Dijon: a look back at the public meeting to present the agri-cultural park of the Maraîchers ecocity

By: fawda - June 23rd, 2024  Filed under: Communique, News

Press releases from the assembly of the Quartier Libre des Lentillères.
First press release distributed before the public presentation:

The Quartier Libre des Lentillères reaffirms its willingness to dialogue with the city of Dijon!

Since 2010, hundreds of people have been cultivating the land, organising cultural events, offering markets and meals on donations, self-managed on the 9 hectares of the Quartier Libre des Lentillères. We are still united by the desire to collectively continue the project we are carrying out for this district.

A dialogue began 18 months ago at the initiative of the city council, and we have taken an active part in it. We want to consider all possible forms of sustainability for the Quartier Libre des Lentillères, its activities and its uses, including in the form of legalisation. [Read More]

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Dijon: Lentillères Spring Festival, Commons Week

By: fawda - May 3rd, 2024  Filed under: Communique, News

On May 31st, June 1st and 2nd, we will celebrate the 14th anniversary of the beginning of the occupation of the Quartier Libre des Lentillères!

Since 2010, from land clearing to self-construction, 9 hectares have gradually been occupied by gardens, fields, cabins, parks, orchards and collective places open to all.

After having snatched the abandonment of phase 2 of the misnamed “eco-city of market gardeners” (éco-cité des maraîchers) project in 2019, and started a dialogue with the city council for the last 2 years, we find ourselves once again threatened by the city’s appetite for concrete. An “ultimatum”, taken out of the mayor’s pocket on a Sunday morning at dawn, forces us to question the indivisibility of the 9 hectares that make up the neighborhood, to make way for an urbanization project on a strip of 1.14 hectares. This pressure undermines the trust and exchanges that we had tried to establish in recent months. [Read More]

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Dijon: Invitation to come and discover the Quartier Libre des Lentillères

By: fawda - November 30th, 2020  Filed under: News

With this second lockdown, we sense that we will have to learn to live with the global pandemic a little longer. For some time now, we had also understood that we would have to deal with the ecological crisis. Rather than gently waiting for the next state of emergency, what we are trying to build here at the Quartier Libre des Lentillères is a possible way to continue to live in spite of these crises. By imagining and creating a world that makes us envious, built of non-market relationships, based on solidarity and a sense of the common, connected to the environment in which we find ourselves, organized in self-management.

From a small, very localized struggle against an urbanisation project such as there are so many of them, a neighborhood rich in the diversity of its activities (from market gardening to self-construction, from small gardens to neighborhood festivals) was built over 10 years, without planing, trying this and that, and also rich of people who come along, garden and live in it. And rich in possible imaginations. Together we are constantly reinventing ourselves collectively. [Read More]

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Dijon: attempt to evict the Engrenage Gardens

By: fawda - July 24th, 2020  Filed under: News

Early this Friday morning, the occupants of the Engrenage Gardens were woken up by municipal police officers and three backhoe loaders that had been sent to ravage the vegetable gardens. The rapid arrival of supporters allowed them to stop the advance of the machines. The protagonists’ account of the events.

Waking up this morning, to the sound of the “beep-beep” of the bulldozers. Astonishment to discover the Jardins de l’Engrenage, surrounded by the barriers and the police. The beans, the tomatoes (already red!): crushed, the branches of the trees: torn off, the hedges: crushed. The brutality of the machines, facing the thorns of the brambles.

Sponsored by whom? Why was it ordered? The city? The property developer? Nobody on the spot wants to answer our questions. No one to dialogue except the police force and the steel of the machines.

So we’re holding. Together. We hang on, we climb, we watch. We call friends and neighbors. Yesterday they were there for the market, and since June 17, 2020, to share around these gardens a moment of music or petanque… Today we saw tears in their eyes. Since the taking of this land how many gardening tips, crafts and small services have been exchanged; how many stories around this neighborhood and the lives of its inhabitants! So we resist, again. [Read More]

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