The following article is from The Hague, but if you live in, or visit a city, then this the pattern you will be experiencing or about to experience. The march of capital to turn our cities into nothing more than profit producing entities. Cities are rapidly becoming places where only those with large disposable incomes can congregate. They are no longer places where ordinary people live, meet, hang out and socialise. In these new sanitised city centres, if you enter and are not in that group of "well-to-do", you will treated as suspicious, and probably deemed to be "up to no good". The controllers of the new cities don't want you unless you can spend "big time", or you can work as the minions that serve as attendants to the money spenders. You will have the opportunity to have a crap job with crap wages, and zero hours contracts. Is this the new cities we want? Our cities must be our streets, places we built and places where we wish to live, not simply money making machines for the corporate beast and the financial Mafia.
The Hague. Netherlands. On Friday and Saturday 31st of July and 1st
of August, HOUSING ACTION DAYS will take place in The Hague. The theme
for Friday is social housing and precarious modes of housing, and the
theme for Saturday is the selling out of the city and gentrification.
During these two days we will make a collective fist against precarity
and the housing shortage.
In the past couple of years the city has become the stage of a social
struggle. Capital is increasingly controlling housing and public
spaces. The city is transformed into a revenue model, a new apparatus
for a select group to accumulate wealth. This has drastic consequences
for many of us. De waiting lists for social housing are ever
lengthening, rents are already way too expensive and the political
unwillingness to take up these issues is stifling. In the inner city,
one loft gets restored after another and only expensive private sector
housing is built. Hip coffeehouses and their terraces are spreading like
an oil spill.
We don’t want a city merely for consumption but a city in which we can live!
Paired with the gentrification, the state’s net to control public
spaces tightens. Concurrently to being forced to pay increasingly high
rent for increasingly small spaces, we are being dispossessed of the
streets: hanging out in the street is perceived as suspicious and will
get you castigated for gathering. The only places where you can still
gather in public are parks or sports field – but never without the
supervision of cameras. Our living spaces are shrinking, we will no
longer put up with this shit anymore!
For this reason, let us meet on 31st of July and 1st of August, to
take action against the selling out of our cities and our lives. We
invite everyone to come to The Hague, the belly of the beast, to
struggle for the right to live and to the city!
Mail: woonopstanddenhaag [at] riseup.net
More information: woonactiedagen.wordpress.com
Visit ann arky's home at
https://radicalglasgow.me.uk