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?

community and economy, sustainability and justice

I wrote this to a newly forming group called the Charlottesville Relocalization Community:

We need community. We need a powerful social network. We need relationships. We need each other. Effective organizing is usually based on strong relationships. If the relationships are solid then you can face whatever comes.

But community is not just about relationships, it's about culture. Community is about expressing values and teaching lessons through stories, through art, through music. It is where we learn about ourselves and each other, and our relationship to the world. It is where we learn to honor and to celebrate. We need venues to create a resilient social fabric of satisfying relationships and meaningful culture.

We need a system of economics: systems and structures for the creation, exchange, and distriubtion of goods and services. Much of our lifestyles are defined by the choices provided in the economic system we live in. Changing our lifestyles, our purchasing patterns and our use of material resources is a key element to addressing the ecological and economic crises we face.

More than that, we need to change our system of economics. We need an economic system that supports and encourages work that make healthy people and a healthy planet. We need an economic system that provides everyone with opportunities to contribute to that effort and that also guarantees that their basic needs will be met.

We need to see community and economy as intrinsically interlinked. We need a coherent vision of what a just and sustianable human society might look like, and we need to build the relationships and the plan of action that will get us there.

I offer this in the hopes that others will share their thoughts on the vision and mission of relocalizing charlottesville. I think Dawn's first stab is fantastic, and I imagine that a synthesis of the groups thoughts and dialog will make it even better.

my non-negotiables

I've been saying for some time that I'm pretty flexible about the kinds of community related projects I'm involved with. This is true and it isn't true. I'm pretty flexible about many things. I hold tolerance as a high value. But there are some things that I need in order to feel good about investing my time and energy.

Recently, it seems I was losing touch with this, getting confused. Kassia gave me some feedback that I was coming across more forcefully in my conversations, expressing more of a "this is how things need to be" attitude. So, I thought, maybe I should write down what my non-negotiables are so I can be clear up front about that. I told this to a couple friends and one of them said, oh cool, so what are your top 5? Off the cuff, this is what I identified, which helped me realize that I really am pretty clear about this. Here's a slightly refined version of what I said.

My 5 non-negotiables:

1. Continually working towards the creation of an ecologically sustainable urban habitat

2. A collective commitment towards healthy, functional, and cooperative social dynamics

3. That each member holds a personal commitment to their personal/spiritual growth, and the view that that growth is integral to making the world a better place ("good for one's self, good for others")

4. A collective commitment to staying socially and politically engaged with the larger community and larger society, including acting as a social hub and a base of activities for activism and organizing.

5. Supporting and assisting in the formation of other cooperative/collective/communal living and/or working groups/projects/entities


Also very important:

Aesthetics and architecture that are beautiful and functional in the aim of a health, sustainable community.

Sharing in the growing and eating of food. Dinner every night (not that everyone must be at every dinner) is minimum. Also, that food is there to be eaten - if it doesn't have a name on it, it's all yours.

being uncomfortable

the people I want close to me are those that are willing to be uncomfortable
to ask themselves, and be asked uncomfortable questions
to look at the parts of themselves that make them uncomfortable
to sit comfortably in uncomfortable situations
to face uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world
to make changes to themselves and their lives that are uncomfortable
but that will help to make the world a better place

doing shit

"I don't need networking, I need people who are going to do shit." That was Alexis speaking, a friend and long-term activist organizer in Charlottesville, VA. I'd voiced my concern that cooperatives and collectives tend to come together around one or two highly motivated individuals, and that this ends up creating dysfunctional power dynamics down the road. "That's a 3rd or 4th tier problem," he said. "One of the cornerstone radio stations of the Pacifica network is incredibly dysfunctional, but they're why you have alternative news radio. A dysfunctional organization is better than no organization."

I reluctantly agreed, but I wasn't willing to leave it at that. What would it take for a group to come together, all of whom are motivated, responsible, and "doing shit" to for an organization? "You need a social network, otherwise people drift off when they find partners and want to have kids. That's what Kat (Kinkade - founder of Twin Oaks Community) pointed out. The only problem is you need a social network to create a social network."

"And there's the problem of economics," said Sue, co-founder of Little Flower Catholic Worker. "When people are busy getting their needs met they don't have time to do all these cool activist projects, let alone build the social network."

These two factors seem to form the crux of the problem, which, in my mind, all boils down to basic human needs, both material and social. Providing for these needs through systems and structures, organizations and institutions, that are based on a deep understanding of sustainability and justice, is both what alternative movements should be doing and what they need to be doing to grow.

And to accomplish this, yes, we need people who are going to do shit, and, I believe we need the networking, or, as my friend Jenny calls it, cross-pollinating. "It'd be great if y'all are going to start some kind of communal household that will also be a hub for the social network." Indeed, and not just for the purposes of socializing, but for bringing people together from different networks, organizations, and communities to help identify potential relationships both material and social.

Back in Portland, during a meeting I helped organize on fostering the emergence of alternative economies, Rebecca, Portland State University professor and avid anti-racism advocate, said "look, we just identified at least half a dozen organizations without even trying. I'm sure there are dozens more. Is anyone going around to these organizations and asking them what they need and what they can offer?" "Huh, no," was the cynical reply. "Why not?" "Most people involved in alternative organizations aren't interested in that stuff. They just want to focus on their group, either because their in it for the image, or the social life, or because they just want to make sure their group stays afloat."

Still, I though, someone should be asking those questions: what do you need? What can you offer? I'll be that someone. To me, this strikes at the essence of cross-pollinating, which, once Jenny articulated the concept to me last Fall, is what I realized I just do without thinking about it.

But I do agree with Alexis, we need people who are going to "do shit." If we are going to have the kind of social network and base of resources we need to grow the movement we need more nodes, we need more places for people to get involved, more places from which both relationships and projects can emerge. I'll be one of those people and I'll help create those places.

For me (not necessarily for anyone else), this is where my balance is, with my head in the clouds and my feet planted firmly in the earth, the merging of dirt and dreams. This is the work that has finally allowed me to understand the concept of having a "calling." This is the work that viscerally, I know I have to do. I've made my choice, and now I have no choice, and it is a great feeling.

my body's story

Recently my dear friend Caroline wrote my (and many others) the following:

"I am currently in Barcelona, attending an art school for a semester, and i'm about to embark on the most ambitious project i've ever undertaken.

It's conceptualized around the idea of disconnection from the body. I'm still forming my exact words and thoughts around it, but it's basically the idea that disconnection from our physical self is the root of many of the struggles we face, both as individuals and in society.

My goal is to use this project as a vehicle for those ideas. What i need from my friends, peers, acquaintances, enemies, and folks on the street is your body story. I'm not looking for a well rounded essay on your entire life's experience of your body (though it could be that, if that's what you wanted), but something simple, basic, and essential. It could be a trauma or a joy, a history or an accident - anything. Anything."

So, this is what I wrote...

I remember being a kid and feeling invincible. I remember my friends and I riding our bikes down this long bumpy hill, no hands, arms up high, exhilarated. I remember clambering through the canopy of entangled conifers, or over the thick limbs of eucalyptus trees. I remember rolling down sand dunes, hiding in the brush.

I remember feeling very free, light. There was very little distinction between my body and the world around me.

We moved when I was 10, and social pressures came to the fore of my experience. I shut down emotionally, and became more physically rigid. One didn't have adventures - one played sports. Very particular kinds of movements, imbued with conformity and posturing. At home I became the proverbial couch potato. I had almost no friends for 3 years. My parents marriage was falling apart and the restrictions on behavior slackened. It wasn't uncommon for me to spend 10 hrs a day in front of the television eating junk food. And then my parents told me they were getting divorced and my world came apart.

I remember feeling confused, heavy. My body was full of emotions I didn't know how to express or process.

By the time I was 14 things were improving. I had friends again. I was even in love, a kind of tortured love, which was all the sweeter for its agony. I started having adventures again. I started shedding the weight of the last 5 years. Voluntarily, I stopped watching TV and started eating better.

When I was 19 I was taken to my first contact improv dance jam, we're various radical faeries, large, muscular, sweet gay men were more than happy to help me explore the ways my body could move. I took a yoga class, an aikido class. I started spinning fire. Yet the existential
dilemma of entering adulthood uninitiated started taking its toll, and I sunk into substance abuse. I still had adventures, but there was always this nagging, stinging, tinge of self-doubt.

I remember feeling free, yet lethargic, depressed, yet open to the possibilities of the adult life I was entering. I was in my body, but my heart was spinning, scared, excited.

Now, at 28, even at 28, I gain weight easier and my body is heavier, slower. I don't think it has to be this way. It's what I've chosen, though perhaps not consciously. Over the past years I somehow chose DJing over dancing, meditating over yoga. I feel good, happy. I've passed through the angst of my twenties and know who I am, and am at peace with who I am. Mostly. I feel like my body and I are like an old married couple. We know each other incredibly well, yet there's a certain depth of intimacy that seems no longer attainable.

I wonder, how do I fall in love with my body again?