Towards a new citizen-centred urban social pact: the grass-roots approach of the Zero Evictions Campaign

In fact, after all these years, not one of the objectives or goals has been even partially achieved: 15% of the world population is subjected to forced eviction caused by foreign investment in heavily in-debted countries (Nairobi, Karachi, Mumbai, New Delhi, Istanbul, etc) or in countries undergoing the transition to a market economy (in Eastern Europe, including Russia), or by the privatisation and liberalisation of the real estate market (the European Union countries and the United States), ethnic cleansing (from the former Yugoslavia to the Congo and Italy), property speculation (Dominican Republic, Panama, etc), misunderstood environmental protection (Chennai, Ushuaia, etc), occupations and wars (Palestine, Colombia, Mexico and others), or speculation in the aftermath of natural disasters such as the Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

For the same reason there is little prospect of Objective 7-11 of the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals being fulfilled. The objective was to improve the living conditions of 100 million people by the year 2020, but it is more realistic to predict that there will be 700 million additional inhabitants of shanty towns.

The main reason for this discrepancy is the failure of the strategies that have conferred the main responsibility for housing development to the market, under the supposition that it would then be self-managing such that existing inequalities would have been corrected. Instead of improving living conditions in most cities, neoliberal globalisation has caused new problems stemming from the commercialisation of land and basic services, and from wasting finite resources such as water.

This phenomenon is causing a rapid loss of identity for urban communities and urban territories, rising segregation and the marginalisation of the poor, a growing violation of fundamental human rights as the housing right and the right to participate, indiscriminate rises in the cost of land, mass evictions and the elimination of counterbalances and basic norms, which crumble under the pressure of large sums of capital.

Furthermore, neoliberal policies and structural reform programmes have favoured the privatisation of public services all over the world and the transfer of basic responsibilities to local communities, both through local authorities and through NGOs, while the State fails to provide adequate funding for housing, concentrating only on welfare policies for the poor, whose numbers have risen everywhere during the last decade.

The reign of capital in third world cities can only lead to a world where the chilling predictions made by George Orwell in his famous book "1984" come true: cities where police control millions of poor inhabitants who survive with great difficulty alongside the official city. The only people who could doubt the truth of this assertion are those who are unfamiliar with the shortages suffered by the majority of the population in the cities of so-called developing countries, such as Lima, São Paulo, México DF, Buenos Aires, Abuja, Nairobi and Harare.

Today inequality goes much deeper, so much so that the governability of the world’s cities is being questioned, because of the development of two different but strongly interconnected worlds, the formal and the informal, each of which develops its own rules and regulations.

As for the cities of the "first world" or those in transition toward a market economy: any outside observer can see the accelerated process of "third world-isation" that they experience year after year. This process is a product, not only of increasing migration, but also of a deterioration of living conditions, the return of slums to European cities, and the creation of ghettos such as those that have recently driven young people to rebell in the poorer suburbs of Paris. Not to mention the historical cities, such as Venice, Rennes, and Aachen, that evict their inhabitants, or the massive demolitions and relocations in Beijing associated with the Olympic Games – because this is what ‘gentrification’ really means: squandering the dynamism of community life and draining it of its significance and substance.

In this context, the idea of basing public policies on the formalisation of informal practices, the simplification of administrative norms and the progressive elimination of all references to “housing rights” from UN-Habitat’s documents is incredibly superficial and naïve.

The Zero Evictions Campaign: an innovative g-local strategy by city inhabitants

To tackle this dramatic situation, the International Alliance of Inhabitants launched the Zero Evictions Campaign1 at the 4th World Social Forum (Mumbai, January 2004), to mobilise international solidarity, from the grassroots - the city inhabitants directly involved in these changes – in order to restore their hope of achieving dignity and security in housing.

We are talking about an innovative g-local strategy, taking its inspiration from the principles of the Caracas Declaration and the World Social Forum Charter of Principles. City inhabitants, in this g-local challenge, demand a role in building the cities of the future, not as mere users or precarious clients of the territory in which they live. For this reason they are no longer satisfied to put up with solutions that fail to present a fundamental challenge to the internal logic of the market.

The aim is to secure housing rights for all: no one should be evicted. If inhabitants have to be relocated, decent, secure alternative accommodation should be found in advance and with the agreement of the inhabitants concerned. This means respecting Article 11 of International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, with particular reference to General Comments N. 4 and N. 7 of the UN Committee on Rights.

The Zero Evictions Campaign operates on several levels depending on the engagement and mobilisation of the local organisations involved and the gravity of the situation:

• An international alert system with local “antennae” for violations of housing rights
• Appeals for international solidarity
• Proposals for exploratory missions and conciliation by the UN-Advisory Group on Forced Evictions (AGFE)
• Support for the sharing of experiences and good practice in combatting evictions by inhabitants’ organisations, local autorithies, and other actors
• Support for the drafting and monitoring of local, national, and international plans of action for security of housing tenure.

The Zero Evictions Campaign starts out with resistance to evictions and ends up proposing alternative solutions. Take for example the movement of French city mayors who, after the events in Bobigny, have issued public orders declaring ‘eviction-free zones’, or the Italian presidents of municipality that have requisitioned flats that have been left empty. Or the Popular Funds for Land and Housing, financed by the funds transferred from the payment of foreign debt and controlled by inhabitants’ associations; the first such Fund was set up with funds released by the cancellation of Kenya’s debts to Italy and others are proposed for the Dominican Republic and Peru. This is also the basis of the IAI representatives’ activities on the Advisory Group on Forced Evictions.

To achieve these objectives, the IAI has proposed the setting up of a common global space for all urban social movements, which includes more than 350 organisations from more than 40 countries, in order to coordinate local, national and international initiatives.

That is a fundamental step in the creation of the World Assembly of Inhabitants, planned for 2011, which should be based on the pace of the neighbourhoods’ inhabitants, at the local/national/continental/global levels, so as to give life to a new Via Urbana (Urban Way).

At the same time, it has invited NGOs, networks involved in housing rights, local autorithies, progressive governments and UN institutions to give the campaign their backing.

The IAI has therefore called on organisations and networks throughout the world to organise World Zero Eviction Days for housing rights in October of every year, on the occasion of UN-Habitat's World Habitat Day. The activities of 2007 marked a new development, with the Global “Act together - housing for all!” Campaign, launched by the IAI, HIC and FAL. This action went on for four months, up to January 26 2008, the WSF’s Day of Global Mobilisation. On that day some fifty occupations, debates and assemblies simultaneously brought together, for the first time in history, tens of thousands of people demanding the housing rights with no boundaries, in rich countries as well as poor ones, north and south, east and west, and witnessing the emergence of action, proposals and international solidarity.

Towards a new citizen-centred urban social pact

The harmonious development of cities, the respect for fundamental human and civil rights and the improvement of the living conditions of their populations, are ambitious but necessary objectives that demand, more than ever before, the creation of a new urban social pact that involves everyone (inhabitants’ organisations and urban social movements, local and government authorities, activists, academics and others) who share common principles (a commitment to the right to housing and to the city, public intervention, durability, equality and non-discrimination). In this pact, autonomy and differences between actors, including those that lead to conflict, should be considered part of the solution to the problems and not as problems to be solved by the rules of the market or police intervention.

However, this new urban social pact requires those involved to agree on the material and symbolic significance of the city for its inhabitants, for the region, for the country and for the world and on shared principles that make it possible to live a civilised life in the heart of the city, such as gender and economic/social equity, peace, harmony and the wisdom to manage conflicts as well as resources.

Among other things, it requires:

• Respect for individual and collective rights to the city and in the city
• No racial, social, economic, or gender discrimination
• Collective ownership of public goods and property
• A recognition of the fundamental importance of the public sector and of participation in controlling the market
• Restrictions on property rights to prioritise social needs and interests, especially in relation to scarce resources such as water and land
• Participatory development planning
• Local democracy and active subsidiarity

As for housing and urban development, it must be remembered that urban and environmental problems take specific forms depending on the local context and that, as a consequence, the proposed policy solutions must be flexible and responsive to particular circumstances, with a local approach and needs for improvement that are appropriate for each area, and they must be worked through with the active participation of city inhabitants and their organisations and not behind their backs or in their names.

Universal housing solutions promoted by the multilateral agencies, which cannot be modified by the "beneficiary" country, should be abandoned.

But for that to happen countries, and especially countries in the global South, must be able to count on the necessary resources so that programmes adapted to the real needs of their populations can become reality.

From this perspective, social movements propose practical measures such as taxes on speculative real estate transactions and the creation of popular funds for housing and land that draw, for example, on resources deflected from the payment of foreign debt.

On these bases, the International Alliance of Inhabitants calls also on UN-Habitat to become closer to people, to renew its vocation to service and its social sensitivity, to put aside privatist philosophies and its immeasurable faith in a market that has caused so much damage to the poor. A new pact based on a new dialogue between equals such that the voices of the inhabitants of all the world’s cities, the true builders of the city of the future, will be heard once and for all.TOWARDS THE URBAN POPULAR UNIVERSITY

Cesare Ottolini, International Alliance of Inhabitants coordinator, August 2008