Reclaiming Spaces Magazine

International space for exchange & reflection of urban activists

The Objective of Reclaiming Spaces RECLAIMING-SPACES is an independent and voluntary project that aims to build a forum of international communication and reflection for urban activists dedicated to struggles against dispossession and expropriation of inhabitants from their land, housing, infrastructure, and public spaces. These struggles begin at local levels by organizing the social and/or political protection of common and public goods from privatisation, financial speculation, authoritarianism and/or corruption. While local mobilizations build the foundations of successful resistances, it is also true that processes of capitalist dispossession cannot be overcome without transforming the underlying political economic structures that are largely determined by supranational “global” economic conditions, corporations and powers. RECLAIMING-SPACES supports the development of spaces as well as tools that foster the exchange of local experiences, while concentrating on those elements that are transnational and/or global — such as global financial investors and international real estate markets, and the institutions and arrangements that back them. This project contributes towards the better common understanding of the forces behind the transformation of human environments by: encouraging critical analysis, strengthening existing and emerging alliances, improving international networking, and engaging in practice-orientated exchange and intervention. RECLAIMING-SPACES focusses on the various modes of appropriation, their corresponding struggles, and the various methods of organization through which activists can proceed from local resistance to trans-local pro-active social change. Practical Approach Through developing communication projects and co-working on concrete journalistic products, we hope to build an international collective of co-workers, which step by step can develop to an independent international networking force, servicing social movements and organisations towards an issue-orientated “unity in diversity” for broadly rooted, clearly targeted and efficient transnational action. The specific approach of our journalistic project includes an orientation on open debates and discourses from movements for movements in a spirit of solidarity and respect for each other. Reclaiming spaces with it’s communication tools and spaces of reflection wants to cooperate with all existing or new networks and movements struggling for the right to housing, land and city.

Accepted contributions will be published under http://www.reclaiming-spaces.org. The first issue will be published in Pdf format and eventually printed out pending funding. This first issue of the reclaiming-spaces magazine is a collective experiment. Besides the content, it is of high priority to build a network of contributing authors linked with local movements. Please feel free to ask for more details and get in dialogue with us. The reclaiming spaces editing group of issue 01 Laura Colini, Constance Carr, Knut Unger, Massimo A. Allamandola