public
when talking in class one of the things that was commented upon was how public space was not really taken care of by the public. In a lot of public spaces there is litering and all sorts of things going on that people might not do in their homes.
Personally, i think this comes from a sense of non-responsabity and non-ownership of these so called public spaces. For example, parks are suppose to be public but they close at a certain time and the cops come kick you out if you try to stay over night. i mean you always hear the argument about how that is for the safety of the public etc etc, but really , this ‘unsafety’ occurs because there are no safe places for people to do what it is that they want to do or to stay at night (affordable clean and safe), so they go to the park. i think this perception also come from us thinking that people who don’t have a parmament place to stay are somehow dangerous and to be avoided. yea, some people steal but that may be becasue they have no access to good jobs that pay a living wage. it’s not that people are inherently bad, but that our circumstances sometimes force us to do certain things. But back to public spaces . . .
part of the impediment to seeing a public property as really belonging to a community, besides those restrictions, are the sometimes lacking of sense of being a community. A sense that working together we can set up our own services and demand that what we need is given to us.
This requires organization and solidarity, which we are begining to see, and have been occuring, with activies like the little village arts fest and organizations like the little village environmental justice organization, the little village development corporation, colective arte y realidad, ura and the collaboration between all these organizations. i put these examples up becasue these are the ones i know of in my community, which interestingly is not know as little village in maps and stuff (it’s something lawndale but i forgot what at the moment, that info is on the lvejo website).
it is through this colective ownership that we should control our resources and how we will begin to realize our own power as people.
