlali baseMjondolo which is pasted in below.

http://www.hic-net.org/document.php?pid=3399

Cities for All: Proposals and Experiences towards the Right to the City
Ana Sugranyes and Charlotte Mathivet (editors), 2010

For over thirty years, Habitat International Coalition (HIC) has focused on the link between human habitat, human rights, and dignity, together with people’s demands, capabilities, and aspirations for freedom and solidarity.

HIC has been committed to be involved in the creation of a theoretical and practical framework for the right to the city. This first edition of Cities for All: Proposals and Experiences towards the Right to the City in three languages is intended as an additional source of inspiration for people to live in peace and dignity in every city.

Here, we give the word to the actors who fight for the right to the city in the world in many different ways, all towards the same goal that another city is possible.

To download the book in English, just click here

Para descargar el libro en Español, haz click aquí.

Para baixar o livro em Português, clique aqui.

The book will be launched on March 23rd during the World Urban Forum 5 in Rio, venue: W3-12

Abahlali baseMjondolo & the Popular Struggle for the Right to the City in Durban, South Africa

Richard Pithouse

[I]f their cause be so good, why will they not suffer us to speak and let reason and equity, the foundation of righteous laws, judge them and us?
– Gerrard Winstanley

Apartheid conflated modernity with a specifically white urbanism. This racial paranoia produced a tremendous white hostility to the black presence in the cities. Unsurprisingly both the elite and popular strands in the struggles against apartheid often put the demand for an equal right to an urban life at the centre of their politics. In parts of some cities, and especially in Durban, land occupations, particularly during the late 1970s and the 1980s, achieved a decisive break with the racialisation of space. In its latter years, the apartheid state made various concessions in response to popular agitation for the right to the city. These ranged from legal reforms, to trade offs in which an autonomous but precarious presence in the cities was exchanged for a subordinate but formal place in the cities, and some degree of state recognition for urban land occupations.

After apartheid, the right to housing was guaranteed in the Constitution and laws were passed to protect squatters from arbitrary eviction and to prevent any eviction that would leave people homeless. Housing policy was developed from engagement with World Bank models and was based on the allocation of a fixed government housing subsidy per household to be awarded to private contractors who must take their profit from building within the subsidy limit.

Although it had not been long since the mass mobilization against apartheid in the 1980s — a mobilization that was often driven by popular organisations acting with a considerable degree of autonomy from centralised party control, and which often confronted the urban question directly— the state and its allied NGOs were able to move very quickly to reduce the political question of the right to the city to a technical question of building houses. The reduction of a deeply political set of questions to the technocratic language that reserved urban planning as a state and NGO function and measured success in terms of “units delivered” became largely dominant in civil society. Houses were built in impressive numbers but they were often very small, of extremely poor quality and located in peripheral ghettos. Moreover, housing projects were routinely captured by local political elites and, at every level from the awarding of construction contracts to the allocation of individual houses, were used to support the personal and political interests of those local elites. This was often undertaken ruthlessly, and on occasion violently, by local party structures.

A decade after apartheid, progressive planners in and allied to the democratic state recognised the failings of the subsidy system and in 2004 a new policy Breaking New Ground, was adopted. It declared a shift from “conflict and neglect” to the integration of settlements “into the broader urban fabric to overcome spatial, social and economic exclusion” via “a phased in-situ upgrading approach.” However the policy had no real political support and has not been implemented. The state has instead turned to revanchism via a return to the apartheid language of “slum clearance.” Shack settlements are now slums to be eradicated from the cities rather than communities to be fully integrated into the cities. Once again shack settlements are being presented as a threat to aspirations for an elite modernity.

Three primary strategies are being deployed to eradicate shacks. The first is to withdraw or limit services such as water, electricity, refuse removal and so on to the point where conditions in the settlements become life threatening. The second is the use of various forms of surveillance and state violence to prevent the expansion of settlements or new occupations. The third is the destruction of established settlements. When established settlements are destroyed some residents are allocated houses, often in peripheral settlements, while others are coerced into state-built shacks, known as transit camps, and others are left homeless.

The state’s actions towards shack dwellers are systemically unlawful and, indeed, criminal. Mahendra Chetty, Director of the Durban office of the Legal Resources Centre attests that:

The City, as a matter of regular and consistent practice, acts in flagrant breach of the law… A recurrent theme with these evictions is the simple callousness with which they are carried out. They are carried out in an extremely authoritarian and high handed manner against the most vulnerable people in our society — poor black women, old people and the unemployed.

A popular challenge to the resegregation of the cities, this time on the basis of class, began to emerge with the beginnings of some important social movements from around 2001. Since 2004, South African cities have been convulsed by thousands of municipal revolts, largely, although not always, organised from shack settlements. Their primary tactics have been road blockades and vote strikes. Despite rapidly increasing repression resulting in regular arrests and police violence, a violence that has occasionally been fatal, these protests have continued to gather intensity.

A key demand has been for people to be able to make their own decisions about where they would like to live. Sometimes this has been generalised into a collective demand for the right to the city. In many instances, protesters have demanded to be able to stay in their centrally located shacks rather than to be moved to new housing projects on the periphery of the cities, showing that the question of housing is not reducible to being formally housed by the state. A second key demand has been the right to co-determine ‘development.’ This includes both a demand to recognise grassroots urban planning that has already occurred by, for example, formally recognising past land occupations, and a demand that future planning, such as the building of houses or the provision of services, be jointly undertaken by communities and the state.

In Durban, an organised shack dweller’s movement emerged out of the general ferment. In March, 2005, a road was blockaded by residents of the Kennedy Road settlement. Kennedy Road is the inner suburban core of the city and had been marked for eradication. In the months after the road blockade there were intense discussions with people from twelve nearby settlements, all in the inner suburban core, and in October that year a decision was taken to form the Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers) movement (AbM) and to pursue a politics of the poor, by and for the poor.

The movement was not founded by an NGO or a political organisation nor had it donor funding. It was, in the sense developed by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, an autonomous political project. It drew on the traditional language of the dignity of each person, reworked into a cosmopolitan form appropriate for urban life.

From the beginning, the movement had something of a feeling of the warmth and mutual care of a congregation, a slow, deliberative and deeply democratic political culture and an impressive diversity in terms of ethnicity, race and nationality.

Since then, the movement’s experience with the state has swung from outright repression to a cautious but productive engagement and then back to an even more ruthless mode of repression. From the founding road blockade in March, 2005, until September, 2007, when a legal and peaceful march aimed at the city’s mayor was violently attacked by the police, the state had refused to accept AbM as a legitimate organisation.

In some respects settlements that had collectively been affiliated to the movement were treated as dissident territories by the police and there were instances where settlements were occupied by the military at times of heightened tension. AbM protests were unlawfully banned and then attacked when they went ahead in defiance of bans. Well known supporters of the movement were forced out of their jobs and there were more than 200 arrests and all kinds of other forms of police harassment, including the use of police violence to physically prevent the movement from taking up invitations to debate politicians on radio and television. During this period of repression, the movement was subject to virulent slander from the state, much of it alleging a political conspiracy by a white agent of a foreign government tasked with destabilizing the country.

Despite the difficulties faced by the movement from October, 2005, until September, 2007, a considerable amount was achieved. The movement declared a University of Abahlali baseMjondolo and, in the discussions of that university, resolved to protect its autonomy by refusing party politics. It was decided to only engage with NGOs if and when they were prepared to work with the movement on the basis of mutuality and useful connections were made with the churches. A key slogan in what came to be called the movement’s “living politics” became “talk to us, not for us.” In the words of the movement’s chairperson, S’bu Zikode:

[T]he time has come for poor people all over the world to define themselves, before someone else defines them, before someone else thinks for them, and acts for them. Do not allow others to define you. I’m pleading to intellectuals and NGOs to give us a chance to have a platform for our own creativity, for our own politics. Our politics is not a politics that originates from institutions of higher learning. It originates from our lives and from our experiences. We are asking the intellectuals and the NGOs to work with us to create a space where we can think and discuss together. We don’t want them to think and to speak for us. We are not prepared to hear from anyone on the point of order. Not government, not NGOs, no one. But we are prepared to talk to anyone.

During this time the movement continued to grow and was able to achieve a remarkable degree of unmediated access to elite public platforms. In practical terms, AbM had been able to: reach a point of being able to successfully resist evictions in all the settlements where they were strong; build and defend new shacks; openly undertake and successfully defended their expansion of existing shack settlements; win access to various state services outside of party patronage; set up crèches and various mutual support projects; (illegally) safely connect thousands of people to electricity and many to water; vigorously contest police oppression; democratise the governance of a number of settlements to win sustained unmediated access to voice in the popular media; defend the right to dissent against local party elites; contest the withholding of welfare as a punishment for dissent; and fight a high-profile battle for land and housing in the towns and cities.

AbM has been able to call meetings and initiate campaigns in which those NGOs, academics and lawyers willing to work with a grassroots movement on the basis of mutual respect, and on the terrain where the movement is strong, rather than, as is more typical, on the basis of an assumed right to lead, could work with the movement. The first campaign developed in this way was against the Slums Act. The Slums Act was first proposed and passed in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in 2007 and was meant to be replicated in other provinces.

The Act essentially criminalised the unlawful occupation of land, resistance to evictions and any form of shack dwellers’ organisation that occupied land unlawfully and raised money via a membership fee. The process of resistance to the Slums Act included mass mobilisation, public debate and an ongoing legal battle to have the act declared unconstitutional.

It slowly became clear that the movement had entered a second phase after the attack on the march in September, 2007. This attack was witnessed by the local ishops who strongly condemned it and it was also condemned by international human rights organisations. Unlawful police repression stopped, the state recognised AbM as the legitimate representative of fourteen settlements in Durban and negotiations began with city officials. In the beginning, there were explicit attempts to persuade AbM to shift from a political discourse to a development discourse. This was refused.

For a while there was something of a standoff but once AbM had secured the right to remain political in and outside of the negotiations,35 the negotiations could continue. In May, 2008, African migrants were attacked and hounded out of shack settlements across the country in a wave of xenophobic pogroms. AbM took a decision to shelter and defend all people born in foreign countries and were able to ensure that there was not a single attack in any of the settlements affiliated to the movement and to stop two in-progress attacks in settlements not affiliated to the movement.

In February, 2009, AbM and the Durban Municipality announced a deal which committed both parties to the in-situ participatory upgrading of three settlements, including Kennedy Road, and the provision of some basic services to fourteen settlements. It marked a number of major victories including a decisive break with the spatial logic of apartheid (the settlements to be upgraded are in the inner suburban core), which signifies an acknowledgement that settlements need decent access to services and a recognition that development can be a collaborative process between communities and the state.

However, in September, 2009, AbM leaders were attacked in the Kennedy Road settlement by an armed mob chanting ethnic slogans. The police refused to come to the aid of AbM and only stepped in to disable spontaneous resistance to the mob. Lives were lost during the attempt to mount a defence against the mob and the homes of more than 30 AbM leaders were destroyed and looted following which local leaders of the ruling party seized control of the settlement. Party leaders in the city and the province attacked the movement in extremely strong language in the days following the attack, excoriating it for taking the government to court to have the Slums Act declared unconstitutional and accusing the movement of being “anti-development.” Police officers, state officials and journalists have all been told that foreign NGOs are funding the movement in order to stop development so that they can ‘keep Africans poor and sustain their access to donor funds’.

Three weeks after the attacks, AbM succeeded in having the Slums Act declared unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court. It was a remarkable victory. But supporters of the ruling party are openly issuing public death threats against the movement’s leadership in the context of intense hostility to the movement from local party leaders and police officers, as well as patently unlawful conduct towards the movement by a local magistrate. The state-backed attack on the movement is happening amidst a general turn towards authoritarian ethnic politics and the future of the movement, and, indeed, of any popular affirmation
of the right to the city in South Africa, is not at all clear.

The High Cost of the Right to the City

The High Cost of the Right to the City

March 2010

Notes from a meeting of Abahlali baseMjondolo in preparation for the World Urban Forum (WUF): “The Right to the City”.

It is our usual practice when we send delegates to other people’s meetings that we get together as a movement and discuss our collective view so that our delegates can take a mandate that is based on our ‘home-made’ politics. In this case there will be chances for our comrades to connect with other movements from around the world as well, so it is all the more important to be clear on our own home-cooked politics of Abahlalism – our ‘living politics’.

Our movement’s ‘living politics’ is the politics of the daily life and thinking of shackdwellers in South Africa who fight for truth and for justice. It is quite simply living out in the real world the practical meaning of the basic idea that ‘everybody counts’. In our discussion we think through the connections between our ‘living politics’ and the theme of the WUF: ‘the Right to the City’. If ‘everyone counts’, then surely there should be a right to the city! In fact, that theme sounds very much like a slogan of people’s struggles for justice in cities around the world – but we know that the slogans of people’s struggles often get taken and tamed by the powerful and rich; and we know that when that happens, the real politics at the heart of the struggles is usually lost. Some of the ways that the militant slogan of the ‘right to the city’ can get taken and tamed are when:

* it can be reduced to a ‘technical’ issue of working out how the state system can ‘deliver’ services and amenities to the people;
* it can be turned into a legalistic issue of ‘human rights’ fought over in the courts of law between lawyers;
* it presents the only possible solutions in terms of ‘participation’ in ‘good governance’ as defined by the power-players in the system of the state and the political parties.

In our own struggles as Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) we have taken up all of these avenues and issues to fight for justice for shack-dwellers – but our living politics and our total struggle does not start and end in these limited definitions and confined spaces.

In the systems of the government and the political parties it happens again and again that the things the people have fought hard for are taken by those who claim to be leaders and given back to the people as ‘delivery’. The people have their muscles and their thinking – but they do not have control over the money and resources like government and parties have. The politicians, and especially the local councillors, use this power and then claim that they were the ones who worked so hard to achieve these things! The systems of municipalities and councillors are against our living politics. They are an oppressive burden on us, keeping us down. No-matter how we try to deal with them, they know they have certain kinds of power and resources to take our issues and ‘deliver’ to the communities. When they do this, they even make us look like we who struggle are actually working for the Councillors! We know that the Councillors in the local governments and municipalities come from the political parties. That means that they will always try to do their homework and find out what the people at the grassroots are struggling for because they will want to come with a strong agenda for the Party to look like they are the ones who can ‘deliver’ what the people want. As deployees of the political parties, they are intent on crushing us politically and taking our issues over to their agenda. This is a huge challenge, and we must and we will fight harder against it because we know that Municipalities are a problem – and that the solution is in the struggles of the people, with their muscles and their thinking.

It is a kind of theft – to take away the valuable things of the people and to put them to work in a system that is against the people but in favour of the powerful and the rich. Not only the municipalities and the politicians but also many of the NGOs and ‘civil society’ structures and activists are guilty of playing a part in this ongoing theft against the people. It can make you feel like your struggle was useless. You fight for justice – for equality and for the world to be shared – and you end up with the promise of ‘service delivery’.

Against this theft and oppression, it is important that our struggle remains always our own and that we hold on to our autonomy. When we look at the official letters from the WUF we see that the government of Brazil and its President Lula is also inviting and hosting us – this is a surprise for us as a movement. We know that some of the movements there get funding from the government. For us, this should be debated and it makes us wonder what is the motive for having this event in Brazil. The poor people’s movements in Brazil are very strong in rural areas and in the cities. They occupy land and city buildings to appropriate housing and shelter for the poor. But then some of them also get funding from the government! Is the agenda behind this WUF to push the idea that government and the social movements can or must work together? For us as Abahlali, although we are not aiming to overthrow our government, it is very clear that we have different ideas from the government. Our government gives us a very hard time and we are in conflict with them. So is there really such a big difference between our government in South Africa and the government of Brazil? What we do know is that almost all politicians claim to speak for the poor, claim to be concerned about the poor. So invitations like these are really because they like our tears. When they can show our tears to the world, they can carry on with their plans and carry on saying that the tears of the poor justify their plans. We don’t trust that government of Brazil, nor our government in South Africa, nor any other government. We remember that Presidents Lula and Zuma met each other and agreed that their plans were just the same. Anyway, going to the WUF is more important as a chance to meet and talk with other movements of poor people from cities around the world and to strengthen each other’s struggles.

The Department of Human Settlements from our government will also be at the WUF and presenting some papers – but we will be there too and we will tell a different story. The Department will pick and choose what they present about the situation of land and housing in our cities. They will display to the world the good things they can show to create the impression that South Africa is a great place to live. Our task is to tell the truth against this lie.

Truthfully speaking, is there any ‘right to the city’? Is the life we are living really giving us a ‘right to the city’? If there is a real ‘right to the city’, why are were facing evictions on such a massive scale?; why must we beg to the courts for our rights?; why are our rights to organise, speak and march so violently repressed?

No, if there is a ‘right to the city’, it is a very difficult right to actually get. And it is we, the poor who struggle for it, who are paying the price for this right – and it is a very high price to pay to access any meaningful and broader idea of our right to the city. Just look at the cost of the attacks on our movement in Kennedy Road last year. The price is still being paid by people who have been made homeless refugees in their own country, and by the comrades still being held in prison without trial since those attacks. The world must see and hear from us what the price of the fight for a real right to the city is. The world must know that those who voice out the truth are attacked, silenced, slandered, threatened and imprisoned. The world must know that there is no real difference between the apartheid government and this one we have now.

Mega-events to entertain the elites like the FIFA World Cup also show clearly that for the poor, there are no real rights to the city. To put on their games in the way the rich want them, means that poor people have to swept away, and poor traders forced off the pavements – all this simply to make sure that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We see the same things when we look at the growing number of golf-courses and golf-estates that are mushrooming. Poor people are squashed together in crowded settlements or are without housing, and some are forced out of their places to make way for these elite play areas. In the world as it is now, what counts is not that everyone is a person – what counts is whether you have money. In our cities, the powerful and rich elites chase their dream of a ‘world class city’, and in their ‘world class city’ what counts is money. For the right to the city to be real what will have to count will be people and not money.

If the right to the city has such a high price, is there any hope then? Yes – in the movements of the poor that are organising; in the work of our delegation that will go to Brazil; in all of our work to really transform the world as it is. Even through the work of our shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, we have won important victories – like defeating the Slums Act in the Constitutional Court. But since that victory, the attacks against us have shown that we have to carry on, we have to organise and build the movement even more, and we have to work twice as hard as ever before. There is really no such thing as a ‘right’ that can be given to you by a government or NGO. As the poor we have to organise ourselves to increase our power and to decrease the power of the rich and the politicians. The only way to succeed in making the right to the city a living reality for everyone instead of a slogan which repressive governments can hide behind is to democratise our cities from below.

Social Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro March 22-26, 2010

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Abahlali baseMjondolo will be represented at this event by Louisa Motha, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, David Ntseng & Mazwi Nzimande. The trip to Rio has been made possible by solidarity from German churches and money raised in their Lenten appeal.

Social Movements and Organizations of Rio de Janeiro invite you to:

Social Urban Forum Fighting for the right to the city, democracy and urban justice in neighborhoods and in the world
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
March 22-26, 2010

PRESENTATION

In March, 2010, the city of Rio de Janeiro will host the V World Urban Forum (WUF). Organized every two years by the United Nations Habitat Agency, it is expected to bring together 50,000 participants from all over the globe. In past versions, the WUF was dominated by official delegations that responded to multilateral organization discourses and speeches, such as the World Bank, Inter American Development Bank (IADB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Program for Development (UNPD), City Alliances, among others. Words, words, words … but also a repeated effort to impose cities all over the world, a model of competitive and entrepreneurial city and large projects that only deepen inequalities and gentrification processes, especially in peripheral countries. The poverty alleviation rhetoric does not hide the failure of a policy that subjects our cities to a market logic scheme, while the mechanisms and processes that produce and reproduce inequalities and social and environmental injustices in cities are silenced or hidden.

In its various editions, the WUF has also been unable to open space to those who resist the implacable logic of entrepreneurial cities, those who fight to build alternatives to the models adopted in various governments and spread by international consultants and international “aid” which rarely is uninterested, as well as by world conferences and congresses where the urban misery of millions is transformed in cold statistics and promises that are never fulfilled.

For these reasons, social movements and organizations of Rio de Janeiro decided to invite all social movements and civil society organizations to build with us a space of wide and free manifestations and debate, in our SOCIAL URBAN FORUM. This will be a space and time for us to meet and recognize each other, to share experiences and to build collectively, a perspective of another city: a democratic and egalitarian city, committed to social and environmental justice.

OBJECTIVES

The objective of the SOCIAL URBAN FORUM is to enable dialogue, sharing of experiences, and expression of diversity and the strengthening of social movements and organizations articulations around the globe.

The SOCIAL URBAN FORUM also places itself as an opportunity to unveil the true city that is usually hidden behind walls and fences, as well as behind discourses about global cities with which many governments justify huge investments in mega events of urban marketing. This is why host movements and organizations want to offer the international and participants the possibility to know a Rio de Janeiro that is not present in post cards or official propaganda, a Rio de Janeiro that can be ugly and unfair, but that is also rich in resistance and popular creativity.

ACTIVITIES

From March 23 to March 26, 2010, parallel to the World Urban Forum, the activities and events of the SOCIAL URBAN FORUM will be taking place. They are organized in the following manner:

– panels and debates that will cover the following topics: Urban Violence and
Poverty Criminalization; Mega Events and Globalization of Cities;
Environmental Justice in the City; Great Urban Projects, Central and Port
Areas;
– Tables and debates proposed by Brazilian movements and organizations and
other countries;
– Expositions and video projections;
– Cultural manifestations;
– Other proposed activities.

TOPICS

– Criminalization of Poverty and Urban Violence
Militarization of periphery and popular communities and neighborhoods;
Criminalization of poverty and immigrants; Urban violence in its multiple
manifestations; Racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia in the city.
Gender violence; Repression and criminalization of community based and
human rights activists.
– Mega Events and Globalization of Cities
Soccer World Cup, Olympic Games, international exhibitions and expositions;
Impact of international mega events in cities, from international experiences
and from the experience of Rio de Janeiro; What are its ¨legacies¨ and who
are its beneficiaries or stakeholders?
– Environmental Justice in the City
Environmental inequality and organization of urban space; Land tenure
regularization, health and environment; Environmental racism;
Environmental conflicts and resistance fights; Climate change in cities.
– Inner cities, Water Fronts, and Large Urban Projects
Renewal of of inner cities and water fronts. Mobility. Gentrification. Evictions
by institutional and/or real state violence. Corporations, public-private
partnerships and land speculation. Globalization and urban capitalism.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Beyond the proposed topics, we also invite the organizations and movements of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the world, to contribute to the auto-managed activities proposed. These will be developed in debates, plenary, articulation forums, expositions, projections, and other cultural activities. The deadline to send proposals is March 7, 2010.

The inscription to activities must be made by filling out the SOCIAL URBAN FORUM ACTIVITY PROPOSAL application.

The Program Commission will try to include all the received proposals within the limits of space and time available. Guided visits and tours will also be organized to allow direct contact with barely known urban realities, such as cultural manifestations of the city and struggle experiences – community movements, occupations, etc.

THE VENUE

The activities of the Urban Social Forum will be developed in the Cultural Center of the Citizen Action Against Hunger, at Barao de Tefé Ave. no 75, in the Saude neighborhood

http://bit.ly/cc6FAP>. This venue is a port warehouse, built in 1871 and restored in 2002. Today, it hosts political, artistic and cultural events. The space has 14,000 m2, offering good conditions to develop various activities and events simultaneously (pictures at http://www.acaodacidadania.com.br/templates/acao//publicacao/publicacao.asp?cod_Canal=3&cod_Publicacao=6)

The Urban Social Forum is also located 300 meters from the WUF, allowing easy
circulation to all participants between both events. Guided visits will also start in this same place, taking into consideration previous announcements.

INFORMATION

Social Urban Forum: Democracy and Justice in the City
E-mail: comunicacaofsu@gmail.com
Submission of activity: programcaofsu@gmail.com