Lille, France: Paint attacks against gentrification and evictions

On the night of 23th-24th [March] we attacked suddenly with paint the front of the Mayor’s office, the gendarmerie [military police], the formerly occupied Mangouste and the house of hip-hop. We chose these targets to oppose the ‘regeneration’ of poor neighbourhoods and the city policy that evicts the poor, to make these neighbourhoods more profitable for developers.

Le Chti d’Arras, a former event space for several years and of illegally occupied existence (in particular where concerts and other hip-hop events took place) saw itself evicted and replaced by “the house of hip-hop” or “European Centre for Urban Culture”. A good way for the Mayor to recuperate what was already being done without her, to relieve her of all that was subversively done there, and to instead make a commercial-cultural product. [Read More]