Where
neighbourhood counter-powers put down roots.
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Community garden in Puerta del Sol occupation during M15 demonstrations in Madrid. Credit: Jose Luis Fernández Casadevante, Kois.The main feature of power is
that it inevitably creates resistance, a process Michel Foucault, for
example, studied in detail. There are no harmonious societies. Conflicts of
interest between different social groups have been a constant throughout
history, and are probably the main driver of social change.
Counter-power emerged as a means of collective action whereby the injustices suffered by
subordinate or oppressed social groups become politicized, either in the form
of silent rebellions that remain latent in everyday life or through challenges
that are publicly and openly declared.
The forms this collective
action takes have varied over time, due to factors such as technological
developments, cultural changes or socio-institutional processes. The idea of
counter-power has always been ambivalent: on the one hand, it is defined negatively
by its capacity to say NO and prevent the hegemonic elites from carrying out
their agenda; on the other, it transmits an assertive strength, a capacity to
say YES and deploy new sensibilities, desires, ways of organizing and
alternative lifestyles. Destituent and constituent power are two sides of the
same coin.
Our cognitive reflexes tend to
associate social struggles with images of revolts, mass mobilizations and epic
insurrections, where conflict is dramatized. In the urban context, its
mythological architecture would be the barricade – an ephemeral construction
that symbolizes two worlds in conflict, made of the magic cobblestones that
rise up to form fortresses described by Baudelaire. But what if, rather
than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms of a space such
as a community garden? But
what if, rather than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms
of a space such as a community garden?
We would speak of defending
the existence of spaces where the lives of local communities and plants are
cared for, food is grown and social relationships are harvested, of
neighbourhood and environmental ecosystems threatened by the market and urban
policies.
Let’s think of the workers’
movement with its unions and parties, consumer and worker cooperatives, mutual
societies, newspapers and magazines, folk schools, cultural centres and
libraries, people’s houses, choirs, bands, excursion clubs, theatre groups,
women’s associations, mutual support networks in neighbourhoods… We will find a
whole world run according to its own principles and rules – a constellation of
community institutions where people could socialize, practise solidarity, and
reproduce a culture and lifestyles that operate independently of power.
Does it not seem reductionist
to think that this complex multiplicity, overflowing with life, is a mere
exercise in the accumulation of forces awaiting the day of the revolution? Counter-power
interests us because it refers to inhabiting a conflict without being obsessed
with confrontation, and acknowledges that building new social relations can be
a gesture of radical defiance. This connects with historical socialist and
anarchist tendencies whose efforts were aimed at developing initiatives and
projects that foresaw what a non-capitalist society would look like.
Long ago, the Labour Party
activist G. D. H. Cole wisely stated that the revolution should look as little
like a civil war as possible and as similar as possible to a record of events
and a culmination of existing trends. This is why we emphasize the positive,
constituent dimension of counter-power and track experiences that are able to
transform our cities and people’s lives, bringing about small-scale radical
changes at the same time. We will mention a few of them and then focus on one
example: community gardens, specifically in Madrid.
Resisting austerity urbanism
A city is
more than a place in space, it is a drama in time - P. Geddes
The financial crash that began
in 2008 put an end to the illusion of a model of economic growth increasingly
disconnected from meeting social needs. Cities have borne the brunt of the
dramatic social and economic impacts of the crash (household debt, evictions,
high unemployment, energy poverty, inability to afford food, deterioration and
privatization of public service, etc.), which have given rise to a serious loss
of social cohesion.
This process was aggravated by
the application of an austerity
urbanism that
opened the door to the private sector in service provision and management,
giving it an ever more important role in the definition of strategic guidelines
for urban transformation.
This restructuring of urban policies is based on processes such as the
promotion of megaprojects and mega-events, public–private partnerships (PPPs),
opening up the most interesting sectors to foreign investment, unequal public
service provision depending on the purchasing power of different neighbourhoods,
gentrification, and the commodification of sectors such as environmental
management, green areas or even the public space itself.
Investors, property developers
and large corporations have driven the creeping commodification of the city,
with the result that markets – disconnected from social needs and free from
political oversight – determine the direction taken by urban governments. And
citizens have suffered the dramatic consequences: market authoritarianism and
the erosion of local democracies, booming corruption, an increase in
environmentally unsustainable processes and an exponential growth in
inequality. Investors,
property developers and large corporations have driven the creeping
commodification of the city, with the result that markets determine the
direction taken by urban governments.
In Spain, the official
narrative of the crisis began to be questioned publicly with the emergence of
the 15M movement in 2011, which launched the most intense cycle of collective
action in the country’s recent history. The protest camps and assemblies formed
micro-cities
at the heart of a larger city
in a sort of project proposal for other cities, generating an atmosphere more
favourable to social change.
Against austerity urbanism,
what emerged from civil society was cooperative urbanism, intensive in its
capacity to innovate to solve problems, citizen leadership and more democratic
ways of understanding the public sphere.
In Spain, responses to the
crisis have taken different forms: campaigns to stop evictions and recover
homes, led by the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas,
PAH); citizen tides in defence of
public services such as health and education, bringing together users,
professionals and trade unions; the restoration of buildings to set up
community centres; the organization of food banks for vulnerable families;
neighbourhood support and solidarity networks against the exclusion of migrants
from health services; or the takeover of abandoned properties to plant
community gardens.
The
plurality of resistance is not just defensive action against the loss of rights
and the lack of resources and basic services, but a recovery of collective
thinking and proposal-making.
The greatest successes of this
plurality of counter-powers have been to discredit the story about the crisis;
to put a stop to the most aggressive policies to privatize health, education or
water; to popularize acts of civil disobedience (stopping evictions,
occupations, refusing to pay higher taxes on medicines, medical care for
undocumented people); to present popular legislative initiatives aimed at
changing the legal framework, the outstanding example being the PAH proposal on
the right to housing; and to develop a non-hegemonic use of international law,
leading to several condemnations of the Spanish state for human rights
violations. This is not just defensive action against the loss of rights and
the lack of resources and basic services, but a recovery of collective thinking
and proposal-making.This cycle of mobilization has consolidated a modest,
imperceptible geography of resistance that takes the form of different ways of
thinking about, imagining and inhabiting the territory.
Whether intentionally or
unconsciously, in solving problems counter-powers tend to promote alternative
urban models where different lifestyles can develop. They do this by
re-signifying and politicizing concepts such as the neighbourhood or the public
space, and by producing places where new social and practical relationships can
be (re)built: community centres, community gardens, community-run equipment,
the reinvention of empty or under-used public spaces.
Living in a different way
implies the material construction of arenas where – albeit on a small,
fragmented scale – it is possible to reproduce other patterns of relationships
among people and between people and their surroundings.
Planning change in the city square
They can
cut all the flowers, but they can’t stop the coming of spring.- Pablo
Neruda.
This citizen counter-power was
enacted in the protest camps that from 2010 onwards spread to large cities all
over the world, from Tahrir Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, from Occupy Wall
Street to Gezi Park, as people demanded more democracy and rose up against
‘austericidal’ policies.
With thousands of people
living side by side in the protest camps, the public space was seen as a
collective, political site. The occupation of this space was ‘potentially
permanent and self-managed’, making
it a metaphor of another way of inhabiting the city, reinventing the public
space as a common space, ‘a performative representation of justice and
equality’, where people could protest in common, think in common, live
in common and explore alternative values in common.
The protest camps were
structured as temporary cities, with different spaces for different activities
and needs: children’s areas, libraries, communication and information centres,
dining areas, solar panels. In many of these camps, between the tarpaulins and
the assemblies, community gardens somehow also found a space that was sometimes
symbolic or evocative. Spaces where the community living in the camp imagined
itself and made plans for the future, such as in the Huerta del Sol in Madrid,
where there was a sign saying ‘if we last 40 days we will eat lettuces’.
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Mural of Teatro Polivalente Ocupato in Bolonia. Credit: Kois.Greek and Turkish Cypriot
activists from Occupy the Buffer Zone in Nicosia set up camp on the disputed
land. One of the ways they took ownership of this space, left a mark on it and
gave it a new meaning was the Greening up the Green Line action, which involved
building a small vegetable patch and ‘seed bomb’ workshops. These actions
sought to give a new meaning to the green of the so-called green line (the
demilitarized zone that separates the island), turning it into a cultivated
landscape. These were temporary, shifting spaces, designed to highlight
political demands and make links with other movements and spaces that were
already there.
In Occupy Rome, the city’s
guerrilla gardening groups and community garden (CG) collectives, organized
their first joint action with the design and construction of the Orto
Errante, based on movable vegetable
patches; Occupy Wall Street organized workshops and guided visits to the community
gardens in the Lower East Side;
in Barcelona, the agroecology movement attended various protests with a nomadic
garden, which ended up being seized by the police; and Occupy San Francisco
planted an organic garden opposite the headquarters of Monsanto.
Elsewhere, the protest camps
led to starting up projects that aimed to be permanent, such as Occupy the
Farm, an urban farm on an occupied
site in the University of California, Berkeley, or the People’s Peas Garden
located in a public park and run by Occupy Gardens Toronto, which was active
for five months until it was dismantled.
After the camps were taken
down, the seeds of ideas planted by these gardens germinated elsewhere, as
illustrated by the Puerta del Sol camp, which was dismantled to shouts of
‘We’re not leaving, we’re moving to your conscience’.
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Mural of Adelfas community garden. 'Many small gardens cultivate small peoples who will change the world' Credit: Alberto del RioWhen neighbourhood assemblies
in Spain start to work on their local environments, they often develop
community garden projects. This has happened from Madrid and Barcelona to
Burgos or Málaga, where the very name of the gardens reflects those origins:
Horts Indignats in Barcelona, Huerta Dignidad in Málaga (in reference to the
2014 Marches for Dignity).
Urban agriculture has become a
means to denounce speculation and demand a new culture of the territory. It has
also enabled the creation of social and economic alternatives linking a wide
range of social actors and collectives, from green activist groups to
unemployed people’s assemblies, from neighbourhood associations to popular
solidarity networks.
Community gardens or rooted
counter-power
The
gardens symbolised the opposition to what was happening. The possibility of
building a better city based on the interests of local communities, an
expression of people working together. The opposite of racial segregation,
individualism and the urban renewal strategies that benefit only the rich and
powerful.- C. Khan
In common with other critical
social movements, the community gardens presented their demands under the umbrella
of the right to the city,
understood not as a legal claim, but as citizens’ right to intervene in the
city, to build it and transform it.
This symbolic framework can be
used to connect with other essential demands (against neighbourhood segregation
and stigmatization, forced displacements, evictions, the criminalization of
poverty) for imagining a socially just city, into which experiences like the
community gardens incorporate issues such as urban ecology and food sovereignty.
The urban agriculture movement
reveals and poses questions that go beyond the gardens themselves, calling on
people to participate and share responsibility for our lifestyles and how we
manage resources that are located beyond the city limits but are essential for
the city’s subsistence in a context of social and ecological crisis,
exemplified by climate collapse and the energy crisis.
Together with the right to the
city, another central pillar in the ideas and practices of the urban
agriculture movement is the notion of the commons. Indeed, the CG defined
themselves as the urban commons from the outset. Thus, for Karl
Linn they are neighbourhood
commons, meeting spaces built and managed by people living in degraded areas of
deprived neighbourhoods.
The urban commons revive traditional
practices of community management
of natural, strategic resources the community needs to reproduce, and adapt
them to the urban setting. One of the strengths that gives the community
gardens their radical nature and transformative capacity is their goal of
creating a community in the broad sense, around sharing and collectively
managing a space, resources (soil, seeds, water, tools), certain benefits
(harvests, social recognition), and a group of people who define their own
rules and organization.
This has led to the
community gardens also being defined as green urban commons: ‘green spaces located in urban
settings, with diverse forms of ownership and a wide range of rights, including
the right to create their own management arrangements and to decide who they
want to include in that system of management’.
The community gardens are
self-organized, non-hierarchical experiences that combine a critique of the
dominant model of the city with the mobilization of emancipatory practices and
ideas. Against the ideology of homo
economicus, the idea of the community refers to the way in which people
create their own community intentionally, reflexively and by engaging in
dialogue, generating groups that see themselves as inclusive, open, flexible,
porous and rooted in the neighbourhood. Against the ideology of homo
economicus, the idea of the community refers to the way in which people
create their own community intentionally, reflexively and by engaging in
dialogue.
Neighbourhood belonging
The neighbourhood is that
sphere between the productive and the reproductive, between the private, known,
domestic space and the public space, comprising the larger, more abstract city
that cannot be encompassed in its totality.
In the community gardens, the
sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is defined culturally rather than
geographically, seeking to involve and appeal to neighbours whose definition as
a group is likewise flexible, as it refers to people who work collectively in
the neighbourhood and not so much to their place of residence.
This sense of community
belonging that characterizes the urban gardens is underlined by a gardener from
Madrid, an unemployed architect: ‘It’s not a question of each person having
their own plot, or each person managing, working and harvesting a separate,
fenced-off area. That’s something people find very unsettling – they’re
surprised that you’d go and put in the work without knowing what you’re going
to get out of it’.
Because what is grown is not
for commercial purposes, the gardens promote a sort of gift economy, where what
each person contributes and what they receive is not quantified.
Another gardener from the same
garden explains it like this: ‘This spade is not mine, neither is this plant.
Because all of it is everyone’s, I have more of a sense of belonging. It feels
more important to me, I have to look after it and defend it more than if it was
mine or someone else’s. It’s everyone’s space and no-one’s space – a common
good that we can all enjoy but that doesn’t belong to us’. For another
gardener, ‘Being a community means working more on the basis of questions than
answers. Things get decided through consultation, nobody imposes their views’.
For a gardener in one of
Madrid’s oldest gardens, Adelfas, the community garden is ‘a place where we can
go back to what a neighbourhood used to be, talk to the neighbours in a space
that’s not commercial or defined by consumerism’. Another adds: ‘It’s a place
where we do things collectively and connect with the earth, a place to be with
people who have something in common, a part of the neighbourhood that’s really
ours, unlike the park that’s cold and impersonal’.
The
community gardens are self-organized, non-hierarchical experiences that combine
a critique of the dominant model of the city with the mobilization of
emancipatory practices and ideas.
Agroecology, self-management
and social ties are the three features that define their work at the local
level, where people grow food and harvest social relationships. Because they
are in the public space, the community gardens are highly visible, attractive
experiences, and very active in making connections with other initiatives
(community centres, neighbourhood associations, consumer groups, cyclists’
collectives, education associations and schools, for instance), which means
that they reweave the local social fabric.
As time goes by, the meeting
space and relationships with other people become key to the group’s cohesion
and compete in attractiveness with the gardening dimension, which was initially
more relevant. As one gardener says, ‘When we didn’t know each other so well,
we mostly talked about plants. Now we know each other we talk more about what’s
going on in our lives’.
Another gardener, the
treasurer of one of the largest gardens in Madrid, Huerto Batán, expresses her
motivation in similar terms: ‘Now, rather than the tomatoes, the important
thing is relating to other people’.
As well as the immediate
activity, the community gardens prefigure what people would like their city to
look like in the future, expressing the need for neighbourhoods that are more
participatory, shared spaces, together with the introduction of more
eco-urbanism (sustainable transport, proximity, renewable energies, composting,
closing cycles).
Madrid community garden history
The community gardens were
born in local communities that organized to regenerate degraded urban spaces on
a small scale by occupying abandoned properties, spaces between buildings or
underused green areas.
These empty spaces once again
became inhabited, combining a modest reconstruction of the site, emphasizing
the use value of the urban space, with a relational rehabilitation that seeks
to restore the quality of the space by intensifying social relations
(organizing activities such as street parties, community meals or cultural
initiatives).
The protest side of the
gardens was there from the start, revealing how far urban development policies
and expert knowledge have diverged from the needs and aspirations of the city’s
inhabitants. The action of occupying the space reflects the absence of ways to
engage in a fruitful dialogue with local institutions, and reclaims the right
of communities and citizens to take ownership of the public space and apply
‘collaborative planning and management practices to recreate it and think about
what it should look like in the future’.
The movement began at the
start of the twenty-first century with a few isolated initiatives taken forward
by neighbourhood associations and ecologists, who by 2010 had set up coordination
networks such as the Red de Huertos Urbanos Comunitarios de Madrid (RED). Since
the 15M movement in 2011 many neighbourhood assemblies have been setting up
gardens in different areas of Madrid, definitively locating this issue in the
public sphere and putting it on the political agenda.
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Sharing a meal in Adelfas community garden. Credit: Alberto del RioThe RED serves to raise the
profile of all the initiatives, encourage the exchange of experiences (visits,
meeting), share resources (seed nursery, seed exchange, buying manure
collectively), create mutual support mechanisms and promote training events
(learning days, courses), as well as offering a resource space that can provide
advice and support to people and groups interested in taking forward new
initiatives.
Right from the start, the
instability inherent in the occupation of land and the scarcity of resources
led the RED to seek dialogue with the Madrid City Council, in order to
regularize the status of the gardens and push for the launch of a municipal
programme that would enable them to form part of the city’s green
infrastructure on a permanent basis.
Between internal tensions and
lengthy assembly meetings, sites being dismantled and occupied, protests and
photo exhibitions, support from universities and international recognition
(UN-HABITAT’s Good Practice Award for Urban Sustainability), the RED gained
legitimacy as an interlocutor in negotiations.
Following a lengthy hard
bargaining with one of Spain’s most neoliberal municipal governments, the
status of the first 17 community gardens was regularized in 2014.
The gardens are located on
sites categorized as green areas, and the right to use them is awarded in a
public bidding process. In the list of terms and conditions a balance has been
struck between respect for the uniqueness of citizen initiatives and their
autonomy, while offering legal security to the City Council, in an innovative
procedure that could be replicated in other cities.
This major victory was won
after exploring the shifting sands of dialogue with the city government,
without dying in the attempt, proposing new forms of engaging with state
institutions from positions of conflict and not just confrontation, eventually
progressing towards dialogue and even cooperation.
This giant step has enabled
the community agriculture initiatives in the capital to consolidate and in just
a few years to increase to nearly 60 regularized projects today.
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Map of Madrid community gardensThe community garden map is
the opposite of a tourist map, which shows only the city centre, because the
low-income neighbourhoods predominate, especially those on the outskirts where
most initiatives are concentrated.
In the city centre, where
urban development is denser, it is much more difficult to find a physical
space. Even so, the decisive variable is the thick social and neighbourhood
fabric that the gardens require, which is more likely to be found in outlying
neighbourhoods.
The institutionalization
process is in the early stages and is gradually becoming consolidated,
respecting the autonomy and non-party-political nature of the initiatives. In
addition, since a municipalist coalition took over the City Council in 2015
further steps have been taken, advancing the joint development of public
policies aimed at recognizing and maximizing the creativity and collective
intelligence in our cities, involving citizens and the social fabric in
designing and implementing policies that concern them.
This has led to the
regularization of more gardens, including those located on non-residential land
on a temporary basis, the building of the Municipal Urban Gardening School,
consolidating a training plan to support community gardens jointly managed by
the Red de Huertos, and the launch of a pilot project for community
agro-composting.
Municipalism is a walking
paradox – discomforting to central government powers and business interests,
but also to local counter-powers, who are obliged to leave their comfort zone,
abandon the logic of resistance and accept a change in their identity that will
enable them to play a leading role in a scenario where securing new rights
becomes feasible. Counter-powers seen from above, powers seen from below.
The ‘city councils for change’
find themselves in an unusual and paradoxical position between the pragmatism
of the moment and the utopian impulse to bring about change. They are giving
life to a space where it is possible to create more suitable ecosystems and
environments for the experiments that are autonomously prefiguring another
society. These are local governments that facilitate, support, and strengthen
new forms of social institutions. These are local governments
that facilitate, support, and strengthen new forms of social institutions.
How do these green islands operate?
The community gardens are
organized as an assembly, where proposals are made and important decisions are
taken. They also operate with working groups that are set up to coordinate
specific tasks. Alongside these, are informal mechanisms based on thematic
leadership – the person who knows about the specific topic and can take the
initiative decides how to do it – and decision-making by those who are most
often present in the space.
The work draws on the
knowledge and experience of all the members, creating a climate of knowledge-sharing
and ongoing, collective knowledge-production in response to the problems that
arise.
Tasks tend to be organized
depending on each person’s preferences and knowledge, although there are
mechanisms to ensure that people take turns to do the most unpleasant ones –
such as sweeping or stirring the compost.
A gardener from Adelfas,
remarks how ‘there comes a time in this process when you have to do things you
wouldn’t necessarily choose to. You might like the idea of spending the day
with this person who’s a specialist in something and learn first-hand how they
do their work, but you take responsibility and do whatever it’s your turn to do
that day’.
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Working in Bombilla community garden. Credit: ZuloarkThe harvest – a motivation
more symbolic than material – is divided among everyone present and is seldom a
source of conflict. However, care is taken to ensure that it is shared out
fairly. On one occasion, an older man broke a bone in his foot while working in
the garden and was unable to go back for some time, but his share of each
harvest was set aside for him and someone would take it to his house since his
work had helped to grow the vegetables.
Some initiatives collect
modest cash contributions from members, although people who cannot afford to
pay are not excluded from joining the project. Others raise funds by making
food or selling merchandise − badges, canvas bags, etc.− as well as by
collecting voluntary individual contributions.
The practice of urban
ecological agriculture is often the main initial attraction. Later, working and
spending time with other people means that relationships tend to become more
important than the vegetable-growing tasks as such. Gradually, a network of
relationships is woven and encourages solidarity and mutual support.
Of course, as in any social
setting, there are disagreements and disputes over how to manage the space or
do the work, or because of misunderstandings. However, conflict is not usually
seen as something to avoid, but rather an issue to be addressed. This is why
some gardens in Madrid have developed their own regulations for dealing with
conflict, and even make use of mediation processes through the RED.
From
islands of green to an archipelago
The difference between a group
of islands and an archipelago is the existence of connections between them. Once
the gardens had put down roots in the neighbourhoods and become part of the
social ecosystem, they and the RED focused on building bridges, gaining more
allies, linking up with other campaigns and coordinating with other actors on
various scales.
The advocacy work done by the
community garden goes beyond their own neighbourhoods and their influence
extends to the city as a whole, where they are making their own specific
contribution to changing the urban model. These projects are involved in
multiple mobilization networks both at the urban and the translocal scale,
linked to citizen participation, food sovereignty and agroecology.
In 2015, the RED coordinated
the First National Meeting of Urban Community Gardens. The ultimate aim is to
transcend their own neighbourhood and become involved in a wider movement by
connecting these islands to others, eventually consolidating ever-expanding
archipelagos that break the bounds of established institutional structures and
dominant practices.
To sum up
Madrid’s gardens have gained
significant symbolic power as metaphors for social creativity, for citizens’
capacity to give abandoned spaces back their use value, for caring for nature
in the city, and for the building of alternatives by autonomous citizens.
As well as mobilizing
alternative ideas and becoming a means of protest, the community gardens have
been a valid practical way to bring the organizational dynamics and critical
discourses developed by the 15-M movement to neighbourhoods and municipalities.
They are also fostering
connections between the various pre-existing group or neighbourhood processes,
thus diversifying their participant profile thanks to their constructive and
inclusive nature.
Locally, the community gardens
bring together a range of feelings, demands and claims (environmental,
neighbourhood, political, relational), while simultaneously stimulating
processes of neighbourhood self-management that place an emphasis on direct
participation, taking ownership of the space, the rebuilding of identities and
the shared responsibility of the community as a whole for the different issues
that affect the people who live there.
These exercises in
micro-urbanism express people’s disagreement with the dominant model of the
city and the lifestyles it induces.
The community gardens are an
expression of the emergence of a cooperative urbanism, intensive in citizen
leadership and more democratic ways of understanding the public sphere. The
gardens imply processes of urban rehabilitation, both in the form of
small-scale material changes and, especially, in the form of relational
rehabilitation, in how links are developed among people and between people and
their surroundings.
A
garden doesn’t change the world; it changes the people who are going to change
the world.
The community gardens act on
the production and transformation of the urban space through their impact on
human relationships and lifestyles rather than via major works of physical
refurbishment. A
garden doesn’t change the world; it changes the people who are going to change
the world.
A habitable counter-power is
one that allows people to experience in the here and now the major features of
the future life to which we aspire, a process of immanent transformation that
cannot be reduced to strategic calculations regarding the accumulation of
forces and irreversible revolutions.
The anarchist Paul Goodman
used to say: ‘Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming
about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you
wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that
way now!’
As a mural in one Madrid
community garden says: ‘A garden doesn’t change the world; it changes the
people who are going to change the world’. The challenge for these projects is
to keep their more political contours without losing their capacity to bring
about change.
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Connecting the garden to the world. Photo-action against TTIP in Adelfas community garden. Credit: Manuel Muñoz
The original version of this article was first published by theTransnational Institute as part of their feature on State of Power 2018.
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On April 2, 2018 violent protests under
the banner ‘Bharath Bandh,’ (‘Shut Down India,’)
broke out across northern and central India, resulting in the closure of public transport systems, schools and shops. Ten people lost their lives, dozens were injured and hundreds
of protestors were arrested. The agitations were a response to an
unanticipated judgement by the Indian Supreme Court, which curbed the Scheduled
Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), one of the most powerful
anti-discrimination laws in the world.
