invest in life

crossposted from Stealth of Nations:

You, too, can invest in something infinitely more valuable than profits. It's a strange new commodity called life.

As The New York Times reports, Copenhagen's Christiania squatters, famed for their anti-free market ways, are selling shares in their community so they can buy it from the government. What do you get for your investment: "a symbolic sense of ownership in Christiania and the promise of an invitation to a planned annual shareholder party." As one squatter calls it, "ownership in an abstract form."


According to the Copenhagen Post, after striking a deal with the state this summer,  Christiania residents now need to raise 76.2 million kroner (almost $13 million) to buy the  majority of the area’s properties and an additional six million kroner  to rent adjoining green spaces. The first 43 million kroner (or approximately $8 million) is due on 15  April 2012. Several prominent people have purchased Christiania Shares, including  Margrethe Vestager, minister of the economy and interior, and Mogens  Lykketoft, president of parliament. The shares are available for  purchase online at www.christianiafolkeaktie.dk.

Squatters in New York

A decade or so ago, there were well-established communities of the homeless all over the New York City, set up by people who formed close bonds and knew that the shelter system was too dehumanizing and brutalizing for them. The pier on Twelfth Avenue just across from the Chinese consulate had several dozen wooden shacks. A median in Long Island City, Queens, where two seldom-used freight lines parted ways, was a friendly location for another encampment. Photographer Margaret Morton documented the homeless casitas of the city and the community in the tunnel under Riverside Park.

Most of these communities have been destroyed, either because these locations have been reclaimed for use (AMTRAK now runs trains to Albany along the previously derelict Riverside Park tracks) or because real estate interests pushed to clear these parcels.

Now, The Brooklyn Daily reports on a small shantytown in Coney Island that has lived against the odds for five years. I hope this community survives its new-found publicity.

who guards the guardians

The New York Times offers a recap of the violent doings of the police in Rio de Janeiro. Which brings up the question: with the growth of the program of so-called 'pacification' that pushes drug dealers out from their perches in the favelas and replaces them with the police, are they making life in the favelas any better. One answer, from Alba Zaluar, a famous Brazilian academic who has long studied police tactics in Rio: “They’re invading, watching over, buying favelas from traffickers.” Not comforting words.

It's long been known that the police take payoffs from the drug gangs. It's long been known that most of the shooting deaths in Rio involve the cops. As the Times article shows, the cops are just like the drug dealers--they're not afraid to torture and kill people they perceive as their enemies, and the top echelon of police militia leaders run their semi-official gangs from jail.

Pacification, it seems, only replaces one brutal criminal gang with another. And the new one may be worse. The police are invaders and occupiers with no roots in the favelas. At least the drug dealers were communitarian outlaws.

homes v. archeology

Hundreds of squatters have erected new shacks on archeologically important spots in southern Peru, Peru This Week reports (based on an earlier article in the Peruvian paper El Comercio). The new settlements, which were built with the support of local politicos, have apparently endangered portions of the Nazca lines, the 1500-year-old geoglyphs that were created by an ancient Peruvian culture. The Nazca lines were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994.

Preservation of archeological sites is crucial for greater understanding of our origins and history. Nonetheless, this land invasion shows how desperate people are for a place to live. The political structure and property-owning system conspire to deny people a right to a place to call home. As a result, people often seize the most readily available land where they will be least likely to be immediately displaced--tracts with disputed titles, parcels in dangerous locations, or properties that have been removed from private development because of other concerns--in this case the need for preservation of the archeological record.

If the towns in the Nazca region would allocate other parcels for the squatters, they wouldn't have to obliterate the geoglyphs.

inexcusable evictions in Rio

Rio de Janeiro is using the coming World Cup and Olympics as an excuse to demolish major swathes of favelas in the Zona Sul--the tourist zone of the city. These videos--at once jaw-droppingly awful and incredibly inspiring--tell the story. Note, in the second video, about the community called Pavao Pavaozinho, that you can see the beachfront highrises out peoples' windows. This shows just how valuable the real estate is in these areas.

People have lived in these favelas for generations. The government has never cared about their lives or their communities. Now, suddenly, with the spark of development and the increase in real estate values due to the games, their communities are areas of interest. The city plans to tear down 123 areas and relocate 13,000 families (though relocation is often to the most remote areas of town, impossibly far from work and economic opportunity, and there is no compensation for the decades of commitment and labor people have put into their communities.)

The World Cup will be taking place in eight major cities around Brazil--and all of them are using the contest as an excuse to eradicate vulnerable communities. These neighborhoods are not primitive. With no investment from outside and no government assistance, people have improved their communities, going from mud and stick settlements to brick and reinforced concrete structures in one generation. They get no credit for this. In fact, it's just the reverse: they are called illegal occupiers and criminals.

Brazil has lost a major opportunity to show the world that major global sporting events can be organized in an inclusive and egalitarian manner.

(hat tip to Tanya for sending the link my way.)

social commerce, DIY-style

Writing in The Guardian, Adam Werbach, the former head of the Sierra Club, endorses squatter savings schemes and do-it-yourself development through the informal economy as the way forward for the megacities of the developing world. "Who will fix this?" a squatter asks rhetorically as she imagines the monsoon rains that will flood her newly-tiled home next year. "It is we, ourselves."

140 characters in search of Caracas

Francisco Toro writes on his blog on the New York Times site that 600 squatter communities in the Venezuelan capital have joined a non-profit called Radar de los Barrios, which uses Twitter to help neighboring communities communicate. “Working-class settlements here don’t communicate much with one another,” the group’s director, Jesus Torrealba, said. Community activists often have little insight into what is happening in the next barrio just a few miles away. Twitter cuts through this isolation, helping create a network among independently minded activists who contest the government’s policies.

Toro, who identifies himself as "opposition-leaning-but-not-insane" also blogs at Caracas Chronicles, and has written that "one of the more difficult things about my job is communicating to a First World audience that unmistakable taste of sheer thuggishness the Chávez government leaves in your mouth."