Rotterdam: Call to occupy Tweebosbuurt!

By: fawda - December 19th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

Tweebosbuurt is a neighborhood in the Afrikaanderwijk district, which is mostly inhabited by descendants of migrants from North-Africa, and situated in the South of Rotterdam, nearby the city center. There are four blocks of small buildings surrounding public parks and gardens. This disctrict has been gentrified for years already, mostly due to the highly increasing rent in the rest of Rotterdam which is leading students and white yuppies to settle in, and then to reclaim pacification of one of the last alive neighborhood of the city.

The city council has decided to take this issue seriously. The next step for the gentrification of Afrikaanderwijk is the demolition of the totality of Tweebosbuurt. We’re speaking here about 600 houses and shops, almost 25 000m2. 535 of these are ruled by Vestia, a private social renter which is mandated by the city council of Rotterdam to make this giant “social plan” a reality. Vestia is paid 24M euros only for the eviction itself, not including the price of the demolition and reconstruction.
[Read More]

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Berlin: Renters organize to expropriate the mega-landlords

By: fawda - November 28th, 2019  Filed under: News

Berlin’s spatial dynamics and organized working class show how to secure liveable spaces and combat the financial nature of housing: socialize them.

Over the last few decades, housing in cities around the world has undergone unprecedented financialization and artificial speculation. Investors have never been richer. The worldwide value of the current real estate market is $217 trillion, 36 times worth the value of all the gold ever mined.

Profits from the commodification of the housing market have skyrocketed in step with the enclosure of spaces and the fixing of financial value to them. Living spaces are now complex financial products that can be packaged up into investment funds and swapped by companies across the world. [Read More]

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Amsterdam: Oops we did again! Amstel 45 squatted.

By: fawda - October 1st, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

Sunday, 22-09-19 we successfully squatted the building at Amstel 45. The owner of this building is the biggest real-estate owner of Amsterdam and an speculator. There have been buildings owned by Veldhuijzen squatted before, Amstelkade 20 (2016), Admiraal de Ruijterweg 76 (2008). Johannes Cornelis Martinus Veldhuijzen is the owner of 512 properties in Amsterdam, he has more buildings on his name than Prince Bernhard van Oranje Nassau! (see for details the Parool article mentioned below). We know the building has been empty for 2 years and currently there is a building stop, which means the owner is prohibited to work on the building any further and he also doesn’t have any plans for the building at this moment.
We are against vacancy, leaving buildings empty and left to rot, and we squat because of vacancy! During the first week of occupation, we didn’t have any contact with the owner. Wednesday the 26 of September, we received the court papers for a fast civil procedure. His story had a lot of inconsistency and no concrete plans and because of this and the new squatting law that is coming, we decided it’s a good time to fight back! We went to court on the 1st of October and now we are waiting for the verdict, the 15th of October. The owner himself did not show up in court and he still has shown no willingness to communicate with us in any way. Will keep you guys updated!
[Read More]

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Amsterdam: New move from the municipality on the squatted bowling in Noord

By: fawda - September 24th, 2019  Filed under: News

Urban resort planning to evict a squat. The squatting community needs your help!

Urban Resort is currently making plans to evict a squat in the North of Amsterdam, called ‘the Krakers Bowlwerk’ (squatted in March 2016). The municipality who owns the building asked them to put a broedplaats (breeding grounds) in place, and Urban Resort gladly said yes to this business opportunity.

They are on a mission to clear the area and make it ready for richer tenants, a process called gentrification. Here’s the catch though: Urban Resort had a lot of ties to the squatting scene, so we will be able to stop them. They were founded by our comrades after all at the time of the squatting ban in 2005. With the aim to safeguard sub-cultural niches, that we as a community created. Niches that they are now helping to break down. [Read More]

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Greece: First they take Exarcheia…

By: fawda - September 3rd, 2019  Filed under: essay

Recent evictions of several squats, some housing refugees and migrants, mark the beginning of a new chapter of repression and dissent in Greece. In the autonomous Athens neighborhood of Exarcheia on the morning of Monday, August 26, hundreds of masked riot cops with tear gas at hand cordoned off an entire block. Overhead, helicopters circled the scene.

No one would be blamed for thinking a civil war, or worse, was about to erupt. But no, the Greek state led by the new conservative government was mobilizing its full repressive armada to evacuate several squats occupied by refugees and migrants. Theorist Akis Gavriilidis weighed in:

This affair is a scandalous waste of public funds, for a result that is not only zero but negative in every respect: moral, legal, practical, economic and whatever you can imagine. To detain dozens of refugees — including children — who have committed no crime, to evict them from places where they have lived a dignified life they have helped to shape themselves, with the only prospect of being imprisoned in a hell where they live in much worse conditions, forced to passivity and inactivity. [Read More]

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Berlin: Expropriate Everything

By: fawda - September 1st, 2019  Filed under: essay, News

It’s an unusually warm Saturday in Berlin—if it even makes sense to refer to the weather as “unusual” anymore. I wake up early, read a bit, write some emails, change some diapers, and then head out to meet some friends at the café before the big demo. The Mietwahnsinn or “rent insanity” protest is an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people at Alexanderplatz who come together to loudly and colorfully decry the seemingly unstoppable rise of rents in the German capital. Like most big protests here, it feels like a party. Strolling down Karl-Marx-Allee, a massive boulevard built in Stalinist style for East Berlin, 40,000 human beings throb to the bass—young, old, parents, roommates, co-workers, students, tenants, and activists all drifting together in common disarray, like a roving concert, shouting about rent-sharks, high costs of living, and, most of all, expropriation. The word is on everyone’s lips, not least the city senate, the big property owners and real estate companies, the struggling tenants and just about anyone else who’s read the paper, watched the news, or walked the streets where posters, banners and graffiti calling for the expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen & Co are ubiquitous. In most cities, such radical slogans would be ignored or dismissed as the infantile fantasies of an ultra-left fringe. But not here. The demand to expropriate the largest profit-oriented property owners in Berlin—in other words, to socialize over 200,000 private apartments—is a serious proposal, one that may, in fact, take place. How did this happen? [Read More]

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Barcelona: We reoccupied Ca La Trava

By: fawda - July 27th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

We have returned to Ca La Trava, now an empty plot, and we are not planning to leave. This space, until now closed, will again be open to the neighborhood, and we will defend it as we have defended our houses. We want it to be again a trench from which to resist the onslaught of the speculators and give war to all those who are destroying our neighborhood. If in Ca La Trava they make luxury flats we all lose, and we can’t allow that.

These are times of empty phrases, of euphemisms, of symbolisms without content and of politicians contradicting each new declaration. For this reason, we want to make it clear that when we say “Ca La Trava will never be luxury flats” we say it as seriously as possible. The struggle of Ca La Trava is not a lost struggle, and resquatting is not an improvised decision or the fruit of sentimentalism. Our goal is to win and we are convinced that we will. [Read More]

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Berlin: The Fight for Liebig34 goes further

By: fawda - July 9th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

The Court hearing for the eviction of our anarcha-queer-feminist housing project will take place on the 20th of september 2019. Padovicz wants to snitch away the house, while the politicians are trying to keep our mouths shut. Both parties are awaiting a final court decision. We do not let any cis-men decide about the future of our anarcha-queer-feminist project, cause simply no one should decide about us, but ourselves.

The last weeks in Nordkiez

Lately, the presence of cops in our neighbourhood increased massively. Helicopters are flying daily and nightly over our roofs. Multiple police vans drive through our streets and ID-controls become part of everyday normality.

Also, during our self-organized neighbour fest in which a lot of children participated, the cops reacted in an aggressive way, trying to ruin our day. Several persons sympathizing with our project, have been arrested and taken into custody. The arrests of these friends were very violent and sexist. Whether it’s about getting a coffee in the morning at the other side of the street or having dinner in front of our house, the cops find ways to intimidate us. The system of state tries to silence us by all means. As a consequence, we face daily confrontation with the cops. However, their provocation is not something we allow to set us back or keep us small. It is something that encourages us to resist.
We are aware that their violent behavior is purely a reaction on our mobilization in our joint-fight against gentrification, patriarchy and capital. All of this, shows us, that our battle against “the city of the rich and powerful” is effectively starting to worry the establishment. [Read More]

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London: Call out for a noise demo in solidarity with Barcelona’s war on gentrification

By: fawda - July 7th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

On Monday 8th July at 8.30am, activists will gather in front of Blackstone offices at 40 Berkley Square in London W1 J5AL for a noise demo to show solidarity with Barcelona’s residents fighting against gentrification.

Blackstone Group, a New York based multinational private equity firm and the World’s largest alternative investment company*, is the biggest property and hotel owner in Spain. The firm, along other large companies such as Goldman Sachs, Apollo Management and Cerberus, have been buying tens of thousands of residential properties in Spain and then raising rents and evicting thousands of long-term tenants to make space for richer and more “desirable” residents: or just leaving homes to rot empty while their value increases. [Read More]

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Berlin (Germany): Attack against an office of the leftist party „Die Linke“ – Solidarity to Squats in Athens and Berlin

By: xxx - May 8th, 2019  Filed under: News

Late saturday evening, May 4, we commited an attack with stones against the store front of the office from Sebastian Schlüsselburg, member of the Committee on Justice and Secret Service, parliamentarian of „Die Linke“ in the district of Berlin-Lichtenberg. Most of its windows were smashed. [Read More]

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Philadelphia (USA): May Day Anti-Gentrification Actions

By: xxx - May 8th, 2019  Filed under: News

For May Day we claim responsibility for the following actions:

-Deflating the tires and painting the windshield of a yuppie housing shuttle bus.
-Throwing paint at the facade of two OCF properties.
-Smashing glass and cutting all non-hydraulic cables of at least four construction machines at the site of a development project intending to manicure a once wild place. [Read More]

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Athens: Solidarity action for the evicted squats

By: fawda - April 24th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

In the morning hours of April 19th we attacked with fire the Ministry of Culture in Exarchia. This attack was pitched, because Clandestina, the squat housing migrants, which was evicted in the morning of 18 april, is owned by the Ministry of Culture. That same morning the anarchofeminist squat Cyclopi was evicted as well. A few days ago, squats housing migrants such as Azadi, New Babylon and Arachovis 44 (with single men) were also evicted.

As for Exarchia, the strategy of gentrification has already started and the evictions (or the demolitions) of squats, the ban for anti-authoritarian events at Strefi hill, the AirBnB’s that keep popping up, the upcoming metro station in the area, the green economy that is spreading rapidly, the cops that are permanently guarding the area overall, are parts of the visible part of the “invisible” war that has been declared by state and capital.

In the network of the metropolis the most totalitarian human tendencies are expressed through relationships. Only target: the accumulation of capital from every possible production field, from every “innovative” consummation field. And Exarchia couldn’t get away from this plan. The capitalist invasion is war. And this war, besides the consciously- politicized subjects, aims the people that are not considered productive and exploitable, such as migrants without papers, “illegal” street vendors, expropriators and substance users. We, by practically showing our solidarity, take position in this war, choose to stand by to every oppressed person and to remind the state that no attack and no eviction will stay unanswered. [Read More]

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