City from Below Issue of the Indypendent Reader

The new issue of Baltimore’s Indypendent Reader, which comes out of the recent “City from Below” gathering, has been released. Information about it below.

This special national issue of the Indypendent Reader comes out of a conference held in Baltimore this March called the City From Below, which was co-organized by the Indyreader, Participation Park (a political project centered around a community garden on a reclaimed vacant lot in East Baltimore), and Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, a worker-owned and democratically managed collective project in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. The conference came out of our recognition that all of our projects were in very concrete ways focusing their energies on what might be called a politics of urban infrastructure – working towards a media platform for Baltimore’s social movements, creating a public space and sustainable urban agricultural alternative, building a business oriented not towards profit but towards social justice, and the distribution of radical information – and in a way such that all of our individual projects reinforce each other through the larger horizontal networks of social movements we all exist within.

For us and our projects, this kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic is one of the most exciting things about this kind of city-centric activism and organizing – it’s not only that we’re working to make the cities we live in a better place, but in some sense, it’s the city itself that’s working towards this goal. Taken to its limit, it’s a vision of urban democracy where the city’s inhabitants themselves directly control the way the city works and how it grows – not in the sense that they get to elect a mayor or a councilperson once every few years, but that they actively participate in a thriving fabric of locally controlled projects and initiatives which build and manage the urban environment.

articles: What Is The City From Below? An Opening Night Address From Mumia Abu-Jamal A Short History of Private Property & The Right to Tenancy in Baltimore--By David Kandel

The Metropolitan Factory: How Capitalist Exploitation Extends Through All Corners of the City-Stevphen Shukaitis &Valeria Graziano

Defenders of the Land, Private Property Abolitionists - By Shiri Pasternak

A Conversation on Organizing Models for Social Justice Struggles in the City

Common Purpose, Uncommon Approach - By Tom Kertes

Fighting Foreclosure in South Africa: An Open Letter to US Activists

Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City: A Conversation with David Harvey, Max Rameau, Shiri Pasternak, and Esther Wang

Community Land Trust Q & A: James Tracy interviews Jim Kelly

The Perils of Public Space and Democracy in Athens - By Nicholas Anastasopoulos, Eleni Tzirtzilaki

Trans-Caucus - By Ilana Goldszer

Whose City? KID(Z) CITY! - By the Crossing Guard organizing committee

Revitalizing Tired Terms: A Language of Anti-Gentrification Planning - By Katie Mazer

"To Show the Fire and the Tenderness" - By Teams Colors Collective/ Conor Cash, Craig Hughes, Stevie Pearce, Kevin Van Meter

A Region from Below - By Correspondenets from the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor