SWOMP - Amsterdam

SWOMP (in Dutch) stands for Slimme Woonwagenbewoners Op Mooie Plekjes, which roughly translates to Smart Wagon-people on Beautiful Places. It's a unique and creative expression of the strong squatting movement in Amsterdam, using small trailer homes on vacant lots instead of occupying a flat or whole building.

In at least some european countries squatting is legal under certain circumstances, and if its done properly (and with some luck) it can be very hard for the authorities to displace squatters. Squatter cafes, (often former flats) dot the city and act as social hubs for the network and bases for organizing. The Mollie (anarchist slang for mollitov cocktail) hosts nightly activities such as community dinners, peak-oil preparedness discussions, film screenings, and game nights. Every Monday is the planning meeting for the weekly squatting action.

The SWOMP site we visited is the 4th of its kind (the first three having already been shut down.) The vacant lot was actually not vacant when a squatting action was first planned. It was an abandoned school. The city had been deliberating for over a year what to do with the building. When the city got wind that a group was planning on squatting it, they decided to demolish it. The squatting action was planned for Sunday. The wrecking crew came on Friday. By Sunday all that was left was a lot of sand and some remnants of brick foundation. Little did the city know they were creating the perfect venue for a SWOMP action.

The SWOMPers brought in 4 trailers and erected a 'fortress' around them. They tapped into left over water and sewage piping, set up 3 solar panels, and planted gardens. There is also a complex lock-down system hidden in the most inaccessible part of the fortress, in case the police show up (the entire structure would have to be dismantled to remove the people inside.) One of our favorite aspects is an urban gardening innovation using a pallet stood on end, lined with cloth, and stuffed with dirt. Poke holes in the cloth, plant seeds, and you've got a vertical garden. I have fantasies of covering the whole outside wall of a building with these things. You could cover your house in food!

This site has been occupied now for 4 months. The city recently polled the neighbhors about the lot. They suggested various alternative plans (like a playground or park) and asked what the neighbors wanted. Most said that they actually liked the squatters there. The city will probably shut it down eventually. Fortunately, it could take the bureaucracy well over a year to do so. I wonder how long something like this would last in Washington DC. 24 hrs maybe? Generally, squatting in Europe happens on a level far beyond anywhere in the U.S. Why this level of tolerance, and even acceptance, in Europe?

Squatting still has something of a heroic and romantic quality to it, even for many mainstream Europeans. People seem to feel a sense of sympathy and appreciation for what squatting represents. Fundamentally, squatting is (in part) a protest against homelessness and the exploitation of people through the privitization of a basic human right. I've been reading Earth Democracy by Vandana Shiva. She talks a lot about the concept of the 'commons' and the history of how the commons in Europe and in India were privatized. In the US, holding common land is not a part of our historic consciousness. But it is still part of the European consciousness, and examples of it do still exist in places. I imagine that sympathy for squatting comes in part from a low-level subconscious resentment lingering in collective consciousness over the loss of the commons and the wide-spread institution of wage-slavery over the last few hundred years.

Sympathy for squatters isn't as good as a mass movement to reclaim the commons, but hopefully it's a step in that direction.

For more info:

http://www.earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/node/21554

Their homepage is http://swomp.wordpress.com/ It's in Dutch, but if you do a google search for it there will be an option to translate it.

civilized countries

"There are civilized countries in the world, we just don't live in one," said Pax. "Why don't we move here?" I asked. "Because it's always raining or cold or both at the same time," replied Hawina.

This conversation was precipitated by my amazement at discovering the waste bin for the municipal compost pick-up outside Irene's door (Hawina's neice, who we're staying with right now). "Yeah?" said Hawina. "Of course. It's the Netherlands." The compost pick-up had been the last straw.

Immediately upon arrival in Heerlen I was blown away (again) by the layout of the city streets. Car lanes are probably 25% thinner than in the U.S., there is rarely more than one lane in each direction, and the average size of motor vehicles reflects the size of the lanes. Sidewalks are huge, and there are bike lanes everywhere - often specially designed lanes that separate them from both cars and pedestrians.

Last June, Kassia and I attended the keynote speech at the Towards Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, OR. The speaker was the former commissioner for parks and recreation as well as transportation of Bogata Columbia. Portland had just been awarded Platinum status as a bicycle friendly city by the League of American Bicyclists. He was congratulatory, but also told the audience not to spend too much time patting themselves on the back.

Portland is good, he said, not great. And sometimes, he said, it's much harder to go from good to great than from bad to great. He showed pictures of how they'd transformed Bogota's nightmare of transportation infrastructure into a veritable paradise. They'd designed the bike and pedestrian path network so that it is possible to traverse the city without ever crossing a car lane, while intertwining them with the public parks. Simulataneously, they reneovated all the parks to include pavillions, stages, and other public gathering places, and began organizing concerts, festivals, and other social activities.

He showed pictures of bicycle friendly cities around the world. Recently in the C'ville weekly, the author of an article about bicycling in Charlottesville had the audacity to repeat the line that Portland is the Amsterdam of the U.S. Hardly. Even Heerlen, a medium sized city in the far south of the country (which folks in Amsterdam consider very backwards) blows Portland out of the water as a bicycle, pedestrian, and public transit friendly city.

The day after we arrived we visited Oma (Hawina's mom) in what could be considered the Heerlen suburbs. She lives in a fairly new andtasteless 12 story apartment building. Not much to speak of there. But when Willow and I went outside to find the nearby playground, I was again blown away. We walked around a neighborhood with clustered housing units, clustered (for the most part) parking areas, narrow two-lane thoroughfares, and even narrower one-lane bricked driveways connecting the parking areas to the roads. Pedestrian walk-ways link the housing clusters, lined with trees, bushes, and other facets of simple landscaping, and in the middle of the neighborhood was a large public green with a playground.

Minus the usual facet of a common building, I could easily have been walking through any number of co-housing communities in the U.S. When Willow and I got back to Oma's apartment I asked her who owns all that space? Who owns the houses? The answer was that the park, the landscaping, and the paths and roads are all city land, maintained by city employees who are often part of a special hiring program for disadvantaged and handicapped individuals. The housing units are generally owned by the people who live in them. It's like the whole city is a co-housing community.

It's amazing being in this place where all these aspects of radical environmentalism and social engineering are assumed, even taken for granted. When Hawina said, "yeah, of course," about the municipal compost pick-up I thought, what would it take to get something like that started in C'ville? You'd probably have to start it as a private business first to prove it was financially viable and then maybe the city would buy it or start their own.

Several days ago, I was reading a news piece on the failure of the first bailout package to make it through congress. There was some quote from some conservative having something to do with the slippery slope towards socialism. This is a common argument against significant increases of taxpayer dollars towards public lands and public services. Somehow people in the U.S. still seem to believe that this kind of government activity will hamper prosperity and liberty. What will it take to prove to them that this is untrue?

zeitgeist

"Portland is where the zeitgeist in America is," Thomas, another Twin Oaks refugee, said to me recently.
"The what?" I asked.
"It's a German word. It means 'spirit of the age.'"

Intuitively I understood what he meant. I also understood why I'm so attracted to Portland. I've always been attracted to the cutting edge, the newest, deepest understanding of, well, just about anything. And in particular, as I have begun to think more and more in terms of what I should do with my life to create the greatest possible good in the world, Portland's identity as the premier green city in the country is a big draw.

Identity isn't enough. There seems to be a reality backing it up. Brush at Tryon Life Community Farm said to me, "the city likes the attention and realizes that it's because of all these young radicals doing interesting things, but the city's not quite sure what to do with them. There are more and more coming, but there are also people who are attracted to Portland who are just going to live mainstream lifestyles. That's easier to plug in on. So we've got to give these radicals things to do that will also allow them to afford to live here."

I'm writing this piece in the dining room of the Emma Goldman Finishing School, an egalitarian, income-sharing, urban commune of (currently) 10 adults and 3 kids. Emma's and Ganas on Staten Island, NYC, are the only urban intentional communities doing this level of resource sharing that I'm aware of. Why is this important? Economic justice. Egalitarian economics. Creating a system of mutual support to escape, or at least create a buffer against the mainstream, capitalist economy. It's not just about creating a groovy, comfortable situation for your little group. The way Emma's sees it, "[w]e work to create this future in the here and now by building alternative economic, political, and cultural infrastructure designed to oppose and replace the dominant system. We aim to create a home that embodies our shared values, provides a fun and supportive environment in which to live, and helps forge a dense network of relations with people and institutions outside of our community... Our home is a place of self-education, experimentation, and radical democracy - a community where the means and ends are one." (Emma Goldman Finishing School, Community Values: Root Document)

The reason why I'm more attracted to urban settings right now is because I think we need to create these systems on ever-increasing scales in order to counter the environmentally and socially destructive (I would go as far as to say suicidal) effects of the mainstream socio-economic system. According to The Endless City, a project by The Urban Age, 10% of the world's population lived in cities in 1900. Today, it's 50%. In 2050 the number is estimated to reach 75%. The anti-civilizationist Derrick Jensen argues that cities are inherently unsustainable. Whether or not that's true they're not going away any time soon, and must be made more sustainable. And sustainability is not just about ecology. It's about economics, politics, and human relationships.

Raine Eisler in her book The Real Wealth of Nations proposes an economic system that is based on caring and caregiving. This sees social relationships as integral, as fundamental, whereas classical economics only considers individuals in their roles as employers, employees, and consumers. She points out that the household economy, the unpaid community economy, and the environmental economy, which are all given little or no value in the dominant economic paradigm, are the foundation. How can we have a healthy economy without healthy people? How can we have healthy people without healthy communities? How can we have healthy communities without a healthy environment? And how can we have any of these without economic policies and practices that take this reality into account?

The economist Bernard Lietaer also points out the fallacy of an economic system that does not take relationships into consideration. He says, "different currency systems create different kinds of relationships... If I want to cooperate with you then I'll create a currency that actually creates cooperation... The economy of the future is going to be one of relationships, the choice of relationships will determine the type of currency we should be using." <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjYDhuLWUnE>

Then there's social ecology. Social ecology "holds that present ecological problems are rooted in deep-seated social problems, particularly in dominatory hierarchical political and social systems. These have resulted in an uncritical acceptance of an overly competitive grow-or-die philosophy. It suggests that this cannot be resisted by individual action such as ethical consumerism but must be addressed by more nuanced ethical thinking and collective activity grounded in radical democratic ideals. The complexity of relationships between people and with nature is emphasised, along with the importance of establishing social structures that take account of this."

Annie Leonard, in her video The Story of Stuff points out that viable solutions are being developed for large scale systems: Green chemistry, zero waste, closed loop production, local living economies, ecopsychology, social ecology, deep ecology, permaculture, etc. Raine Eisler references her involvement with pioneers in chaos and complexity theory and how these theories provide scientific basis for this new brand of integrated-systems theories.

We now have what the counter-culture movement of the sixties lacked: a creditable and understandable base of academic and scientific work to support the practical application of our values and ideals. Mix this with a counter-culture that has been continuing to develop over the last several decades: aspects of eastern and new age philosophy as well as reclaimed christian and jewish philosophy, hip hop culture, anarchist-DIY culture, an explosion of underground music and art and the technology for independent mass-distribution, home gardening, community gardens, a steady increase in collective living situations...

But in my opinion the academic and scientific work has surpassed the practical application, which is dangerous. "The map is not the territory," as one of my teachers, Steven Young, says, and "practice and theory must go together," says, S. N. Goenka, another of my teachers. Theory without practice can become irrelevant, or simply useless.

Portland is where I see the most developed practical application of this body of theory. There's a strong, cohesive social culture supporting organizing and innovation, a solid coalition of NGO's with a mission of creating a "livable future" for all city residents, and a progressive, responsive city government. It's where the zeitgeist in America is.

It may be that I chose not to live there for more than a few months. But in that time I plan to learn as much as possible and be as deeply inspired as possible, so that where ever I go I will take this zeitgeist, the spirit of the age with me.