Australia Day 2012

To riff off (or is it on?) these well-worded thoughts of Fugitive Sound‘s: how raw the distance is today, the distance between what ‘we’ say we are (democratic, nonracist, just, settled, ‘reconciled’, fair) and what is continuously in evidence as the reality.

In this distance sits the anger, sadness and sickness; also the fear, superiority, and ignorance. Violence displaced onto the violated, security deployed by the insecure, civility demanded by the incivil.

Canberra protest “could’ve blown up in people’s faces”

The tent embassy debacle from a protester’s POV

View from the Tent Embassy: reality v news reports

The mob violence that wasn’t

Also WTF is with Australia’s recurring shoe fetish?

#Pinheirinho

English:

The struggle for Pinheirinho will remain an inspiration

Brazil police storm landless settlement near São Paulo [I think the BBC have mixed the meaning of 'roofless' (sem teto: i.e. a major social movement supporting the occupation is O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, the urban movement of roofless workers — as opposed to sem terra, represented by rural movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra)].

Police clash with slum residents for a second day

The landowner

português:

Solidariedade á ocupação Pinheirinho

Ferido em confronto por Pinheirinho passa para cirurgia

Google Notícias: feed

I remember the bus ride out of São Paulo, headed for the countryside, past the yards of homes made out of plastic bags from the hipermercado I’d been getting my lunch from most days.

I am no expert (despite failed professorial attempts to fashion me into a ‘Latin Americanist’ or ‘Brazilianist’), my command of Brazilian Portuguese is not even strong enough to translate some articles faithfully for you, I have spent only a little time in these spaces — long enough to feel the pull of their complexity and how easily they are simplified. But I will still say that I think #Pinheirinho is the brutal, spectacular underside of global city making, and that these are days to mourn.

“These forms of urban informality… are expressions of class power”

In warming to the theme of a geopolitics of urban renewal (alteration, innovation):

“The splintering of urbanism does not take place at the fissure between formality and informality but rather, in fractal fashion, within the informalized production of space. Informal urbanization is as much the purview of wealthy urbanites as it is of slum dwellers. These forms of urban informality – from Delhi’s farmhouses to Kolkata’s new towns to Mumbai’s shopping malls – are no more legal than the metonymic slum. But they are expressions of class power and can therefore command infrastructure, services and legitimacy. Most importantly, they come to be designated as ‘formal’ by the state while other forms of informality remain criminalized.”

Ananya Roy, from “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011. qtd.

Many thanks to @lcarroli for the pointer!

Foreclosing on foreclosure

#3, #2, #1

Speaking of Newtown, I’ve been reading about the Black Friday eviction, a story from the Great Depression, dated Friday 19 June, 1931. The local historian Alan Sharpe describes it thusly:

“News got out the police were coming to evict a family living at Newtown. The well-organised, Communist-led Unemployed Worker’s Movement, having already prevented many evictions, gathered in and around number 143 [King Street?]…

From the crowded balcony the defenders hurled road metal and full-size bricks down on the police who promptly drew revolvers and began firing, forcing the pickets to seek cover….

It was the second occasion in which police actually fired on pickets. The first was during an eviction siege in Brancourt Avenue, Bankstown two days earlier.”

- ‘Newtown’s Black Friday’, Pictorial History Newtown, Alan Sharpe 1999.

The collective, defended refusal to leave may change the pattern of gentrification, perhaps, if you can find a way of getting around the brutal barrier of the NSW police. (I can’t help but think of the US again here, and the well-organised communities who have cropped up around home loan foreclosure, coalescing into Occupy Our Homes).

(thanks to Disco for research support on this one!)

Rent control

#2

Rent control is (arguably) a rather classic tactic for slowing, resisting or halting gentrification. Dearest M who moved to San Fran this year sent me some local intelligence on it a while back, after learning about the differences between the amount of rent she pays compared to some of her ‘rent controlled’ neighbours. As we mused at the time, how might our beloved inner west look today if there had been such tenets in place over the past decade?

Aggregated: describing ‘DIY urbanism’

“citizens [displaying] great wherewithal and ingenuity in the face of budgetary stalemates…. From activating stalled construction sites, to constructing temporary public plazas and parks at street intersections, to designing pop-up storefronts. [Sparking] social change.” – Rebar Group, San Francisco

“the shared experience of designing and participating in the creation of our urban environment. It uses a bottom-up and participatory approach. It includes the tactics of small-scale intervention, experimental and micro-architectures, the temporary, the nomadic and the add-on. It’s a radical urbanism, one that challenges the current dominance of top-down urban planning and capitalist development.” – Joni Taylor

“grass roots urban projects that are collaborative and improvisational. These sometimes guerilla projects bring new life to the city and influence how we use and perceive our urban environment” – Niehoff Urban Studio

“the temporary and low cost creative activation of … empty buildings” – Renew Australia

“distinct from large-scale, commercial and spectacle-driven urban developments” – DIY urbanism: Sydney Reconsidered

“interventionist” – Mimi Zeiger

Too small to fail?

When in London I went to Rough Trade Records East via Brick Lane’s panorama of gentrification. On the right of the doorway there was a counter with a bunch of pamphlets, postcards and publications. I picked up a copy of Death of a Scenester, ‘all the way’ from Melbourne. It talked up Adelaide’s Format Festival.

In the same week Detroit appeared in The Guardian as an exemplar for understanding the riots that ripped through the British consensus only a month before. Evidence of the riots was piecemeal for this tourist: graffiti on a public wall reading TORY BRITAIN: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE; a magazine cover spotted on a windowsill of a council estate.

Detroit as referent for unrest, as referent for renewal. Is the social research question really ‘how to read the riots?’, or even ‘what caused the riots’?

Sydney to London, September 2011

It seems truly absurd and fantastical that the conquerors and colonists and administrators thought to transplant and transfer an entire culture, society and landscape onto another place, one so far away. It is messing with me a bit to be so far away from home and yet have everything around me seem almost boringly familiar.

Absurd and fantastical – and successful? Would you know that other people lived on that country for forty thousand years prior to “British settlement”? That they live there today? Would you hear the spirits sing to you?

I see children in the tube station, around the monuments, and think of D as a child, my mum as a child; doubtless many ancestors who passed through from Saint-Hélier, Cork, Bristol, Scotland, France…. The sixteen-year-old Mary who boarded the boat in 18whatever. Tired white faces all around. The green of thousands of paintings on walls, the fox hounds, squirrels, holly, ivy, elms, plane trees, blackbirds, white swans, green-grey rivers of most of my childhood stories and nursery rhymes. That fictional Englishness.

And now…. The Seaside.

Kitteh

Camping and connecting

The Occupy camp in Washington DC has been compared to ‘trendy’ DIY urbanism by one Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post.

There’s certainly something intractably urban about Occupy. And DIY urbanism and Occupy seem to face similar barriers to their activities, barriers that can be tracked to the tying up of property in capital speculation, unimaginative local government and overly bureaucratic by-laws which might even see them in the same courtroom from time to time. However, whilst I get the connections being made in terms of community-driven urbanism, surely there are critical differences between DIY urbanism and Occupy – not least in their relationship to homelessness (and other forms of poverty in public perhaps), as per previous posts.

One camp is doubtless doing it differently to another, and I can’t speak with participatory authority from my local Occupy. Still, I think there are some serious points of divergence between the squatting action from earlier in the week (and other strong statements about homelessness in this city) and, say, the Empty Spaces project. At the City of Sydney council meeting on Monday the Empty-Spaces-loving, homelessness-service-supporting, consulting-the-public Lord Mayor made it very clear where she stood. And it was not with the camp, nor against the typically exceptional behaviour of the police.