-- Tony Blair
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Welcome to People in Common. Find here information and news about various campaigns relating to
freedom and justice, begun one fine day with a surreal ticking off for
unaccountable, multinational money lenders, followed by a lovely picnic
in defence of the right to protest in Parliament
Square, various debates about the state of our constitution and,
finally how to build a viable, responsible coalition for the future. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Please click to read Campaign for a 21st Century Constitution, 2006 Statement | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The coalition building LSE event organised by London Against Injustice, London Guantanamo, CAMPACC and People in Common on 10th December was a success. Likewise the Social Action event hosted by the 21st Century Network the following evening. There is undoubtedly a space for coalition building around the question of civil liberties and human rights which we’ll be exploring further with partners (see some of the links from this page) in the coming months. Thanks again to everyone who helped to make it happen. For info on follow up activities please check the calendar for new coalition meetings, email humanrights2012@gmail.com or join the forum. Here’s a report on the Right to the City from the 3pm seminar: The Right to the City and Public Space Teresa Hoskyns, London Social Forum 'the universal mistake made by man… was the mistake that allowed power to be placed outside of life' Henri Lefebvre The Critique of Everyday Life The Right to the City started as writings of Henri Lefebvre first published in 1967. It has been re-kindled in the social forum movement and emerging from this is the World Charter for the Right to the City. It is now a growing movement, increasing throughout the world in different forms. The Right to the City is fundamentally about democracy and citizenship and about whether human beings have the right to produce their own lives through the ability to develop and change the world around them. So the Right to the City is about having a direct power relationship with our environment and the things around us that affect our lives. If one imagines this right in practice what starts to develop is a creative- productive definition of citizenship rather than the passive-consumer definition that we experience today in neo-liberal society. Therefore the right to the city is access to the democratic processes of the city and access to the processes of production of the city. It is through the right to the production of the city that this right starts to cross over with architecture and planning because it is partly through public participation in architecture and planning that it is often imagined that this right is exercised. Participation has become commonplace with many practices but it is however token without a democratic and spatial framework. The Olympics is an example there are many local organizations and associations that have been completely excluded from the decision-making and design of the park. And since the legacy depends on the spatial participation of local people this could be proven to be a bad mistake. Writers like David Harvey show how the city has been central to the expansion of industrial capitalism and neo-liberalism, he argues that without the appropriation of space they would have ceased to function. [1] For Harvey one of the problems of these spaces is that 'a select few do the imagining and designing'. So for the mass of the population human creativity in the production of space is denied and this is a profoundly alienating situation. [2] He shows how private spaces of consumption and us as consumer citizens are central for the functioning of capitalism for the absorption of surplus value. [3] So on the one hand the right to the city is about participation in the production of the city but on the other hand the right to the city is about democratic space and the direct practice of politics as part of every day life. The right to the city therefore starts to define political types of public space, space as somewhere of active citizenship, of political participation and of the public voice. Public space is produced and re-produced through active participation rather than passively experienced. In the World Charter for the Right to the City two such types of political public space are described the first is the space the first for direct participation in city decisions and the second is the space for civil society and associational practices of democracy. I would add a third type of public space a space for more autonomous and arts activities, rather like the social centres that are provided by the cities in Italy and emerging from the anarchist movement here in London. ARTICLE III. PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT OF THE CITY Cities should open institutionalized forms and spaces for broad, direct and democratic participation in the processes of planning….management …public policies and budgets. ARTICLE IX. RIGHT TO ASSOCIATE, GATHER, MANIFEST, AND TO DEMOCRATIC USE OF URBAN PUBLIC SPACE All persons have the right to associate, meet, and manifest themselves. Cities should provide and guarantee public spaces for this effect. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 states: Article 21 (1). "Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives." The UDHR therefore describes a fourth type of public space that capital cities should provide for the direct participation national governance. I would argue that particularly in London we need to become very clear about these types of democratic public space as democratic rights of citizenship because what we are experiencing is the erosion of our Right to the City through the diminishment and privatization of democratic space. On the space for direct participation in national governance, The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 means that it is now illegal to demonstrate in the political centre of London, in an exclusion zone that covers anywhere within 1km of Parliament Square except Trafalgar Square, without applying 6 days in advance to the Comissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who can then impose any conditions he likes on the demonstration. The act means that this historically political public square is no longer freely produced through direct acts of participation and that the public voice or free speech has to be pre-negotiated with the police who of course make conditions to minimize the impact on parliament. The exclusion zone not only restricts historic democratic rights of protest outside the House of Commons but the zone includes Downing Street, the Home Office and New Scotland Yard. On the space for associational practices of democracy one of the campaigns we are involved with in the London Social Forum is around the markets. Among others Elephant and Castle market, Wards Corner market in Seven Sisters, Ridley Road market in Dalston and Queens Market in Upton Park are under threat of privatisation and many like Spitalfields Market have already been privatised. The stall holders of Wards Corner market in Seven Sisters have just lost in their planning attempt for a community plan that would mean that the space is both designed and run through the participation of the stall holders. Instead the council have opted to knock the market down and build a shopping centre that includes chain stores like Marks and Spencer. Queens Market has been taken over by a private developer who pre re-development have immediately doubled the rents. Both a space for cheap quality food and an associational democratic public space is being lost. Queens market has at least 6 different associations that have emerged from and are active in the market. This take over is the transfer of a public space and citizenship into yet another space of privatised consumption. On the space for the practice of politics: as soon as you try to organize politically you experience the absolute impoverishment of spaces for civil society and the practice of politics in London. In 2004 the European Social Forum came to London and the GLA didn't have any public space at all that they could offer the forum, even City Hall is not publically owned it is leased from the private corporation More London. The official forum rented Alexandra Palace and some other spaces became autonomous public spaces including LSE, The Bartlett, squatted Social Centre's. But it is only through sympathetic professors and self organized groups that these spaces were available. So to sum up the right to the city includes both the democratic right to participate in the production of the city and the right to democratic space that takes on different forms. [1] David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 23 [2] David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: p.124 [3] David Harvey, The Right to the City, New Left Review No.53 September-October 2008 To read the rest of the 10th Dec seminar report, Invisible Barriers click here To see David Harvey Right to the City lectures, click here Tax Justice Petition On Friday 31st October, a petition was delivered to Nos. 10 & 11 Downing Street. The petition demanded an end to tax havens, the global enactment of CTT/Tobin Tax and wholescale reform of the Common Agricultural Policy CAP to redistribute wealth to democracy building initiatives for people and planet. Please sign the petition by clicking here and write to Gordon Brown to ask him to support it personally. Are Human Rights Political? Essential Principles | Political, Democratic Republicanism "In order to maximise our own liberty, we must cease to put our trust in princes, and instead take charge of the public arena for ourselves, [constructing a genuine democracy] in which government is for the people as result of being by the people". Professor Quentin Skinner Liberty and Justice for All
SOUTHGATE PHOENIX NEWSLETTER  Southgate Tube Station |
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A Sunday Picnic Statement: From 1st August 2005, Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) made criminal the rights of free expression and association in a 1km Exclusion Zone around Westminster. As a result, a number of people have shown a determination to defy this undemocratic law, through a variety of peaceful means. People In Common began as part of this determination. On 7th August 2005 a hundred or so people came to Parliament Square to defy SOCPA and risk arrest. On that day, some of us took it upon ourselves to throw tea in the Thames, in defiance of SOCPA and in protest at the untaxed international trade in money. As a result of this action, the Sunday Peoples' Commons Tea Party was born. People in Common campaigns against SOCPA, but also aims to show creative, non-hierarchical democratic solutions. People In Common says no to s.132 of SOCPA and no to the current constitution. We say yes instead to a blank canvas, and yes to a new, simpler set of just laws, to be made by the people. We say yes to direct democracy, and yes to mutual aid, conviviality and global solidarity as the correct means to justice and peace. You are cordially invited to the picnic, and please bring something nice to share. |
