This panel will feature two amazing organizations that have both been fighting for the right to the city for decades, and are both appropriately enough members of the new Right to the City Alliance. CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, founded in 1986, has been recently at the forefront of anti-gentrification struggles in NYC's Chinatown, and City Life/Vida Urbana has been active since 1973 in Boston, continuously agitating around housing and displacement issues.
This first part of this panel explores the theory and tactics used to navigate
the contradictory logic of `revitalization without displacement'
and divert a conventional economic planning project toward anti-
gentrification ends. The presentation will exhibit the strategy,
process, and results of a `revitalization plan' prepared for two
Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) in one of downtown
Toronto's last non-gentrified neighbourhoods. In preparing this
plan, we were asked to work within the structure of revitalization
planning for business-oriented clients: a limit placed on our
This a 2005 conversation that took place as part of (Re)living Democracy, which many of the City From Below organizers help put together, and highlights many of the issues around inequities in urban development we're going to be talking about in March. Read the transcript here.
For an update on the ongoing struggle of SMEAC against inequitable development and dispossession in East Baltimore, see the latest issue of the Indypendent Reader, one of the City From Below sponsoring organizations.
