RECLAIMING SPACES: news & events

Dear friends,

as part of the European Social Forum (17th to 21st Sept. 2008 in Malmoe, Sweden) we invite you to join us for the

ASSEMBLY OF URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

It will take place at Saturday, Sept. 20, 09.30-12.30 h. at Enskifteshagen, Tält 2

This ASSEMBLY, open to all activists for urban/housing/land rights (tenants union, cooperatives, social centres, homeless, etc.), should discuss concrete steps for improved international cooperation on urgent action, campaigns, advocacy, exchange and reflection.

It should try to fix the implementation of agreements built during the last period and the ESF meetings.

Let’s develop effective, targeted and transparent international networking! Let’s build a roadmap for unity of urban social movements and inhabitants organisations!

This assembly should focus on concrete proposals for international cooperation among different groups within the next years. This especially includes proposals which have been discussed in other related seminars before and proposals which had been developed in your and our networks. Based on this, we hope that we can build some agenda for an improved international co-work in our field.

We propose to focus and structure the assembly and its preparation on the following questions:

1. What are the main/most urgent issues we have to / we should deal with within the next 2-3 years?

2. How, with which priorities and by which means and projects, could we improve international exchange and communication among the movements and organisations? How to improve internal information, action related reflection and international media work? 3. How can/should we improve our articulation and advocacy in front of international organizations, such as the European Union or UN Habitat?

3. How can we develop alliances with other stakeholders sharing common principles (local authorities, NGOs, researchers, professionals)? Which would be priorities for advocacy? How to link it with effective campaigning and mobilization?

4. How can we develop more powerful international campaigning with broad participation and real impact for the people and on the political conditions?

5. On which issues and especially: targets should we focus? Can we unite around common campaigns? What are the targets and methods?

6. Which urgent actions should we undertake immediately? What could be uniting steps for the next months? How can we do that in a transparent, participative and efficient way?

7. Which proposals should we launch for the general assembly of social movements in Malmoe?

If you have any ideas, proposals or comments on these questions, please send them back to us. We will collect them and distribute the results as service for the ESF and our assembly. Please indicate the organizational background of your proposal and if you plan to discuss you proposal in an seminar at the ESF.

Please, anyway tell us if you/your organization can participate in the assembly and what languages you could understand:

English

French

Spanish

Russian

Turkish

German

other: …

Please even tell us if your organization can contribute a small amount of Euro for our costs (registration/translation:800 Euro).

See you in Malmö!

Cesare Ottolini, IAI

No Vox

Knut Unger, Reclaiming Spaces

Posted on August 24th, 2008 under ASSEMBLY OF URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, ESF 2008 Malmö •  Print This Post • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback