Events

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