Anarchist Views of the City

just throwing some things out there.

Colin Ward-
Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976)
Welcome, Thinner City: Urban Survival in the 1990's (1989)
The Child In The City (1978)
Cotters and Squatters: The Hidden History of Housing (2004)

I was at the WSF in 2003 and saw these debates on the post-rev city:
http://www.zmag.org/wetzelcity.htm
http://www.zmag.org/lac/bond.htm
http://www.zmag.org/souzacity.htm

The Barcelona Rent Strike
http://www.workersolidarity.org/rentstrike1931.htm

BART fare strike
A thorough and awesome account, with lots of anecdotal reports
http://libcom.org/library/fare-strike-san-francisco-2005
Tom Wetzel's article
http://www.workersolidarity.org/transitfight.html

Housing:
Anarchosyndicalist Alliance (UK)
http://libcom.org/library/housing-your-squalor-their-profits
Midnight Notes about housing decentralization
http://libcom.org/library/spatial-deconcentration-d-c
Economics of housing by Aufheben (good!)
http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the-housing-question

I think some of the NEFAC people were/are involved in housing/urban stuff, so i'll ask around some more. There's got to be some accounts of the OCAP activity.

Yep he certainly does, you read Buda's Wagon? Apparently he was also planning to write summat specifically about anarchists n' all.

City of Quartz is another great one of his. David Harvey is a Marxist, but also an excellent writer on the city -- he wrote an excellent book about Paris, whose name evades me.

Agree, he's an excellent Marxist geographer. I don't know the name of the book about Paris, but in Spaces of Hope he writes a lot about Baltimore.

I'd also recommend the work Asef Bayat has done on the political actions of the urban poor. Street Politics is about Tehran, but he's got loads of articles that are available online. Search for quiet encroachment and Bayat and you'll find it.

There's some really good stuff from the SI and pro-situs about cities, the development of freeways, etc.

you might like to have a look at the work of Richard Sennett, a sociologist of the city, esp:

The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life (1970), ISBN 0393309096

A flexible city of strangers (essay) http://mondediplo.com/2001/02/16cities

Bo Grönlund:
The Civitas of Seeing and the Design of Cities
- on the urbanism of Richard Sennett

http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Sennett_ny_tekst_97kort.html
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Situs:

ATTILA KOTÁNYI, RAOUL VANEIGEM "Basic Program of the
Bureau of Unitary Urbanism"

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/6.unitaryurb.htm

IVAN CHTCHEGLOV "Formulary for a New Urbanism"

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

Simon Sadler "The Situationist City" MIT Press; New Ed edition (30 Sep 1999)
(2nd hand paperback copies not too expensive)

(from the amazon blurb: "Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "The Naked City," outlines the Situationist critique of the urban environment as it then existed. The second, "Formulary for a New Urbanism," examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living. The third, "A New Babylon," describes actual designs proposed for a Situationist City."

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should keep you going

Manuel Castells is also interesting sometimes.

Thank you everyone for the resources. It will be a few months before I can get through them all. My situation is that I live in the deindustrializing Rust Belt and I have been trying to figure out exactly who and what I should interface with for organizing. It is clear to me that the major issues in my area are:

-- economic collapse of the working class as the economy shifts from industrial to service and information industries (health care and biotech are the growth industries)
-- capital flight from the center city as white middle and upper middle class people leave for the exurbs where there are "better schools" and where they are "safer"
-- large tracts of abandoned decaying building
-- collapsing infrastructure

On one level it seems like it could be an organizers dream. On the other there's the fact that I am not certain where to even start. Almost any group that I can get involved with seems very reformist and most of the solutions that seem like the might actually have positive outcomes for working class folks are also fairly reformist (shift the polity from the city to the county so that the fat tax bases on the edge of the county are incorporated into the city budget and pay for more infrastructure, work with local business and community leaders to encourage economic development, etc.).

WobblyP - it seems like you've got an interesting dynamic goign on there. of course the obvious answer would be to go for the growth industries of healthcare and biotech. if they're growing, you'll want to appeal to them.

re. empty tracts of disused buildings - and i mean this in seriousness - if there's a decent enough collective of committed folks, a social centre in your local area could also be a start. if run well (and not all SCs are, by a long shot!), it could highlight and support both community and workplace struggles in one fell swoop.

first of all, though, i'd personally start to seek out like-minded individuals. of course, if all the groups that currently exist are reformists then there is a gap in the market, as it were, for a practical yet radical left-lib organisation to emerge.

i'm The Climbing Bandit

too obvious

curses

forgot to mention Transgressions

http://www.unpopular.org.uk/transgressions/tg.html

(I see there's an issue 5 out, must send of for it.)

Also Alastair Bonnett (editor of transgressions)
(univ newcastle) is another anarcho geographer it would seem.

Geography as the world discipline: connecting
popular and academic geographical imaginations

here:

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/file.php/2471/geog_sk6_10t_c__3.pdf

(not much use regarding organising soz.)

Ashwin Desai's 'We Are The Poors' is well worth a read for info on township community struggles in the grim new world of post-apartheid South Africa, as the poor are 'structurally readjusted' by the ANC elite according to IMF & WB policy . Excerpt here; http://www.monthlyreview.org/watpxcerpt.htm

And an interview with him here; http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2003/wren0303.html

I would also suggesting watching Boom The Sound of Eviction : http://www.boomthemovie.org/
One of the directors is a co-worker of mine and fellow union member. It mostly talks about the gentrification process that occurred in SF in the late 90's. But, it also offers an analysis of the city as a community, critiques the view of the city as a marketplace and exposes the amount of resources necessary to sustain an expanding urban area.

Another essay by Tom Wetzel on Gentrification: http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/gentry.htm

Its interesting that anarchists often reject, or are unaware, that surrounding suburbs are actually a vital part of most major cities. Also, the assumption that the burbs' are strictly middle class enclaves is somewhat off base given the way most cities are currently expanding. If you look at San Francisco as urban center which is becoming increasingly polarized between the ultra rich and the very very poor. It is the working class, blue collar workers who are moving increasingly to the suburbs. The suburbs of San Francisco (Tracy, South SF, Vallejo) are where the workforce that drives the Bay Area lives. There are only a few working class neighborhoods left in the city (Bayview, Hunters Point, the Richmond and Outer Mission).

The de-industrialization of San Francisco basically began when shipping shifted from San Francisco to Oakland in the 80's and 90's. The SF waterfront was slated to be redeveloped for tourism, housing and white color office buildings. Warehouses also moved with the port to Oakland and the East Bay's surrounding suburbs.

There have been few movements to preserve the industrial bases of (rapidly de-industrialized) cities. The most recent example that pops into my head was a coalition of community, labor and environmental groups united to preserve the Seattle's industrial waterfront. They passed the "Industrial Jobs Initiative" which limits office and retail development in industrial zones. But often critiques of gentrification stay focused on issues surrounding housing and transportation and ignore the the flight of industrial based jobs to outlying suburbs or rural areas.

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