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 following from Enough is Enough:
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.
Originally published by Woonactiedagen.
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
Twitter: @woonopstand070
More information: woonactiedagen.wordpress.com
You will find posters and leaflets here: https://woonactiedagen.wordpress.com/info/promomateriaal/
