Events

A set of workshops and testimonials led by workers and participants covering the transformative power of human rights values, the role of one's place in the narrative, the Battle of Stories Framework, and tactics and strategies for the Human Rights Zone campaign in Baltimore. Through in-depth discussion and first-hand accounts, participants will analyze the strategies used by the United Workers in advancing the cause of Baltimore's low-wage workers.

While the end of Apartheid policies in South Africa brought about a
reorganization of municipal governance and a formal integration of
city life, the implementation of neoliberal reform over the past
fifteen years have done much to deepen the country's racial and class
inequalities. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cape Town, arguably
the most unequal and spatially segregated city in the world. Yet just
as evictions, privatization, and cost recovery have continued to
squeeze the city's poor majority, these pressures have also helped to
spur the growth of popular resistance. This

Landslide is an urban farm and sustainable living project in
Pittsburgh's Hill District. We have three acres of farmland, two
farmhouses, and 14 full time volunteers. Our hope is to build a
community based project that can provide a consistent supply of
healthy food for our neighborhood and offer a model for sustainable
living in an urban setting.

In the two years since the farm's inception we've had some major
successes and build strong and lasting relationships with our

Philadelphia's Media Mobilizing Project has been using media activism, online and off, as a tool for building solidarity between different social justice struggles in Philly - in this panel, they'll present their methods and organization, and explore the relevance of media work as activism in conversation with members of some of the groups they've partnered with.

An informative session giving you the essential legal knowledge you need for taking back the city from below...

A Community Land Trust is a model of permanently affordable, community
controlled housing provision where the ownership of the land is held in
trust by a community organization, while residents cooperatively own and
control most aspects of their everyday lives as dwellers. In San
Francisco, the San Francisco Community Land Trust played a role in
ending the evictions of 21 households in Chinatown. In New York and
Seattle, organizations have turned to this strategy to preserve
affordable housing gained through direct-action takeovers. As the

A panel discussion focusing on urban gardening as intervention in the city...

Why are so many of our nation's incarcerated from urban areas?

Chicago 101: Learning and Investigating the city that brought you Obama, Oprah, Blago, Rahm, Jarret, Axelrod, Duncan, Studs, Jesse, Fred Hampton and the original Rainbow Coalition, Jordan, Fermi, Padilla, Van der Rohe, Hansberry, Wayne's World, Kanye, and Fall Out Boy

Recent research describes the European network of squatted social centers, their intentions, politics and operations and the current wave of repression. Americans visit and tour these places and bring back tales. As the new wave of European social centers strive to strengthen their ties, what lessons does this major underground movement have for activists in the U.S.?

In nearly every major U.S. city, the displacement epidemic is destroying

The use of the creative class by capitalists in the urban environment.

Metropolitan Glide, Metropolitan Strike

Recent developments in post-workerist / autonomist thought have
focused on the city as a site production and resistance, in
particular as a locus of struggle precisely because of the becoming-
productive of the city: from the social factory to the factory-city,
the productive metropolis. To say that the metropolitan space has
become productive, in the same way that it has been argued that
all of life (social cooperation, communication, affects, creativity)

Children are wonderful at noticing things adults dont, appropriating
new uses for common objects, and expressing creativity to invent, or
destroy, their environment. However, their basic needs are often
ignored, challenged, even put last, by political systems as well as
city planning and smaller social gatherings; and their proscribed
spaces (school, playground, and private homes) marginalized. Even
their natural desire to learn and meaningfully participate is often

Urban collective living offers an affordable,
sustainable way to live in a city, as well as
challenge the notion of property ownership.

The Red Clover Collective formed an urban intentional
community in the Better Waverly neighborhood of
Baltimore in 2004 and is now six members. Participants will tell of
their experiences with group dynamics, consensus decision making,
creating policies, working through stressful times
and conflict, buying property, and incorporation.

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

As gentrification sweeps through neighborhoods, housing displacement
becomes an issue of major concern. One way to stanch the displacement
of poor people from gentrifying neighborhoods seems pretty obvious:
give them housing they can afford. So activists demand affordable
housing, politicians promise it, and developers - after negotiation -
sometimes even agree to produce it. But what exactly is meant by
"affordable housing"? How is it, for instance, that a guy who works at
Merrill Lynch Investments qualifies for affordable housing in

A presentation of the work of Miami's Take Back the Land, a poor people's movement attacking homelessness through direct action - squatting foreclosed properties.

By connecting the theme of urban struggle in-and-against the crisis,
Midnight Notes editors and friends will discuss the strategic areas
in which the economic crisis is impacting forms of life in the city
as well as the struggles that exist in relation to it.

What is at stake in this conversation is the possibility of a massive
restructuring and re-spatialization of our social relations in the
metropolis; however, there are many potential outcomes that will be
determined by the composition of our movements. Thus we ask: How

What it is: Coming at it from a food justice context, we want to

1) create a space to analyze sustainability and green (i.e.Philly
will be the next green city) and how these terms have been co-opted by
the capitalist agenda. How do we, through our work and organizing,
reclaim, in a culturally appropriate way, the idea that sustainability
is at its very base about straight up survival.

2) hold a strategy session looking at concrete ways our work and
actions build towards the self-determination of our communities,

For information about ACORN's Baltimore campaign, see:

Indypendent reader: Baltimore ACORN Voices Foreclosure Injustices in Maryland

Baltimore Indymedia: ACORN Breaks Into Foreclosed House to Restore it to its Former Owner

Private property and the right to housing: a brief and recent history - the rent control campaign, alternative community development, and fair housing.

With Michael Mazepink on The People's Homesteading Group and alternatives to development (sweat equity, squatting, etc...) plus Barbara Samuels (Maryland ACLU) on the sordid history of housing discrimination in Baltimore.

Especially as the economic crisis leads policymakers to cut even more funds from already underfunded public services, the issue of the right to education in the city is a tremendously relevant one. This panel will examine the fight for publicly funded education and access to information, with contributions from the Baltimore Algebra Project (student-led organization fighting for funding for Baltimore's public schools) and Philadelphia's Coalition to Save the Libraries (a citywide effort to stop the planned closures of neighborhood library branches).

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 interactive workshop will explore the broad theme of speculation in the global city through the specific example of empty apartment buildings and vacant lots held off the market by their owners in New York. The intersectionality of abandonment, gentrification, race and homelessness will be explored. We will share strategies to reclaim vacant properties as a mechanism to assert a popular community development practice that benefits poor and homeless people.

We're anticipating that many attendees of the conference will have great stories to share on what's happening in the urban area they're coming from, what social movements to reclaim the city look like in their city. This is a chance for all this information to be put out on the table, in a structured open forum, moderated by Dan Tucker of AREA Chicago.

Get out of the conference hall and into the fields! Join us at Participation Park, a sustainable urban farm on a formerly vacant lot in East Baltimore for a tour and a delicious breakfast.

From June 4 to 14, 2008, a group of people traveled through Illinois
and Wisconsin in search of a Radical Midwest. They looked for evidence
of small town organizing, prison resistance, and perma-cultural
farming-- living right beside agribusiness, supermax prisons, toxic
dumps, christian conservatism and more. They found the reflections of
the city, in the urban migrants who sought a fairer futures on open
land, in production that fuels and feeds the masses and in waste that

Politics is driven by power, including the power to communicate.
Effective communication moves people to act in ways intended by the
messenger. The election of Barack Obama was driven in large part by a
communications team that understands marketing in a post-television
era, including how to use branding, social marketing and the Internet
to shape culture. Obama constructs culture in part by using the power
of myth and epic narrative. This presents a dilemma and an
opportunity for grassroots community organizers whose politics may

A comparative look at different models of grassroots organizing in the city, with a focus on organization led by poor people and people of color, facilitated by veteran Baltimore community organizer Betty Robinson.

Homesteading and Homelessness in St Louis

Abbilyn Harmon is a graduate student in Landscape Architecture at
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studying activist approaches to ending homelessness and creating home with individuals experiencing homelessness. She is also a community organizer, involved in several projects, including with an East St. Louis service provider; setting up a homeworking operation to aid in creation of local jobs for men; and works on an annual radio broadcast called the Homelessness Marathon.

How can urban design be made into an empowering, participatory process in the service of spatial and urban justice?

The dramatic implosion of heavy manufacturing in the Rustbelt is, at
this point, mostly discussed in the past tense. After 100 years of
dominating work, home, and civic life, Capital fled the unionized
plants in the Global North, leaving hundreds of thousands out of work,
massive plants and mills empty, and industrial cities and towns
throughout the region eviscerated. Even Business Week reporter John
Hoerr could write of the Monongahela Valley in 1988 "Such widespread
carnage may be unparalleled in US industrial history, especially

We are becoming increasingly aware to what extent this economic
crisis is meant to also become a crisis of the working class itself.
This crisis will be first and foremost experienced at the level of
social reproduction, in our ability to reproduce our lives. Will
increased hierarchies further individuate us and fragment our power?
Will we develop ways of living in common that refuse this capitalist
crisis? Does organizing refusal help us determine where we go from
here, how we might find an ?exit? to capitalist command? How do

Gentrification isn't always a purely market-driven phenomenon - sometimes large institutional actors like universities are able to set the agenda for urban development and displacement. This panel will consider the effects of University expansion on existing urban populations, and what kinds of community and student struggles can fight this kind of gentrification.

We are ready to begin to provide for ourselves, without capital. We
have begun. We are also ready to fight and destroy in order to
protect, defend, grow what we are building; you see it. So what do we
need for this project? What tools? What knowledge? What strength? And in what parts of life will this begin? I'll speak about what I see as
the theoretical (practical) necessity for building towards our own
survival without capital (and how what we build in this way we will be
ready to defend with our bodies and lives) and also of the concrete

We are proposing to set up a framework, for the discussion of the role that infrastructural, economic, and natural systems play in shaping the city. The discussion will be entered into through a series of case studies, examining the history and future of four open spaces on Baltimore's urban waterfront.

The struggle for the city is largely a struggle over public money. On
one hand, public budgets finance much of the development responsible
for gentrification, while community groups are forced to fight for
budgetary scraps, be they for social services, housing, schools,
health facilities, or public transportation. This is an exhausting and
often demoralizing struggle. It encourages competition rather than
collaboration, and reliance on politicians rather than democratic
community control.

At the same time, grassroots movements outside of the U.S. are

"We know, I know, that things have to change, and I'm all for a
new economy, but my belief is that you can't put historical in if you're
takin' it out." This quote, from a recently displaced long time resident of
the neighborhood of Sharp Leadenhall in Baltimore City, is emblematic of the
current tensions Black residents are experiencing as their historic
community deals with the processes of gentrification. The city of Baltimore
has experienced rapid housing development in its urban core in recent years.
While beneficial in many respects, this expansion has also signaled a number

For at least a decade a number of social movements have been reclaiming New York City’s public spaces: from the late 1990s Reclaim the Streets, to the Critical Mass(es), to the recent struggles against the rezoning of Williamsburg, Atlantic Yards, Coney Island in Brooklyn, and the privatization of Union Square, micro-initiatives and broad coalitions, tactical displacements and organized campaigns have opposed a vision of urban development driven only by corporate interests and real estate speculations.

From creative reuse to sustainable design interventions to urban permaculture, this panel will explore aspects of green principles and practices for the city.

Casino-Free
Philadelphia is a grassroots, direct action, organizing organization
that was founded June 1, 2006 in order to stop casinos from being
built in Philadelphia.

We are a small budget, high impact group of committed citizens that
build power through campaigns. Past campaigns include Operation
Transparency, Public Filibuster, No Way Without Our Say, Philly's
Ballot Box, and Operation Hidden Costs. Our next campaign launches on
January 27th and is called the Declaration of Independence from