[URBANTH-L]ANN: City from Below Issue of the Indypendent Reader

[Angela Jancius]

City from Below Issue of the Indypendent Reader Released

This special national issue of the Indypendent Reader 
(http://indyreader.org) comes out of a gathering held in Baltimore this 
March called the City From Below (http://cityfrombelow.org), which was 
co-organized by the Indyreader, Participation Park (a political project 
centered around a community garden on a reclaimed vacant lot in East 
Baltimore), and Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse, a worker-owned and 
democratically managed collective project in Baltimore's Mt. Vernon 
neighborhood.  The conference came out of our recognition that all of our 
projects were in very concrete ways focusing their energies on what might be 
called a politics of urban infrastructure - working towards a media platform 
for Baltimore's social movements, creating a public space and sustainable 
urban agricultural alternative, building a business oriented not towards 
profit but  towards social justice, and the distribution of radical 
information - and in a way such that all of our individual projects 
reinforce each other through the larger horizontal networks of social 
movements we all exist within.

For us and our projects, this kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic is one of 
the most exciting things about this kind of city-centric activism and 
organizing - it's not only that we're working to make the cities we live in 
a better place, but in some sense, it's the city itself that's working 
towards this goal.  Taken to its limit, it's a vision of urban democracy 
where the city's inhabitants themselves directly control the way the city 
works and how it grows - not in the sense that they get to elect a mayor or 
a councilperson once every few years, but that they actively participate in 
a thriving fabric of locally controlled projects and initiatives which build 
and manage the urban environment.

articles:

What Is The City From Below? An Opening Night Address From Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Short History of Private Property & The Right to Tenancy in Baltimore--By 
David Kandel

The Metropolitan Factory: How Capitalist Exploitation Extends Through All 
Corners of the City-Stevphen Shukaitis &Valeria Graziano

Defenders of the Land, Private Property Abolitionists - By Shiri Pasternak

A Conversation on Organizing Models for Social Justice Struggles in the City

Common Purpose, Uncommon Approach - By Tom Kertes

Fighting Foreclosure in South Africa: An Open Letter to US Activists

Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City: A Conversation with David 
Harvey, Max Rameau, Shiri Pasternak, and Esther Wang

Community Land Trust Q & A: James Tracy interviews Jim Kelly

The Perils of Public Space and Democracy in Athens - By Nicholas 
Anastasopoulos, Eleni Tzirtzilaki

Trans-Caucus - By Ilana Goldszer

Whose City? KID(Z) CITY! - By the Crossing Guard organizing committee

Revitalizing Tired Terms: A Language of Anti-Gentrification Planning - By 
Katie Mazer

"To Show the Fire and the Tenderness" - By Teams Colors Collective/ Conor 
Cash, Craig Hughes, Stevie Pearce, Kevin Van Meter

A Region from Below - By Correspondenets from the Midwest Radical Cultural 
Corridor