LEXICON
Adaptability
Adaptability or flexibility for a space of solidarity is fundamental for creating an inclusive space where many types of people feel comfortable in all different locations.
Adaptation
Baltimore Green Currency Association
“Baltimore Green Currency Association, a non-profit program of Fusion Partnerships, Inc., was founded in Spring 2010. We are working to help create an alternative economy that will strengthen local businesses, create jobs, encourage the formation of local supply chains, and ultimately provide economic opportunity and increased resilience to communities underserved by traditional economic structures. Our mission: to foster economic opportunity through the administration and expansion of an alternative currency, the BNote, for the communities of Baltimore. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit under the fiscal sponsorship of Fusion Partnerships, all donations to Baltimore Green Currency Association are fully tax-deductible.”
Source: Baltimore Green Currency Also see: Alternative Economy
Baltimore Free Farm
"Baltimore Free Farm is an egalitarian collective of gardeners and activists who aim to provide access to healthy food for all. We believe that hierarchical systems of organizing are damaging to our lives, our minds and our relationships. In an egalitarian collective, we do our best to create an environment where everyone is valued equally. We value the input of all collective members and encourage honest discussion. Our decision making process is consensus-based and we allow the voices of all members to be heard.”
"The hillside of 3511 Ash St. was Baltimore Free Farm’s first project. In 2010, we cleaned up this lot and used salvaged rocks to create terraced garden beds. Today, this is our community garden space where you can rent space to grow your own vegetables! Recently our hillside has been renovated in an effort to minimize erosion of the hill, come and visit our new sustainable design. Plots are available on a seasonal basis for a sliding scale fee. Acquired in 2013 after a lengthy campaign to raise support and awareness to keep the land we had been maintaining in our hands, we were auspiciously sold the land. The lot is now managed by a guild of folks called Heart and Soil with a reverence for nature and who seek to revisit the lost knowledge of plant medicine… Our other garden spaces Baltimore Free Farm has a space dedicated to growing a collective garden, where we grow food as a team for our own personal use, to generate funds that keep the project going, and to share surplus with volunteers or at our food rescue day. We’ve also built a greenhouse, a compost bin, a tool shed, and a chicken coop. The warehouse located at 3510 Ash St. is where we do much of our organizing. This space is where we hold all kinds of events and workshops for community use, but it is also where we work on creating our screen printed items, canned goods and handmade crafts. Free Rescue Day on Wednesday and Food Not Bombs on Saturday, Sunday and Monday occur either inside or directly in front of this space."
"Every Wednesday members of Baltimore Free Farm go to various produce distributors and grocers to rescue distressed goods: items too ripe to sell or on or just past their expiration date. We drive the 300-500 lbs of produce, dry goods, and bread 30 miles back to Baltimore Free Farm for redistribution into the community. This is a direct action against the endemic food waste crisis that faces our society, which pushes 40% of food produced into landfills to rot with the plastics and other non-compostable goods while millions around the world starve. By simply giving perfectly edible food to people who will eat it, Food Rescue Day is the physical manifestation of a conversation about food waste on a local level. Your donations and ideas are generously welcomed. Food is given away at 12pm every Wednesday, please bring your own bag. Visit Food Rescue Baltimore for information on additional giveaways throughout the city."
Source: Baltimore Free Farm
See also: Free Farm
Baltimore Housing Roundtable
“The Baltimore Housing Roundtable's mission is to coordinate and integrate the work of BHR members into a unified movement that will promote and facilitate social change. BHR members understand that individuals cannot create widespread social change on their own. Competition among non-profits over limited public and private resources contributes to a fragmented system that does not meet housing need in Baltimore, particularly among those with low or no income. However, as a collaborative, BHR members can pool resources and advocate to implement an agenda of systemic change and realize our shared values and vision. The Baltimore Housing Roundtable has developed a vision for Fair Development in Baltimore. The 20/20 campaign calls for real, annual investment in neighborhood-driven development- development that puts us in charge of our own communities & doesn't price us out. We call on Mayor Pugh to designate $20 million in the capital budget for permanently affordable housing and $20 million for projects that employ community residents to deconstruct vacants and create public green space.”
Source: Baltimore Housing Roundtable
See also: Community Land Trust
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates’ book, formatted as a letter, addressing his own son; but it resonated with the Nation’s young Black population—those seeking answers and validation after Michael Brown’s murder inflicted by St. Louis police. “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” – Coates
Cambridge Cohousing
Cambridge Cohousing is a community-designed and -developed housing project in Cambridge, MA. We are a group of people of diverse ages, backgrounds, abilities, professions and lifestyles. We are committed to creating a neighborly and cooperative community in which we know and care about one another. Children can play safely, surrounded by neighbors, and residents know that caring friends are close by. We are committed to the vitality, convenience and diversity that is Cambridge.
Commoning
According to political economist Massimo De Angelis, "Commons are a means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to articulate the many existing, often minor, struggles and recognizes their power to overcome capitalist society."(Angelis) He defines three notions in order to explain not merely the commons in terms of the resources that we share but a way of commoning, that is, a social process of "being common": the way in which resources are pooled and made available to a group of individuals, who then build or rediscover a sense of community. Food sociologist and activist Raj Patel also focuses of how food was part of social movements and have created different forms of solidarity (Patel) such as Black Panther movements that organized breakfast for children or People’s Grocery or Via Campesina. He defines commons: "Commons is about how we manage resources together."(Patel) But his argument is not only about managing and sustaining food growing and sharing but also about how food-related movements should act in solidarity with other movements. Thus the concept of "commons", as understood here, holds a sensitive position within any given community or public, especially in contested territories or cities subject to the threat of the neoliberal destruction of their built environment. Negotiation and the resolution of conflicting values are key to such commoning practices. As Stavros Stavrides argues, more than the act or fact of sharing, it is the existence of common grounds for negotiation that is most important. Conceptualizing commons with reference to the public does not focus so much on similarities or commonalities but on exploring the very differences between people on a purposefully instituted common ground. We have to establish grounds for negotiation rather than grounds for affirming that which is shared.(Stavrides). Furthermore, Palestine based collective Decolonizing Architecture proposes the term “Al-Masha” refers to "common land": "The notion of Al-Masha could help re-imagine the notion of the common today. Could this form of common use be expanded by redefining the meaning of cultivation, moving it from agriculture to other forms of human activity? [...] How to liberate the common from the control of authoritarian regimes, neo-colonialism and consumer societies? How to reactive common uses beyond the interests of public state control?" (DAAR) In the activities of Decolonizing Architecture, the "common" differs both from public and private space.
From this perspective, a practice of commoning is – of being in common. “Commons” is not what we own or share or produce in terms of property, but rather “social relations” that are closely connected to everyday life (Harvey). In the context of “commons” discussion; socially engaged art or participatory art practices ranging from ecology oriented to urban justice offers methodology and examples of engagement in communities. These engagements create and offer possibilities of social co-existences that are established through artistic methodologies. Thus, practice of commoning partially is a fundamental practice in such engagement in ethical level as well as in searching for social relation for urban&rural justice and solidarity.
Commune
Craigslist
Is an online platform offering the possibility to post advertisements, which are classified into categories such as housing, items for sale, services, community and forum discussions.
See: Solidarity and the domestic space in Cairo
Cultural Capital
Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e. , in the form of long lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.
Source: Pierre Bourdieu
Decolonization
District Six
“District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. It was established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants, District Six was a vibrant center with close links to the city and the port. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the process of removals and marginalization had begun.”
“The first to be forced out were black South Africans who were displaced from the District in 1901. As the more prosperous moved away to the suburbs, the area became a neglected ward of the city. On 11 February 1966 it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers. The District Six Museum, established in December 1994, works with the memories of the District Six experience and with that of forced removals more generally.”
Source: District Six
Eco Village
Economic Empowerment
Empathy/Respect
Creating a space of solidarity requires that all parties involved must show a commitment to being empathic and respectful of each member of its immediate community as well as communities beyond.
Emotional work
Entanglement
Evicted/Eviction
Exchange
